Playhouse Tuedays (Thursdays?): On Paula Vogel

by erica wachs, prose reader

It’s been a while.

I’m sorry.

Like, so sorry.

In order to avoid the sophomore slump, I decided to get involved in many, many activities the first two and a half months of school, leaving me very little time to read plays.

To make it up to you, I have an amazing show to tell you all about: Indecent by Paula Vogel, which I saw last night during its World Premiere run at the Yale Reparatory Theater. (It is also why this post is happening on a Wednesday.)

Indecent is the story of Sholem Asch’s play The God of Vengeance. Originally written in Yiddish, Asch’s early 20th century play depicts the life of Yekel, who owns a brothel. Wanting better for his daughter, Rifkele, he buys her a bridegroom and a Torah scroll, so that she can rise above the ranks of the whorehouse. However, his plans are ruined when Rifkele falls for Manke, the “star stable girl” of the whorehouse, and they elope. Rifkele is dragged back to her father, who, because she is no longer a “chaste, Jewish girl,” hurls Rifkele and the Torah scroll into the whorehouse, renouncing his dreams and his God. While the play enjoyed a successful run throughout Europe, when it opened on Broadway (in English) after significant changes had been made to the lesbian nature of the show, the entire cast was arrested after opening night for obscenity. Indecent tracks the show from the moment after it’s been written to its final performance in the Lodz Ghetto, where the performers were about to meet their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

There is so much to talk about in this meaty, powerful show. It talks about homosexuality. It talks about Jews, and Yiddish theater, and the Yiddish language. It talks about what it’s like to come to America, what it’s like to have to translate your thoughts into a foreign tongue.

But it also is a play, as Vogel stated, that talks about theater.

While the story of Indecent and most of the characters depicted were real people, Vogel created the fictitious character of Lemml, the stage manager of the “troupe of actors performing” (which is how the show covers such a large span of history; all the actors play many different roles). Lemml serves as the narrator, the driving force of the story. He introduces everyone to us; he brings us into this world Vogel has created. Throughout the dance-heavy opening, Lemml has one line as he introduces the actresses who are going to play Rifkele and Manke:“Isn’t that a moment worth holding your breath for?” With that one line, we as the audience love these two women, we love the love that is between them, and we love obscenity that is about to occur.

There are two main instances of Lemml that really spoke to me both as an audience member, and as an aspiring playwright. The first is towards the beginning of the show, Lemml is invited to hear the first reading of God of Vengeance in I.L. Peretz’s literary salon in Warsaw. He has never heard or seen a piece of theater before. While most of the sophisticated men in the room are either shocked or disgusted at the play they are made to read, Lemml is enthralled with every word. He is so captivated that when the men made to read Rifkele and Manke’s love scene refuse to do so, Lemml bashfully reads both roles. And though the rest of the men advise Asch to burn his play at the end of the reading, it is Lemml who convinces Asch to fight for his work, and it is he who goes with Asch as an assistant stage manager to Berlin. His excitement stems not only from his passion at the reading in Peretz’s salon, but also because throughout the process of his job, he cultivates an ardent belief in the theater. He brings that passion with him to every stage in Europe, where he calls each cue as if he has the most important job in the world. He brings it with him to America, where even when there is an officer waiting to arrest him and the rest of the cast, he responds in broken English: “I have to call a cue.” Throughout the course of Indecent, The God of Vengeance becomes the life he has come to know and love, a life that he derives meaning from despite the amount of times he has called the production. He possesses a rare brand of love for the theater—and yet so identifiable for anyone who has ever been touched by theater—that is beautiful to get to watch on stage.

The second instance I wanted to touch on towards the end of the show. Incensed that Asch doesn’t stand up for his show at the trial, and even more so, that he allowed the Rifkele-Manke love scene to be cut, Lemml returns to Poland just in time to be transported to the Lodz ghetto. He stages a performance of God of Vengeance in an attic, rallying the sick and disheartened actor/prisoners to perform Act II of the show. In this moment, he has become the pseudo-director; the optimism that pushed him in Peretz’s salon is the same optimism that makes the rest of the actors excited to perform. The attic performance feels like a triumph… but then, the scene is performed once more. Lemml, “watching” the scene with closed eyes, gets his wish fulfilled as the stage begins to rain. We get to see an authentic rain scene that Lemml connected so deeply with initially. Then Lemml, the only one to defend the show even when the playwright has failed him, gets to watch this scene that he has made the audience crave. To Lemml, falling in love with the story between Rifkele and Manke is also what made him fall in love with theater. No wonder the love scene, the famous, long-awaited scene in the rain what he wants to see before his world is devoid of everything: especially theater.

Paula Vogel said that she wrote Lemml because she often feels that stage managers are the unsung heroes of theater.

Nowhere is it more apparent than this moment, this wish, washed with rain, where we feel why theater is so important. Because it can touch one soul, and with that, it can alter, and even sustain, a life.

#playhousetuesdays #ericawachs