Indecent
Written by Paula Vogel
Directed by Rebecca Taichman
Cort Theatre
June 14, 2017
Production website
💉💉💉 out of 5.

The visuals in Indecent were simply stunning.  It really was a textbook for directors.  From the moment we came in and saw a line of actors already on stage – – obviously Jews saddled with luggage on their high and left – we knew we were headed on a journey that wasn’t going to be easy!  Indecent is such an important part of history in both its exploration of censorship and Yiddish theatre – particularly in America.  Indecent is built on the trouble that the play, The God of Vengeance suffered as one of the first plays to present Jews in an unflattering light and to go even further wth presenting a lesbian relationship.

The play uses a group of a dozen actors in a variety of roles to trace the play The God of Vengeance from it’s conception through its tour of Europe and then to America and back to a world now ripping apart by WWII.  The play plays a fascinating game of language.  We hear the characters both speak in Yiddish and then in English and sometimes they are amplified by words projected as subtitles.  We really get to experience the feeling of English as a second language and the difficulty some concepts have in traveling from language to language.

The play also takes us through a performance of The God of Vengeance that begins as an artificial, indicated and presentational play to a stunning piece of realism played out in an actual rain shower on stage.  From the rain we go to the death camps and back again to the stage.  We travel to places both in our imagination and in theatrical reality.  It is exhilarating.  We never know if we are going be shown or need to use our imagination.

Imagine a group of Jews standing in line for the death camps with sand pouring non-stop out of their sleeves – piling up on the stage.  From dust to dust.  That is the magic of Indecent.