But on the seventh night, God created Yiddish theater
Paula Vogel's Indecent begins with a troupe of ghosts. In the dust-beamed shadows of an old attic, from the stillness of forgotten suitcases and piled-up furniture, they rise to life like a golem from the genizah of the Altneuschul; they brush themselves clean of their own ashes, raise hands, snap fingers, clap and begin to dance. A boyish thrill in his voice despite the weary grey in his hair and beard, stage manager Lemml (Ben Cherry) introduces each of his company in turn, the elders Vera Parnicki and Otto Godowsky (Susan Rome and Victor Raider-Wexler), the worldly-wise Halina Cygansky and Mendel Schulz (Susan Lynskey and Ethan Watermeier), the ingénues Chana Mandelbaum and Avram Zederbaum (Emily Shackelford and Max Wolkowitz), and of course the musicians (Maryn Shaw, Alexander Sovronsky, John Milosich) who swirl around them with the klezmer's violin, clarinet, and accordion. All together, changing languages, nationalities, ages, sexualities, selves—but not archetypes—from scene to scene, they will tell the story of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (גאָט פֿון נקמה, 1907), the groundbreaking Yiddish drama of sexual commerce, religious hypocrisy, and redemptive lesbian love that rocked the theatrical world of Europe and not so incidentally was successfully prosecuted for obscenity when finally produced on Broadway in 1923; they will tell, too, because one is inseparable from the other, a story of self-representation and anti-Semitism, censorship and self-censorship, and how far art can outrun history and history linger in memory until all that is left is a stageful of rain. It starts in a writer's bedroom and it doesn't end where you fear it must, although it goes there. But as Lemml instructs us, gesturing to the two women, one fair, one dark, of whom we know as yet nothing more than the shape they make in one another's arms: "It all starts with this moment. Remember this."
I seem to find myself writing about theater only when I have been awake for days, so that I worry about my ability to describe the important things. I can tell you easily that the central conceit of a theatrical haunting reenacting the performance history of a particular play inside the already everywhere-and-nowhere charmed space of a stage means that Indecent is not just a play within a play, it's meta all the way down. Stage directions in English and Yiddish are projected onto the black brick wall at the back of the stage as well as the wooden beams that form its moving proscenium, sometimes factual, sometimes funny, sometimes poetic. The dialogue is full of code-switching, accents that distinguish whether the characters are speaking their own, unmarked languages or not. As in commedia dell' arte, the same actors take the same kinds of roles with each turn, but the actor-characters themselves are so lightly sketched that the audience may cease to think of the slender young man with the slightly clownish face as Avram: he's Sholem Asch, except when he's Morris Carnovsky or Eugene O'Neill. The tall, fair, sardonic woman is always Manke, the prostitute in God of Vengeance who falls truly in love with the pure-hearted daughter of her pimp, but sometimes she's a Berlin cabaret star who's blasé about playing a lesbian prostitute but says the most nervously graceless things about playing a Jew, and sometimes she's the more assimilated, ambitious half of the pair of real-life lovers starring in Got fun nekome's first New York, Yiddish-language run. The small, dark, vivid girl is always Rifkele, the pure-hearted daughter who falls truly in love with the prize of her father's stable of whores, but sometimes she's an American jazz baby hoping to shock her parents with her scandalous stage debut, and sometimes she's the lover who can't master English fast enough to join the already fraught Broadway transfer of God of Vengeance, leaving her to declare as bitterly as a vow, "This will be the only role in my lifetime where I could tell someone I love that I love her onstage." The same sturdy, bearded actor takes his share of the heavies, like the producer who censors the transgressive, heroized same-sex eroticism of the "rain scene" in hopes of securing mainstream—white, middle-class, Christian—American box office, the rabbi who denounces even the censored version as an incitement to anti-Semitism, or the police officer who hauls the cast into court on charges of obscenity, but by the third act he's pleading for help in four languages as the walls of smoke and wire we feared from the start close in on Lemml's Europe-returned troupe under the surtitle Letters from Poland, 1939–1941. Asch at the end of his life is the old man, like I. L. Peretz who heard the first drawing-room reading of God of Vengeance and advised the young playwright to burn it; now he refuses to permit the mirror of his younger self to stage his most famous play, claiming that he "wrote it in a different time . . . the time has changed on me," which elides how grievously he himself has changed from the fizzing, fire-eating would-be "writer of world literature," shocked by the defensive backlash from his own community, traumatized by the Holocaust and the foreshadowing atrocities he witnessed twenty years before, shamed by his inability to defend his own work in the language in which it was under attack. Indecent would still be a fascinating, carnivalesque piece of theater if it were only Asch's story, quick-changing vaudeville and realism, melodrama and cabaret, knit together always with original music by Sovronsky and a historical soundtrack that ranges from Sholom Secunda's "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" to Ilse Weber's "Wiegala," but it would leave a bitter taste if its last words were left to the playwright who repudiated them.
