INDECENT

Paula Vogel’s play comes to the Ahmanson from Broadway
By Stephen Fife

Indecent, the play by Paula Vogel and directed by Rebecca Taichman, recently opened at the Ahmanson Theatre in a re-mounting of the Broadway production. I was fortunate enough to see that Broadway production towards the end of its run, and I have to say that it was far superior to the version playing here. This is partly due to the cavernous nature of the Ahmanson, which simply overwhelms intimate/delicate shows like this one; and is partly the result of other issues, which I will go into later. Nevertheless, it still retains some of its magic, and magic is always worth checking out.

Indecent tells the pilgrim’s progress story of the Yiddish play God of Vengeance from its completion in 1907 by Sholem Asch through Asch’s expulsion from the United States in 1952. Asch’s play is about a brothelkeeper who raises his virginal daughter upstairs while running a brothel with young girls in his cellar. As it happens, I adapted God of Vengeance myself for the Jewish Repertory Theatre, who produced it Off-Broadway in 1992. In fact, I met director Taichman in 1998 when Joseph Chaikin directed a revival of my adaptation in Atlanta, and she came down for the last week of rehearsal. She knew Chaikin from the Yale School of Drama, where a year before this, Taichman had presented The People vs The God of Vengeance as her thesis project. While I never saw Taichman’s project, she had described it to me back then as alternating scenes from Asch’s play with scenes from the 1923 Obscenity trial against the Broadway cast of God of Vengeance.

For several years after this I kept hearing about different productions of Taichman’s version, often in the Boston area, never very successful. Then in 2010 she joined forces with playwright Paula Vogel, who had been drawn to Asch’s play many years earlier for its groundbreaking presentation of a lesbian love scene. It was Vogel’s idea to expand the scope of the play back to its origins, and to invent the central character of Lemml, the country yokel who happens to attend the first reading of God of Vengeance, which is also the first play he’s ever encountered. Lemml falls in love with Asch’s play, and he becomes its perpetual stage manager and proponent. Lemml is also the narrator of Vogel’s play, and he helps to connect us with the constantly shifting onstage action.

The problem, however, is that Vogel and Taichman call their play “The True Story of a Little Jewish Play.” These are the words that greet the audience when we enter the theater, projected on the back wall above the seated cast. But you cannot have a “true story” with a fictional central character, can you? This may sound like carping, but to me it calls into question what other fictional elements may be present here, as well as why they felt the need to brand their play a “true story” to begin with. I’m also offended by their calling God of Vengeance a “little Jewish play” — it has 28 characters and a running time of three hours — while also referring to it in the text as “the greatest Jewish play ever written.” (What makes it greater than The Dybbuk or The Golem?)

None of these factors, however, will prevent audience members from enjoying the play itself with its swirl of Jewish history, as Asch’s determination to tell the truth at any cost runs into rejection from well-to-do assimilated Jews in New York City and genocide from the Nazis in Poland. The cast I saw on Broadway had also been involved in developing Vogel’s play for several years, and they were a true company, with a dedication and passion rarely seen anymore. At the Ahmanson, Elizabeth A. Davis and Harry Groener have replaced two of these cast members, and — while both are very talented performers — the authority that was there before has been diffused. It’s still an entertaining evening, but the soulfulness and depth of suffering is no longer there, and the theatrical gimmicks are now more apparent.

Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A.—Civic Center; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed. & Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 1 p.m. & 6:30 p.m.; through Jul. 7. (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org. Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission.