46 | APRIL 20 • 2023
ARTS&LIFE
THEATER
his Christian trilogy led to him being
banished by the editor of the Forverts,
the most widely read Yiddish paper
in America. So, he wrote for the only
Yiddish-language outlet available to
him, the Freiheit, a Communist paper.
This last move resulted in his being
called before the House Committee
on Un-American Activities, which
ultimately led to him leaving the
United States permanently. Almost no
one attended the funeral of this major
Yiddish writer, when he died in London
in 1957.
How much does a writer like Asch owe
to the community, however delineated,
and must the work always be uplifting?
Or does a play like The God of Vengeance
serve its audience by acknowledging the
rich contradictions of that community,
its weaknesses as well as its strengths?
These and many other questions are
raised by Paula Vogel’s provocative
play, Indecent; but it is the matter of
censorship that makes her work so
timely, so essential to our current
moment.
Near the end of Indecent we witness a
group of Polish Jews in 1943, preparing
to perform Act II from The God of
Vengeance. Trapped in the Lodz ghetto,
they use an attic for their theater and
request only a donation, preferably a
bit of food, for admission. They know
their gathering is illegal and that the
performance must finish before curfew.
Just as they reach the delicate love scene
between Rifkele and Manke, the violent
sounds of a door being kicked open and
pounding boots on the stairs shatter
their theatrical reverie.
We in the audience of 2023 know
where this kind of canceling will lead;
but Vogel poignantly reminds us that
whatever the consequence brought on
by efforts to suppress, to censor free
expression, genuine art will endure.
But hers is no pollyannish sentiment
to comfort Broadway theater-goers.
Vogel, at the end of Indecent, has
Asch meet with a Jewish student from
Yale who wants to stage The God of
Vengeance. The older man refuses to
grant permission, declaring that his
play was written from another time, for
another world, and that he has lost too
many audience members.
“Six million have left the theater,” he
says. Yet the joyful ghosts who appear
on stage at the end — like those sitting
among us in the darkened theater —
assert what censors seldom understand.
You cannot suppress, you cannot cancel
memory.
Though you can cancel a high school
production of Indecent, as administrators
did earlier this year at Douglas Anderson
School of the Arts in Florida’s Duval
County. Their rationale was that Vogel’s
play “contains adult sexual dialogue
inappropriate for student cast members
and student audiences.” The same school
has previously staged both Rent and
Chicago, musicals with more than their
share of adult themes and dialogue.
Chicago, for instance, includes the
classic “Cell Block Tango,” in which “six
merry murderesses” explain why their
husbands/lovers “had it coming.” One
of them, Liz, recounts how husband
Bernie’s gum popping bothered her,
especially after a hard day’s work:
continued from page 45
Yale Repertory
Production
2015
Paula
Vogel