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Clayton Grimm

Catherine Young

Performance Response: Indecent by Paula Vogel

11 April 2018

Indecent Performance Response

Indecent, a play written by Paula Vogel and directed by Rebecca Taichman, Opened at the

Cort Theatre April 18th, 2017. The play critiques American censorship of the arts and most

importantly it’s nationalistic tendencies and history of rejection of artistic and foreign counter

culture ideas. Specifically, the persecuted ideals are primarily anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and

homosexuality. The play centers around the controversial 1923 production of Sholem Asch’s

(Max Gordon Moore) The God of Vengeance and focuses on the cast being arrested for

obscenity. Indecent also follows the initial conception of the play, it’s performance, and

eventually the play’s involvement with the Holocaust after it swiftly closed on Broadway. Vogel

beautifully crafts a Yiddish play grounded in an American context. Although plays based in non-

fiction can sometimes come across as merely informative, Indecent is a powerfully moving

American play through its use of music and dancing, directorial and scenic choices, and brilliant

acting.

Although this piece of theatre is, in fact, a play and not a musical, the show is filled with

music and dancing throughout. This allows you to easily understand the mood of each scene and

helps you digest the information and feeling you had during the previous scene. In a play with

myriad location and with minimal set changes, music is instrumental in helping the reader keep

up to the often-quick tempo of the piece. In a historical play that could easily be produced to be

merely informative music also allows the audience to more easily emotionally connect to the
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visuals on stage and the characters speaking and moving. The use of traditional Yiddish dancing

accomplishes a similar feat by immersing you in the lives of these Jewish thespians. Many of

these lighthearted moments of diegetic song and dance may not have been included in the

original production of God of Vengeance but are now present in Vogel’s play to help the audience

sympathize for those involved in its original production. By creating lovable characters that an

audience can easily connect to, Vogel showcases the original intent of God of Vengeance was an

attempt to humanize Jewish people with reckoning with sin and not as a “stone thrown inside the

tent” or something that “ought to be burned”.

I loved this play because of its story and these lovable characters. From Lemml (Richard

Topol) to the playful love between the staging of the two girls Rifkele (Adina Verson) and

Manke (Katrina Lenk), the play is filled with humor and tinged with sadness. These thematic

elements are highlighted by various technical choices made by the Director (Rebecca Taichman)

and scenic designer (Riccardo Hernandez). The direction of the show to use character’s accents

to signify they spoke English and no accent to signify they were speaking Yiddish worked well

with intermixed and narrated projected words in English and Hebrew on a black screen covering

the upstage wall. Vogel’s writing and use of repletion was only exaggerated by Taichman. The

second scene in the play when the final act of God of Vengeance was performed four times, each

time facing a different direction, with actors trying to top the exaggerated absurdity of each

previous line. By the fourth time the scene was repeated, it reached an almost absurd quality and

gave the audience permission to laugh. The partnered work between writer, director and scenic

designer was clear and resulted in seamless storytelling and scene transitions in a minimal set

relying heavily on lighting. In addition to headlines specifying location and language, words

such as “A blink” were used to designate a time jump or “during act one” to clarify that a scene
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from act 1 of God of Vengeance was happening. The play was also book ended with dust and

sand falling from the costumes of each actor on stage in the beginning and at the end to signify

the character’s deaths in concentration camps in Poland.

The technical elements of the play aligned beautifully with the subject matter and

parallels much of Vogel’s other work by using comedy to help introduce the audience to

controversial and highly dramatic material and messages. It is this beautiful fusion of subject of

form and function that allows this story to be not only emotionally moving but clear and easy to

understand. Clarity can often be the most overlooked aspect of a play despite being the most

important.

It is rare that I have almost no negative comments to give a production but Indecent was

produced almost flawlessly. Occasionally, it was unclear what language actors were speaking and

how long time had passed during time jumps. Some actors did not make it perfectly clear what

language they were speaking because it required constant shifting and I felt it may have been

better if they spoke in Yiddish and subtitles were projected. I was pleasantly surprised that the

play ended by repeating the rain scene from God of Vengeance entirely in Yiddish in the rain.

Because this was the first moment in the play that we heard only Yiddish but yet knew the scene

because of the context the previous hour and a half gave us. The words became almost a kind of

music. I felt like a time traveler, as if I was watching the scene that caused this controversy for

the first time in 1923, but without controversy and hesitancy but with pride and applause.