One of the great pleasures of Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company is that one can have an intimate experience of a play or musical that began its life in a giant Broadway barn. Arden has a history of utilizing its space to the advantage of the story the company is trying to tell. The best recent example is the production of Once, a show I had seen in New York and Toronto, but the Arden experience – with Thom Weaver’s light design that invoked Dublin and the proximity of audience to performers – was the magical one.
The company continues in that vein with Paula Vogel’s Indecent. Vogel had a unique achievement with this work as the protagonist of her play is another play, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance. Vogel follows the journey that play took from a reading in a flat in Warsaw to a production in Berlin to a tour of the capitals of Europe to off-Broadway to Broadway (1923) and finally back to a ghetto in Poland during World War II. Playwright Asch is a supporting character in the life of his work. God of Vengeancewas accused of everything from anti-Semitism to indecency. It was the first Broadway production to dramatize a kiss between two women, and the “indecency” of the title derives from the charges of the Manhattan district attorney against the production (though not the play itself).
Vogel smartly places God of Vengeanceas foundational to the American theatre as we know it. She emphasizes the off-Broadway run at the Provincetown Playhouse; it shared the season with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. O’Neill himself shows up in a pivotal scene late in the play, and he places his imprimatur on the work. (Interestingly, when Indecent premiered in New York, a revival of The Hairy Ape with Bobby Carnavale was playing at The Park Avenue Armory. That 1923 Provincetown Playhouse season was pivotal that the city needed to experience it anew.)
Director Rebecca Wright keeps the production values confined to the bare necessities. She opens on the ensemble covered in ash, foreshadowing the play’s (and history’s) horrific trajectory. By the design, Indecentcalls for a Brechtian approach, and the director and her cast are up to the challenge of moving quickly through, time, and language. The company must nimbly from perfect English representing Yiddish to a broken English signifying an individual’s struggle with a second language (all made clear by super titles). The actors have so imbued their various characters and their world into their bodies and very being that set pieces are unnecessary. Doug Hara playing Lemml, the stage manager, serves as the beating heart of the play and chief defender of God of Vengeance. Michaela Shuchman and Mary Elizabeth Scallen find the elegiac complexities of a same-sex couple in early twentieth-century America. David Ingram as the older Asch bears the weight of the world and his own weariness in play’s coda set during the McCarthy period.
Part of the foundational myth of God of Vengeancewas how it traveled the world and touched so many individuals across a variety of cultures and circumstances with its – for then – unique tale of love and hope. What the Arden has demonstrated here is that Indecentcan take that same journey and transform every audience it encoutners.