The Cast of Paula Vogel’s Indecent
Paula Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive and a dozen other plays, has burrowed through the yellowing pages of history to uncover Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance. Magnifying an incident in the century-old play and using its production history as her guide, Vogel has created her own, new work of art. Indecent, which might well be more powerful today than the original was when it reached Broadway in 1923, is given an impeccable production by director Rebecca Taichman, a very-much-in-tune team of designers, and an excellent and enthusiastic cast.
Asch, a short-story writer working in Warsaw, wrote his first play in 1906; for Yiddish audiences, written in Yiddish. God fun nekome (which translates to God of Vengeance) was instantly controversial: the leading character was a Jewish brothel owner who professes religious piety despite his seamy occupation. The play was attacked by Jewish elders for its portrayal Jews—any Jews—in scandalous fashion. Asch, for his part, was simply trying to shed light on the morally hypocritical society he saw.
The play was soon mounted across Europe, in Yiddish, German and other languages. God of Vengeance seems to have reached the U.S. in 1913 or so, with the Yiddish-language version frequently produced in New York. An English-language adaptation by Isaac Goldberg was published in 1918, and Rudolph Schildkraut—who had starred as the brothel owner Yekel in productions around the world—brought this version to the Provincetown Theatre in Greenwich Village, birthplace of the early plays of Eugene O’Neill, in December 1922.
Two months into the run, it transferred to Broadway’s Apollo Theatre on February 19, 1923. (This was a rare instance when a father and son were both starring in different plays on Broadway, with Schildkraut’s son Joseph playing the title role in the Theatre Guild’s successful production of Peer Gynt.) On March 6, the cast and managers of God of Vengeance were indicted for violating the penal code by giving “an alleged indecent, immoral and unpure theatrical performance.”
Vogel has based Indecent not so much on God of Vengeance but on the history of God of Vengeance. In the very first scene, Asch (played, mostly, by Max Gordon Moore) watches his wife read the play. She responds strongly and favorably, singling out what they refer to as “the rain scene,” in which Rifkele, the daughter of the brothel owner, frolics in the rain with prostitute Manke. This is Vogel’s basis for the play; in a program note, she compares Asch’s scene of love and desire—between two women—as comparable to the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.
Time travels as we see Asch’s peers reject the play; a Warsaw company produce the play; and additional companies perform it in a whirlwind of European cities. Then comes the Provincetown Theatre production, starring Rudolph Schildkraut (Tom Nelis). The response attracts the interest of Harry Weinberger, a lawyer and producer. He agrees to the Broadway transfer, offering the Yiddish Theatre star Schildkraut his belated Broadway debut. But Weinberger also demands cuts—including the deletion of that indecent rain scene.
Max Gordon Moore and Richard Topol in Paula Vogel’s Indecent
The actors reluctantly agree. Lemml (Richard Topol), the stage manager who came under the play’s spell at the first reading in 1906 and remained with it through its international journey, tries to get Asch to forbid the cut. But the playwright has signed away control; in a later scene, he sheepishly admits that he agreed to the changes without looking at them because he was embarrassed that he couldn’t read English.
God of Vengeance opens on Broadway and is prosecuted for obscenity, with Weinberger, Schildkraut and the cast found guilty. (In real life, the convictions were overturned on appeal in January 1924.) We then follow Lemml and the play as it returns to Europe, while simultaneously watching Asch grow older and bitterer in his home on Staten Island and later in Bridgeport. The Vengeance troupe ends up back in Poland, performing in the Lodz Ghetto until they are marched off to extermination (with Taichman creating emotionally effective imagery using sand, as in “dust to dust”).
Vogel and Taichman tell their story in inventive and exuberant fashion. (Along with Vogel’s author billing and Taichman’s director billing, they share a “created by” credit.) The sparse set by Riccardo Hernandez is dominated by a wide platform and a gold proscenium upstage near the back wall; most of the props emerge from a mass of suitcases, which are used throughout. There is also highly effective work from lighting designer Christopher Akerlind, costume designer Emily Rebholz, and composer/music directors Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva. The company of seven—along with three onstage musicians—keep Indecent virtually swirling across the stage of the Cort.
The characters, aside from stage manager Lemml, consist of three couples, “ingenue,” “middle” and “elder”; each of the six actors play all the roles in their age category. (While Nelis spends much of his time as Schildkraut, he also plays the elderly Asch in the final scenes; Moore, who plays the younger Asch, also undertakes a cameo appearance by Eugene O’Neill.) Standing out in the showiest roles are the two girls in the rain: Adina Verson as the bordello owner’s daughter Rifkele, and Katrina Lenk as the prostitute Manke. (Lenk, by the way, was absolutely smashing in David Yazbek’s The Band’s Visit, a musical we hope will be remounted next season.) Verson and Lenk play the rain scene several times over the course of the play; the last rendition is breathtaking and gasp-inducing.
Katrina Lenk and Adina Verson in Paula Vogel’s Indecent
Something troubled me when I saw Indecent last May in its New York premiere at the Vineyard Theatre, and a second viewing has allowed me to isolate the issue. Playwrights are free to change and reinterpret history; where would the drama be if not? But it is in this reshuffling that Vogel loses me, slightly. Asch’s God of Vengeance was deemed indecent due—according to Vogel—the rain scene. (It is not indecent, of course; merely human, lovely, and well-written.) To escape controversy, the rain scene was deleted from the script prior to the 1923 Broadway run. During the Broadway run, the cast of God of Vengeance was arrested for being indecent. Yes; but the Broadway production, as Vogel makes entirely clear, did not include the rain scene. Which means that in real life, the rain scene—upon which Vogel hangs her entire play—could not have been why God of Vengeance was branded indecent. The arrests seem to have been political; the reason, at least as given by the judge who tried the case, centered on the desecration of a Torah in the final scene, which—Judge McIntyre helpfully explained from the bench—is as sacred to Jewish audiences as the Host is to Roman Catholics.
But this switched motivation is a minor point. Vogel—only now receiving her first Broadway opportunity, twenty years after her Pulitzer—has rescued God of Vengeance from the stacks of a research library; and brought both Asch’s play and her own. with that very special rain scene, to vibrant life.
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Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman’s Indecent opened April 18, 2017 at the Cort Theatre