Indecent

Play (2017)
by Paula Vogel

With Richard Topol, Katrina Lenk, Mimi Lieber, Max Gordon Moore, Tom Nelis, Steven Rattazzi, Adina Verson

Noted lesbian playwright Paula Vogel, known for the masterpiece How I Learned To Drive (1997), The Baltimore Waltz (1992), and other plays, was, according to a production note, introduced to the material behind this play by her college professor at Cornell, Bert States, who know Vogel as she was wrestling with the process of coming out. States suggested Vogel read God of Vengeance by pathbreaking Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, a play written in 1907 that featured a lesbian relationship.

About seven years ago, Vogel encountered young director Rebecca Taichman who, as an undergraduate at Yale had also encountered Asch’s work and developed the idea of staging the 1923 obscenity trial surrounding God of Vengeance which had presented the first passionate kiss between two women on an American stage. The collaboration developed eventually into Vogel’s penning of Indecent which represents a history of the writing and production of this uniquely interesting moment in theatrical and contemporary Jewish literary history.

Vogel’s play is an attenuated history of the writing and production of Asch’s work which tries, in its relatively short scope, to contain the history of this early theatrical breakthrough in the realm of recognition and sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality.

Wonderful music, by Klezmatics fiddler Lisa Gutkin, and Aaron Halva, embellishes the telling, and periodically there is some wonderful dancing and singing, particularly by the two female lovers played passionately and affectingly by Katrina Lenk and Mimi Lieber.

During much of the performance Yiddish text with interlinear English is projected on the screen behind the stage in order to inform the action. It’s affecting and poignant simply to see the text scroll by page after page.

The play, without doubt, presents interesting history and the subject of the lovers who appear within the play within the play is poignant and moving. Nonetheless, the writing of Vogel’s play is attenuated, trying seemingly to embrace the entire history of the work and its production. The result is a mixed bag – a culturally fascinating account, a touching portrayal of a moment in Jewish literary history – and a dramatically unfocused recounting of the issues that moves through its stations without potently conveying a sense of what is at its core.

If the kiss is at its core, that moment indeed is touching and striking, but the getting there sometimes feels labored. That may be a function of Vogel’s apparent ambition to convey the history of the play itself as it moves from Warsaw to New York as well as to highlight its dramatically erotic message. Indecent is itself quite short and packs a lot of story in nonetheless. And though it represents a noble effort to grasp the entire scope of the movement of this Yiddish work from old country to new, this may just be too much material for a short play to handle.

Moments of song and dance between the two leading women are truly beautiful and captivating, and one wishes that there were significantly more of that throughout.

– BADMan