{"id":20907,"date":"2023-02-17T11:26:56","date_gmt":"2023-02-17T16:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20907"},"modified":"2023-02-17T11:26:56","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T16:26:56","slug":"play-report-indecent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2023\/02\/17\/play-report-indecent\/","title":{"rendered":"Play Report: Indecent"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Speaking of plays that make use of the actual physical presence of the audience, I got a chance to watch a production of Indecent<\/cite> a few days ago, and I am confirmed in my opinion that it\u2019s my favorite script of the last twenty-five years.\r\n

If any of y\u2019all aren\u2019t familiar with the play, it\u2019s a story about the Sholom Asch play Gd of Vengeance<\/cite>, from its writing in 1906 through its international success in the 1910s, to Broadway where it was closed by the police in 1923, all the way until it is nearly forgotten in 1952.\r\n

My Best Reader pointed out that in addition to my identifying with the story because it\u2019s a Jewish story, I identify with it because it\u2019s a theater story. This is very much true. I honestly do get a little weary of Holocaust stories\u2014weary is the wrong word, perhaps, but I tend to feel that sometimes, for some stories, the Holocaust is used as a kind of talisman of emotional heft. As a fellow who is inclined to weep at sad stories, I resent having tears wrung from me on the cheap.\r\n

But it\u2019s much more of a theater story than a Holocaust story. I suppose I could resent Paula Vogel for not ending the story of the play in 1923, but really, even if she had done that, it would have still been a Holocaust story, wouldn\u2019t it? The destruction of European Jewish culture would have hung over the whole thing anyway. And ending the play in the fifties, with a disillusioned Sholom Asch refusing a new production of the play within the play is extremely powerful\u2014and then you can\u2019t just skip the Holocaust in between.\r\n

Sholom Asch came to feel\u2014and it\u2019s hard to argue with him\u2014that the play, and that fiction in general\u2014did not and could not save the world. The horrors of Europe in the fifty years after that play was written are pretty persuasive in that regard. Writers don\u2019t save the world.\r\n

But in Paula Vogel\u2019s play, that\u2019s not the point. She knows that writers don\u2019t save the world. That isn\u2019t their job, she says. Dust we are, and to dust we return, she says, we all know that now, and art will never change that, but still it is possible to create beauty. Not just possible, but necessary. And the existence of one scene in Gd of Vengeance<\/cite>, a scene of two young women falling in love, dancing in the rain, finding beauty and pleasure in each other, the light of that one scene is enough. Or if it is not enough, it\u2019s something, anyway, and it\u2019s possible to live as if it were enough.\r\n

It\u2019s ironic, I think (and I assume intentionally so) that if this is the message of Indecent<\/cite>, it is not the message of Gd of Vengeance<\/cite>. I have only read the latter in the Donald Margulies adaptation, but from what I can tell, the play is fundamentally not about those two young women, but about the brothel-master, who blunders away his (illusory) chance at redemption and ruins not only his own life but the lives of everyone around him. It\u2019s a bitter, brutal sort of play, and while that one scene does stand out as the single example of beauty in it\u2014the one bit when two people appear to be genuinely happy in the moment and not using each other selfishly\u2014it\u2019s not a triumph, but a brief, doomed, futureless blip.\r\n

Paula Vogel imagines a future for that scene that Sholom Asch did not. She imagines it without necessarily believing in it, or asking us to believe in it, but asking us to believe in the act of imagining it. Asking us to live as if that were enough.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger did bring a third handkerchief, and made use of it.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20907"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20909,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20907\/revisions\/20909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}