Fisher’s projected Yiddish/English translations on a curtain hanging behind the performance space. All this is enhanced by Mark Novick’s dramatic lighting and Robert S. Mike Toner’s minimalist scenic design, with its empty raised platform surrounded by assorted props and seated performers, is true to the original production and effectively evokes the time, temperament, and place of the play. The same can be said for Austin Playhouse’s current production under the thoughtful direction of Lara Toner Haddock (stage) and Lyn Koenning (music). And with Yiddish being spoken and sung intermittently throughout the production – an endangered language now, due largely to the extermination of over 5 million of its speakers during the Holocaust – we see just how expediently culture can be canceled.Ĭritics called the Broadway production of Indecent “captivating” and “gorgeous” ( Time Out New York), “a heart-stirring … reminder of … the power of art” ( New York Daily News), and “superbly realized” with “remarkable power” ( The New York Times). By doing so, we see how little things have changed in this country in terms of artistic censorship, religious hypocrisy, and homophobia. Vogel’s one-act Indecent – with its threepiece klezmer band and seven actors playing 42 roles – meta-theatrically traces God of Vengeance’s history and that of its original players from their first performance to their last in an attic in occupied Poland during World War II. The theatre was raided, the show’s producer and 12-member cast were arrested and convicted on charges of obscenity, and the production was shut down. The play proved too scandalous and “ethnic” for upscale audiences who embraced newly restrictive immigration laws. But when an English translation was attempted at Broadway’s Apollo Theatre, local Orthodox rabbis complained that its warts-and-all depiction of Jewish life was fanning the flames of growing antisemitism. The kiss was never meant to be scandalous just an eleventh-hour expression of passion between two people. But Rivke falls in love with Manke, one of the prostitutes, who returns her affections. He and his wife are determined to keep their young daughter Rivke virginal, and thus marriageable. In 2017, as the centerpiece of Paula Vogel’s Tony Award-winning Indecent, it became something more.Īsch’s largely forgotten three-act masterwork – which at the turn of the 20th century achieved great success on the stages of Europe and in the Yiddish theatre scene of New York City’s Lower East Side – revolves around a Jewish owner of a brothel in Poland. In 1923, Sholem Asch’s play God of Vengeance served up Broadway’s first queer kiss and became a landmark work of lesbian dramatic literature. (l-r) Sarah Fleming Walker, Michael Ferstenfeld, Huck Huckaby, and Babs George in Austin Playhouse’s Indecent (Photo by Steve Rogers Photography)

Indecent by Paula Vogel