Theater: Cort Theatre / 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) comes a provocative new play with music inspired by a true story. Indecent follows the incredible journey of a controversial piece of theater and the passionate artists who risked their lives to perform it. Created by Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman (Stage Kiss), this riveting and richly theatrical backstage drama is a celebration of art and tradition, a fierce indictment of censorship, and a gripping look at an explosive moment in history. Featuring the original ensemble and music performed by an onstage band, Indecent comes to Broadway following a critically acclaimed sold-out Off-Broadway run.
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The road to Broadway was paved with compromise for Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance.” Though this early-20th-century Yiddish play had dazzled Greenwich Village audiences in 1922, the show’s producers worried that it might be too provocative for the less bohemian folk of Midtown; a pivotal love scene between two women was deleted from the script, much to the distress of members of the company.
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The very notion of live theater contains an intimation of its future: dead theater. Now the play is before us, moving and breathing along with its audience; then it is done, and banished to the shadow realm of memory. This is true not just of a single performance but also of the run of a production—even The Phantom of the Opera will one day throw in the mask—and, writ larger, of entire theater worlds. Sometimes such worlds age and fade with time; sometimes, as with Yiddish theater, they are violently erased.
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Has there ever been anything quite like “Indecent,” a play that touches — I mean deeply touches — so much rich emotion about history and the theater, anti-Semitism, homophobia, censorship, world wars, red-baiting and, oh, yes, joyful human passion?
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It’s humbling, not to say near-impossible, to fully convey the thrumming resonance of Indecent, the evanescent shimmer of a show that arrived on Broadway tonight following its New York debut last spring at the Vineyard Theatre. But I’ll give it my best and hope that you’ll set aside any argument touting its importance – because Indecent ain’t just spinach – and instead make haste for the Cort Theatre simply to share the astonishing power of this new play with music about a delicious ancient Broadway scandal that pulses through the decades to our own time.
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There was a time when a smooch shared by two women on stage could be deemed smutty enough to shutter the production. Yes, that happened. “Indecent,” the heart-stirring and haunting play created in tandem by author Paula Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman offers a dramatic reminder of that — and of the power of art.
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