“It took 30 seconds” for playwright Paula Vogel to say yes when she was asked to collaborate with director Rebecca Taichman on “Indecent,” a new work about events surrounding the provocative play written in 1906, “The God of Vengeance.”
Who could blame her? The play was ripe with drama, sex and power and held a personal connection for the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “How I Learned To Drive.”
Following the Broadway premiere of “The God of Vengeance” in 1923, the cast and producer were arrested by the vice squad, thrown in jail and put on trial on obscenity charges. The play was immediately shut down and the hopes of the Yiddish theater movement crossing over to a mainstream American audience were dashed.
The moral melodrama by Sholem Asch, a popular writer of the modern Yiddish literature movement, was not only set in a brothel but featured a tender and steamy lesbian romance between a 17-year-old girl and a prostitute. But making this an incendiary trifecta was the less-than-genteel way that the Jewish community was portrayed to a mainstream audience.
The events surrounding the play fascinated Taichman, who is of Polish and Jewish heritage, when she was a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama. As it turned out, Asch’s manuscripts, memorabilia and books were at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library — as well as the trial transcripts.
In 2000, Taichman wrote and staged as her thesis project “The People vs. ‘The God of Vengeance,'” interweaving the trial’s transcripts with sections of the Asch play.
The story stayed with her, and several years ago Vogel joined the project as its playwright. (Taichman and Vogel are credited as “creators” of the play, and Taichman — who staged “Marie Antoinette,” “The Evildoers” and last season’s “Familiar” at the Yale Repertory Theatre — stages the production.)
“Indecent,” a co-production with Yale Rep that will premiere the work this week in New Haven at the University Theatre, and La Jolla Playhouse in La Jolla, Calif., will present it beginning in November. The play will also be staged in late spring at off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre.
Crossover Hopes
In a recent luncheon interview with the two women, Vogel, 63, recalls the impact the play had on her when she was a college student in the early ’70s reading it among the library stacks.
“I was just ‘coming out’ and coming to terms with my sexuality,” says Vogel, who also wrote “The Long Christmas Ride Home,” “A Civil War Christmas” (both produced at Long Wharf Theatre) and “The Baltimore Waltz.” “As I read the play I kept turning the pages and going, ‘Wait a moment, wait a moment, a young married man wrote this in 1906?’ I couldn’t put it down and it stayed with me forever.”
The play centers on the Jewish underworld of a lascivious brothel keeper who tries to shelter his pure daughter from his corrupt business and marry her off to a pious scholar. But when she falls in love with a prostitute from the brothel, hypocrisy and domestic violence are exposed and affairs end tragically.
The play was popular when it was presented first in Poland, then later for the Yiddish theater in New York. It was then translated to English and was presented on the Lower East Side, then to a larger off-Broadway theater.
‘Dirty Laundry’
But what was acceptable before for a special immigrant audience was suddenly not acceptable. This was not how people who wanted to be assimilated into society wanted to be portrayed to a larger mainstream audience.
In New York in the ’20s there was “a whole new community of Polish and Jewish immigrants and it’s a very different culture from the Upper East Side German Jewish culture that was more embedded here,” says Taichman.
The play opened on Broadway at a theater on 42nd Street (which is now the New Victory Theatre) with one of its biggest stars of the Yiddish theater, Rudolph Schildkraut.
But the reaction to the Broadway production was deeply divided — especially from many in the Jewish community who saw the play as “airing our dirty laundry,” says Taichman, 45. “‘There is corruption in our culture but that’s not what we should put on the Great White Way for everyone to see,’ they seemed to say.”
The formal complaint against the play was lodged by Rabbi Joseph Silverman of New York City’s prestigious Temple Emanu-el (“The play libels the Jewish religion,” he said) and 15 days after it opened, arrests were made and the production closed.
Following the controversy of “The God of Vengeance,” there wasn’t a mainstream hit that was exclusively about Jewish culture until the stage adaptation of the stories of Sholem Aleichem in the ’50s, which became the source material for the international hit, the ’60s musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”
This is not the first time that “The God of Vengeance” has been rethought. In 2000, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“Dinner with Friends”) and New Haven resident Donald Margulies adapted the play, setting it in New York’s Lower East Side in 1923. The play was produced by the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Massachusetts Berkshires, and staged by Gordon Edelstein, artistic director of Long Wharf Theatre.
Spans Decades
Vogel and Taichman’s “Indecent” spans decades, features klezmer music and taps into themes of censorship, Jewish identity, the power of theater and the devotion of artists.
It begins with Asch’s writing the play in 1906 and follows its subsequent productions, its court case and what happened to the play, playwright and actors years afterward.
“But it’s not a documentary,” says Vogel. “It’s an imagination of all of this.”
Vogel says she was touched by the true story of this self-assured and angry playwright [Asch] who “in his youth called for artistic freedom and then who lived life, experienced losses and in his 70s had a different perspective about his play.”
After World War II, Asch himself stopped productions of his play.
“He said, ‘I wrote it for one time and the times have changed for me,'” says Taichman. “My feeling was he just couldn’t bear to do it after what happened to Jews so horrifically. He couldn’t justify this story.”
Says Vogel: “I’m on both sides of this fence, having myself thrown everything into a play in my 20s and who now works with playwrights in their 20s who are also crafting incendiary works.
“I tell them, yes, it’s your right to offend people but it’s also your responsibility to listen to the offended.”
Relevant Issues
Playwright and director both say that their play strikes on contemporary issues such as immigration.
“We find ourselves in an extremely nativist time now with the fear of immigration,” says Vogel, “and one of those fears of immigration is expressed through censorship.”
Another contemporary issue is how sexuality is used as an excuse to police identity, whether it’s racial, ethnic or gender.
“It’s remarkable,” says Vogel, “if you stop and think that sexuality has long been a decisive wedge issue.”
Political correctness by one group wanting to represent itself in a certain way in the play is something that Vogel herself experienced when she was starting out as a writer
She said plays with a flawed female character or a lesbian protagonist were not supported by feminist groups that she was involved in at the time. “It was not permissible to show that in public in NYC in the ’70s.”
And although she says she was never charged or jailed for some of her more provocative plays, “there were cancellations of ‘The Baltimore Waltz’ because people felt it wasn’t the right time, in terms of the AIDS crisis, to do comedy,” or because of sexual content or because of improper behavior by a woman.
New Haven Start
Because of the epic nature of “Indecent” and its production demands, “this is not an easy play to work on just on one’s computer,” says Vogel. “You need the actors, you need the music, you need the choreography and projections. We’re developing the production the way American theater used to be done — and especially in New Haven.”
The play received developmental support from the MacDowell Colony, the Sundance Institute and commissions by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Yale Repertory Theatre. It was also the recipient of a 2015 Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award.
“By the time it plays New York next spring,” says Taichman, “it will have evolved a ton. We’re at the beginning of a massive learning curve.”
“The only types of shows that get this kind of development now are musicals, not plays.”
“INDECENT” is now in previews at the University Theatre, 222 York St., New Haven. The Yale Repertory Theatre co-production opens Thursday, Oct. 8, and runs through Oct. 24. Information at yalerep.org and 203-432-1234.
