insightful in-depth reviews

cogency
31, May 2019
Photo by Ashley Smith, Wide Eyed Studios

What’s Indecent?

by Steve Cohen
The Cultural Critic

Indecent by Paula Vogel. Arden Theatre, Philadelphia, through June 23, 2019.
 

Indecent is a wide-ranging play that covers many decades, moves across continents, and speaks in seven languages as it integrates music, dialogue and dance.

This is the history of the 1906 drama The God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch which aroused outrage for depicting an apparently-devout Jew operating a brothel in the basement of the home he shares with his wife and virginal teenage daughter.

The father commissioned the writing of a Torah scroll in order to curry favor from the Jewish community that shunned him because he was a whoremonger. While he’s trying to buy respectability, his daughter has a lesbian affair with one of his prostitutes. The father becomes furious: “This Torah cost all of the whores downstairs on their backs and their knees for a year. Both of you, down into the basement and take the Torah with you!”

Indecent involves interweaving stories about immigration and assimilation; about censorship; about the hypocrisy of a religious man who puts his business interests ahead of his family. And it puts a lesbian love affair onstage while the actresses are having their own affair. Because of all these elements, tight focus and firm control are essential. This production is not completely successful.

Asch’s New York cast was arrested in 1923 because they showed a pious Jew acting despicably. Indecent puts primary focus on a lesbian love scene with two women in the rain, as written by Asch. But the 1923 production did not include the lesbian scene. The charge of “indecency” had nothing to do with that specific. This divided focus is a problem. Rebecca Taichman, who originated the play, is a student of Jewish cultural history. (Her Green Violin in 2003 was a play about the Moscow Yiddish theater.) Paula Vogel, on the other hand, is known for her advocacy of lesbian issues.

Nevertheless, both of these topics are intriguing and — as we’ve been hearing recently in political discussions — people can talk and chew gum at the same time. Indecent impresses when its variegated elements are tightly joined in a pageant of music, dance movements and drama that evokes memories of Jerome Robbins, and of German gesamtkunstwerk (a synthesis of multiple arts.)

As directed by Rebecca Wright, this production sprawls on a very large playing area with audience on three sides. Indecent really belongs on a proscenium stage, where the characters face the audience and all observers can read the projected translations of the varied tongues and the notifications of where and when each scene takes place. Because there are so many different languages, and accents, and because actors shift among various roles, we need to know who is whom and what’s being said at every moment.

The actors should move with precise coordination, in choreographed patterns. Frequent stops-in-motion, called “blinks in time,” are integral. This cast seemed to still be learning on opening night, and their synchronization should be better as the run progresses. Principals deserve high praise for their enunciation of Yiddish, Polish, German, French and Chinese, albeit there were some uneven accents.

Especially fine work came from Doug Hara, Ross Beschler, David Ingram, Michaela Shuchman and Leah Walton, although there was insufficient erotic chemistry between the lesbian lovers.

The play has smart relevance to today’s world. As Indecent examines the immigrant experience, parallels are obvious. The German actress who stars in the Berlin production complains about the “hordes” of undesirable immigrants “overrunning” her country.

At the time when Asch’s play came to New York, the U.S. had restricted immigration from Europe. Jews were especially targeted, whether they were fleeing Communist Russia or the defeated, financially-devastated Germany. Many were rejected and sent back to their homelands. Those who were allowed, adapted. In Indecent an aging Chassid is stripped of his peyes sideburns; he puts on a top hat, struts in an chorus line and sings, “What can you do? It’s America. Even a Jew looks like a goy!”

Indecent starts in 1906 when Asch reads his play for elders of the Jewish community in Warsaw. They denounce it. They say that plays should represent Jewish people as admirable, whereas Asch believes that Yiddish theater should reveal all aspects of life.

Rejected at home, Asch brings his play to cosmopolitan Berlin, where we see a cabaret show that’s bawdy and bisexual, like Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. In that environment, The God of Vengeance is enthusiastically received. Asch’s drama is shown having successful productions in Bratislava, Constantinople and elsewhere. A production in English comes to New York in 1922. In February 1923 it moves uptown to the Broadway district.

A judge ruled that “drama must be purified of eastern exoticism, its sexual pollution and its corruptive attitude towards the family.” A jury convicted the cast and producer, although the verdict eventually was overturned.

Near Indecent’s end we see Asch’s play performed in an attic in the Lodz Ghetto during World War II. Then the actors line up to go to their doom. Some of them had worked on Broadway until The God of Vengeance was shut down, thus impelling them to return to the Poland of their birth.

Students of theater history, like I, perked up when we saw legendary figures impersonated, such as Eugene O’Neill and Morris Carnovsky. I saw Carnovsky as King Lear in 1963 at the Stratford Festival, and he also co-starred in Hollywood films. I interviewed him on my radio program and we dined together. It was eerie to see him brought back to life and it accentuated the fact that almost everyone involved in The God of Vengeance is not only dead — but almost forgotten by the public.

Early in this production the actors stretch their limbs as if they haven’t moved in decades, a lost civilization coming back to life. Men lift their arms and dust pours from their sleeves. At the climax of the evening, these players will go to their deaths in the Holocaust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

David P. Gordon designed the impressive set. Ryan Touhey conducted the orchestra and the three onstage players who melded with the actors.