'Indecent': Inventive, courageous love letter to the art of theater
This review is just to add my voice (very belatedly) to the chorus of praise for Paula Vogel's remarkable play, Indecent, playing through June 25 at the Cort Theatre thrugh June 12. If you watched the Tony Awards, you had a glimpse of the thrilling production and saw Rebecca Taichman win as Best Director.
Indecent is the "true story of a little Jewish play" called God of Vengeance; it was written in Yiddish by Sholem Ashe in 1907 in Warsaw. Lemml (the fervent Richard Topol) finds himself at the play's first reading, falls in love with theater, and – with a courageous script depicting Jews as complex, flawed people, not as paragons of virtue. Central to the plot is the then-shocking love between two young women and their tender kiss on stage in a rainstorm.
The God of Vengeance goes on to acclaimed productions all across Europe, and finally the troupe arrives in New York. The play is a hit at the Provincetown Playhouse (Eugene O'Neill makes a cameo appearance), and then disaster strikes in the form of success: It transfers to Broadway, where it is noticed by the authorities. Declared "Obscene, indecent, immoral and impure," the show is closed and the cast arrested, tried, and found guilty.
Lemml eventually returns to Poland in the 1940s, to stage the play in an attic in the Lodz Ghetto, and the rest is the obscene history of the Final Solution.
Indecent is about homophobia, anti-Semitism, the oppression of women, and the fear created by small-minded authority. It is, as all of Vogel's plays are (from How I Learned to Drive to Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq), inventive in its structure, where time stops and starts in the blink of an eye, and in its thrilling shifts from comic to tragic. Most of all, it is an impassioned indictment of the evils that beset us.
The cast is as nimble and as profoundly theatrical as a show could hope for; the actors shift from role to role, language to language, accent to accent, old to young and back again. Outstanding among them are Tom Nelis and the wildly sensual Katrina Lenk. There is Klezmer music, there is dancing, there is Yiddishkeit. It is a love letter to the art of theater.
Through June 25 at the Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York.
