美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Indecent': A Play About A Yiddish Play That Was Ahead Of Its Time

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Nominations 1 for the Tony Awards come out Tuesday. Among the favorites for best play is Paula Vogel's "Indecent." Paula Vogel is one of this country's most acclaimed 2 contemporary playwrights 4. She got a Pulitzer in 1998. This year she's being honored for lifetime achievement at the Off-Broadway Obie Awards, but she has never had a work on Broadway until now with "Indecent." As Jeff Lunden tell us, it's the story of a controversial century-old Yiddish play following its productions across continents and decades.

JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE 5: The actors are already seated at the back of a bare stage when the audience enters the theater. The lights go down. The performers get up and begin a ghostly dance to klezmer music as bits of ash fall out of their overcoats. One of them steps forward.

RICHARD TOPOL: (As Lemml) My name is Lemml. You can also call me Lou. I am the stage manager tonight. Usually, you can find me backstage. We have a story we want to tell you about a play - a play that changed my life. Every night, we tell this story. But somehow I can never remember the end.

LUNDEN: And for the next hour and a half, this troop of actors takes the audience through the history of Sholem Asch's 1907 Yiddish play, "God Of Vengeance 6." Paula Vogel's play about the play is a collaboration 7 with director Rebecca Taichman. It depicts 8 the author of the original, the actors who performed in it, the controversy 9 surrounding it, the lost culture from which it came. Richard Topol plays the stage manager.

TOPOL: One of the things that Paula and Rebecca are so adamant 10 about is that the play make us understand that we can lose culture. Reminding us that Yiddish was this vibrant 11 culture that is almost dead. And part of what happened in the 20th century and the Holocaust 12 made it so that there were a lot of Yiddish speakers who were no longer with us.

LUNDEN: "Indecent" follows the play through its debut 13 in Europe to performances in New York and just past World War II. "God Of Vengeance" was controversial from the start, depicting 14 a Jewish brothel owner who bribes 15 a rabbi so that the rabbi's son will marry his daughters, says playwright 3 Paula Vogel.

PAULA VOGEL: The only problem in the original play is that the daughter falls in love with a prostitute downstairs. So this was actually the first presentation, and it was of lesbian love.

LUNDEN: Vogel introduces the actors as they prepare for the initial performance.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #1: (As Lenk) How do these women live? How do they dress? What do they do in bed, and how do they do it?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #2: (As Verson) You mean prostitutes?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #1: (As Lenk) Good God, no. We all know what prostitutes do.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #2: (As Verson) Oh. So - so you asked him about lesbians?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #1: (As Lenk) You better learn to say the word out, my girl. Four weeks from today we will be kissing center stage.

LUNDEN: The play may have been controversial, but it was a critical success when it was performed all over Europe and on New York's Lower East Side in Yiddish.

VOGEL: And then someone got the bright idea - let's translate it into English and put it on Broadway at which point everyone is arrested.

LUNDEN: Throughout the play's history, many of the objections to it came from Jews themselves, says actor Richard Topol.

TOPOL: Don't let people see this play. It's too inflammatory. And for them it's inflammatory mostly because of the way that it makes Jews look bad. And at the time, they didn't want to have that out in the world, where people who were already anti-Semitic had any more reason to be anti-Semitic.

LUNDEN: By the time the actors went on trial for "Indecency" in 1923, director Rebecca Taichman says the U.S. government had enacted 16 drastic laws restricting immigration.

REBECCA TAICHMAN: Really the country shut down, and this wave of anti-immigration sentiment was sweeping 17 the country. A huge part of what was happening was a sense that these sort of dirty Eastern European Jews were coming in and taking over and keep them out.

LUNDEN: The stage manager decides to move back to Poland after the "Indecency" trial.

TOPOL: (As Lemml) I am done being in a country that laughs at the way I speak. They say America is free. What do you know here is free?

LUNDEN: He continues to champion the play in his native Poland even as World War II begins. Paula Vogel finally shows the complete scene with its controversial lesbian kiss almost at the end of "Indecent" when the original play is performed in an attic 19 in the Lodz ghetto 20.

VOGEL: Believe it or not, it's actually the purest love scene I've ever read in Sholem Asch's play that I put akin 18 to Romeo and Juliet. And that is an extraordinary radical 21 act, not only for 1097, but I would say for 2017.

LUNDEN: And it's in Vogel's juxtaposition 22 of past and present, poetry and horror that the audience finally understands why they saw the ashes come from the actor's sleeves at the beginning of the play. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.