It leaves them to the characters instead. As its timeline creeps steadily forward toward the cutoff we have more than half suspected ever since our dead actors in the clothes of a vanished world dusted themselves off under the surtitle from ashes they rise, Indecent runs a hair-raising risk: it's a story about the magic of theater in the face of the Holocaust. It could be worse than sentimental. The staging is at least restrained in its horrors, because everyone knows they're coming: there are no chimneys, no swastikas, no human actors playing perpetrators of genocide, just some Jude stars assumed so casually, between lines of a letter, they chill even more. There is a performance in a drafty attic of the ghetto, a cold, starved, determined cast everyone's hoping will still be there to finish the third act next week, a harsh knocking and an almighty bang and the doors at the back of the stage fly open, freezing the audience with pitiless electric light. An impossibly long line led once to a new life in America, leads now exactly where you imagine. And Lemml, sometimes known in America as Lou, the torch-bearer of God of Vengeance, the holy-fool nobody of a third-cousin tailor from Balut who gave voice to Rifkele in the rain for the very first time in Warsaw in 1906 and never gave up on the play even when its author did, closes his eyes and makes a wish: to change the story. Are they Halina and Chana, those two girls standing hand in hand in that terrible line? Are they Dina and Reina? Frieda and Virginia? Are they Manke and Rifkele? They step out of the line. Out of the camp, out of death, out of story, out of time, two Jewish girls who love one another run still holding hands up the catwalk at the back of the stage where no one has set foot all show and a door opens into light; they run through it and are gone. And when old Asch makes to leave his house in Bridgeport in 1952 with only bitterness behind him, Lemml acting like a proper ghost for the first time all show touches him gently over the heart, and the rain scene appears. In Yiddish. We watched it once before in English, but now that feels like a rehearsal. This is the real thing in its rightful language and it is everything we have been told for an hour and forty minutes it would be, the heart of Asch's play, the heart of Vogel's, sacred and profane and miraculous; it makes the rain fall (wet and real, the first few rows got spattered) and the girls shiver in it, laughing, glowing in each other's arms. It's a brief coda, almost a grace note. It's the most important thing. Di nakht iz azoy sheyn, der reygn iz azoy frish, un alts shmekt azoy in der lift. They are not ended yet. And that took Indecent for me from a play that was as good as its reputation to a play that was even more than I had hoped, because it knows that art doesn't save lives, but it knows that art changes them. That art can make lives otherwise marginalized or unspeakable be seen. "Why must every Jew onstage be a paragon?" the young Asch demands bluntly, defending his presentation of a world where Jews like anyone else can be pimps, prostitutes, or in forbidden love. I agree with him, obviously, but I enjoy the irony that he may have created an ideal despite himself, those girls still hand in hand.
