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