So I slept an hour night before last in order to catch the train that would allow me to make it to D.C. in time to see this production with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie thanks to the generous offices of one of her congregants, and I slept several hours more last night on an air mattress in Selkie and Rami's living room where I should know better than to resent that their cat only fell asleep on me after it was time to get up, and I am now on a train somewhere in Connecticut (my God, we're in Bridgeport, hello, Asch) and I know that a play full of ghosts and history and Jewish queerness and music and memory and the questions of what we owe each other and our art sounds custom-tailored to me, but it really was an extraordinary thing. God of Vengeance has, for all the obvious reasons, long been important to me. I worried a little that Asch's play might get lost in Vogel's metatheater. It's like watching a jewel re-set. And it's funny, which I have probably neglected to mention in among all the dead—there's a blink-and-miss-it joke about Smith that cracked the relevant demographic of the audience right up. Worth all its travel. Deeply the right company to see it in, especially at the present moment of history. I wish I could have bought a CD of the incidental music. I wonder if I can nap on this train.
I seem to find myself writing about theater only when I have been awake for days, so that I worry about my ability to describe the important things. I can tell you easily that the central conceit of a theatrical haunting reenacting the performance history of a particular play inside the already everywhere-and-nowhere charmed space of a stage means that Indecent is not just a play within a play, it's meta all the way down. Stage directions in English and Yiddish are projected onto the black brick wall at the back of the stage as well as the wooden beams that form its moving proscenium, sometimes factual, sometimes funny, sometimes poetic. The dialogue is full of code-switching, accents that distinguish whether the characters are speaking their own, unmarked languages or not. As in commedia dell' arte, the same actors take the same kinds of roles with each turn, but the actor-characters themselves are so lightly sketched that the audience may cease to think of the slender young man with the slightly clownish face as Avram: he's Sholem Asch, except when he's Morris Carnovsky or Eugene O'Neill. The tall, fair, sardonic woman is always Manke, the prostitute in God of Vengeance who falls truly in love with the pure-hearted daughter of her pimp, but sometimes she's a Berlin cabaret star who's blasé about playing a lesbian prostitute but says the most nervously graceless things about playing a Jew, and sometimes she's the more assimilated, ambitious half of the pair of real-life lovers starring in Got fun nekome's first New York, Yiddish-language run. The small, dark, vivid girl is always Rifkele, the pure-hearted daughter who falls truly in love with the prize of her father's stable of whores, but sometimes she's an American jazz baby hoping to shock her parents with her scandalous stage debut, and sometimes she's the lover who can't master English fast enough to join the already fraught Broadway transfer of God of Vengeance, leaving her to declare as bitterly as a vow, "This will be the only role in my lifetime where I could tell someone I love that I love her onstage." The same sturdy, bearded actor takes his share of the heavies, like the producer who censors the transgressive, heroized same-sex eroticism of the "rain scene" in hopes of securing mainstream—white, middle-class, Christian—American box office, the rabbi who denounces even the censored version as an incitement to anti-Semitism, or the police officer who hauls the cast into court on charges of obscenity, but by the third act he's pleading for help in four languages as the walls of smoke and wire we feared from the start close in on Lemml's Europe-returned troupe under the surtitle Letters from Poland, 1939–1941. Asch at the end of his life is the old man, like I. L. Peretz who heard the first drawing-room reading of God of Vengeance and advised the young playwright to burn it; now he refuses to permit the mirror of his younger self to stage his most famous play, claiming that he "wrote it in a different time . . . the time has changed on me," which elides how grievously he himself has changed from the fizzing, fire-eating would-be "writer of world literature," shocked by the defensive backlash from his own community, traumatized by the Holocaust and the foreshadowing atrocities he witnessed twenty years before, shamed by his inability to defend his own work in the language in which it was under attack. Indecent would still be a fascinating, carnivalesque piece of theater if it were only Asch's story, quick-changing vaudeville and realism, melodrama and cabaret, knit together always with original music by Sovronsky and a historical soundtrack that ranges from Sholom Secunda's "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" to Ilse Weber's "Wiegala," but it would leave a bitter taste if its last words were left to the playwright who repudiated them.
It leaves them to the characters instead. As its timeline creeps steadily forward toward the cutoff we have more than half suspected ever since our dead actors in the clothes of a vanished world dusted themselves off under the surtitle from ashes they rise, Indecent runs a hair-raising risk: it's a story about the magic of theater in the face of the Holocaust. It could be worse than sentimental. The staging is at least restrained in its horrors, because everyone knows they're coming: there are no chimneys, no swastikas, no human actors playing perpetrators of genocide, just some Jude stars assumed so casually, between lines of a letter, they chill even more. There is a performance in a drafty attic of the ghetto, a cold, starved, determined cast everyone's hoping will still be there to finish the third act next week, a harsh knocking and an almighty bang and the doors at the back of the stage fly open, freezing the audience with pitiless electric light. An impossibly long line led once to a new life in America, leads now exactly where you imagine. And Lemml, sometimes known in America as Lou, the torch-bearer of God of Vengeance, the holy-fool nobody of a third-cousin tailor from Balut who gave voice to Rifkele in the rain for the very first time in Warsaw in 1906 and never gave up on the play even when its author did, closes his eyes and makes a wish: to change the story. Are they Halina and Chana, those two girls standing hand in hand in that terrible line? Are they Dina and Reina? Frieda and Virginia? Are they Manke and Rifkele? They step out of the line. Out of the camp, out of death, out of story, out of time, two Jewish girls who love one another run still holding hands up the catwalk at the back of the stage where no one has set foot all show and a door opens into light; they run through it and are gone. And when old Asch makes to leave his house in Bridgeport in 1952 with only bitterness behind him, Lemml acting like a proper ghost for the first time all show touches him gently over the heart, and the rain scene appears. In Yiddish. We watched it once before in English, but now that feels like a rehearsal. This is the real thing in its rightful language and it is everything we have been told for an hour and forty minutes it would be, the heart of Asch's play, the heart of Vogel's, sacred and profane and miraculous; it makes the rain fall (wet and real, the first few rows got spattered) and the girls shiver in it, laughing, glowing in each other's arms. It's a brief coda, almost a grace note. It's the most important thing. Di nakht iz azoy sheyn, der reygn iz azoy frish, un alts shmekt azoy in der lift. They are not ended yet. And that took Indecent for me from a play that was as good as its reputation to a play that was even more than I had hoped, because it knows that art doesn't save lives, but it knows that art changes them. That art can make lives otherwise marginalized or unspeakable be seen. "Why must every Jew onstage be a paragon?" the young Asch demands bluntly, defending his presentation of a world where Jews like anyone else can be pimps, prostitutes, or in forbidden love. I agree with him, obviously, but I enjoy the irony that he may have created an ideal despite himself, those girls still hand in hand.
So I slept an hour night before last in order to catch the train that would allow me to make it to D.C. in time to see this production with
selkie thanks to the generous offices of one of her congregants, and I slept several hours more last night on an air mattress in Selkie and Rami's living room where I should know better than to resent that their cat only fell asleep on me after it was time to get up, and I am now on a train somewhere in Connecticut (my God, we're in Bridgeport, hello, Asch) and I know that a play full of ghosts and history and Jewish queerness and music and memory and the questions of what we owe each other and our art sounds custom-tailored to me, but it really was an extraordinary thing. God of Vengeance has, for all the obvious reasons, long been important to me. I worried a little that Asch's play might get lost in Vogel's metatheater. It's like watching a jewel re-set. And it's funny, which I have probably neglected to mention in among all the dead—there's a blink-and-miss-it joke about Smith that cracked the relevant demographic of the audience right up. Worth all its travel. Deeply the right company to see it in, especially at the present moment of history. I wish I could have bought a CD of the incidental music. I wonder if I can nap on this train.
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I know her by reputation. I have just not seen, or read, any other of her plays.
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Fair enough! Do you have any underproduced favorites?
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