#indecent paula vogel

[do-you-know-this-play]

[servilius]

Ana Guzmán Quintero and Majo Pérez in Cristian Magaloni's production of Paula Vogel's Indecent. Teatro Helénico, 2022. (Photo: Charly Duchanoy)

[nebylitsa]

ASCH: Do you know what a minyan is? It's ten Jews in a circle accusing each other of anti-Semitism.

Indecent, Paula Vogel

[a-malady]

genuinely one of the most interesting openings to a play I have ever read, even though I don’t remember much about the play proper this imagery always stuck with me

[peacesmith]

florida makes me want to kill myself

if you're unaware or curious; this school, douglas anderson, had a play that was gonna happen but got cancelled due to "inappropriate content" or some shit like that.

i use to go there, so this is important to me.

the play is called "Indecent" by Paula Vogel, and from what I know it includes a lesbian kiss and jewish representation.

but for some reason it's cancelled.

mostly because of the "don't say gay" bill. which is fucking insane. i absolutely can't believe this shit, but guess what, THAT'S FLORIDA FOR YOU

they're changing the play to something more "appropriate" to make it more "suitable for audiences".

they changed it because of "mature" content.

a lesbian kiss? sure.

it just infuriates me to see shit like this. i'm fucking pissed. please share, reblog, whatever just get the word out

[twoontheaisle]

"Indecent" at San Francisco Playhouse

Go. That would be my one word review. Because you don't want to miss this incredibly theatrical, moving, funny, heart-breaking, important play, currently staged in an equally incredible production directed by the very talented Susi Damilano.

My full review can be found at TalkinBroadway.

[sailorpants]

i'm still wiped out from the closing show this afternoon. i feel so much about this play and being a part of it. every single person involved worked their asses off and it made for such a spectacular experience. it's not an exaggeration (though a bit on the nose) to say that this was a play that changed my life

[thesiltverses]

Hello! I found the silt verses about three weeks ago and have listened to it several times since. I have a few things to say.

I absolutely adore that episode about the national grid workers. I think it’s my favorite episode of any podcast I’ve ever listened to. My favorite part of that first episode Paige is in is how she justifies not standing up for Vaughn, that cognitive dissonance that you wrote so well. This episode gives me what I wanted from that episode, the workers all banding together to stop the wasteful sacrifice of one of them. The actor who played the foreman did an incredible job as well. I think that having him discuss which of his workers he would sacrifice was such a significant moment, despite how brief it is. It cuts right to the big question that I took away from the podcast which is, “How much is someone willing to sacrifice in order to maintain their comfort?” And the utter disrespect of Glodditch (apologies for the spelling) refusing to cancel even the radio but asking grid workers to kill themselves for 200kw/h! Top tier episode.

I grew up in the south and went to college in Appalachia. I saw the disparity in technology and “advancement” if that makes sense that poverty brings, and the way you set up the world invokes that feeling in me again. You are an amazing world builder and storyteller.

I really enjoyed the cameos - I’m a big fan of malevolent/devisor, Old gods of Appalachia, and all of Jonny sims work, so hearing familiar voices was an absolute delight. Harlan Guthrie as an acolyte of the snuff gods might have been a bit too on the nose with some of the things that man writes, though… /pos

I’m transmasculine, and something that I really appreciate is how you manage to make a trans man do some objectively awful things, but still manage to make him a complex, full character that I was rooting for very frequently. Brother Faulkner is so, so important to me as a character. Paula Vogel has a play called “Indecent,” which is about the true story of a troupe of I believe German Jewish actors between the years of 1910ish and 1940s putting on a show called “God of Vengeance” by Sholem Asch, also a Jewish man. “God of Vengeance” has queer themes and received a lot of criticism from the Jewish community for showing Jewish folks in a “bad” light at a time when there was already so much hatred for Jewish people. Brother Faulkner being as complex and, in my opinion, malicious and cutthroat as he is at a time when trans people face so much bigotry, especially legislatively in the United States, brings this conversation about “God of Vengeance” up again for me. I also love how normalized non-binary people are in this world, without question. “Sibling this or that,” the hunter, adjudicator Shrew - big thanks from me for all of this.

All of this to say, I love this podcast. Can you talk more about the rhetorical gods? Is Babble one? What makes them one if they are, or why aren’t they? I’m fascinated by them. Can you talk more about the propaganda gods too?

Thank you so much for the thoughtful and kind words!

I'll check out Indecent, it sounds really interesting and I'm very glad to hear Faulkner works for you as a character. I think the topic of how to include and write queer characters who are capable of terrible things and thoughts (because, after all, these characters are human beings and not tutelary exemplars), within the context of both a rising movement of transphobia right now and centuries-old scapegoating / pathologising portrayals more generally, is a really knotty but a really important one, and I always want to make sure I'm approaching it with care and due responsibility as well as a sense of humility around the limitations of what, as a cis writer, I can actually achieve.

To that end, I don't want to ever take the audience response for granted, but I'm always really grateful to hear that the portrayal is working for a listener!

Propaganda gods: gods whose prayer-marks or ritual verses are fed directly to the enemy, enforcing destructive or sabotaging changes to reality (so rather than sending a destructive saint or angel to rampage over the foe, you might drop pamphlets or send radio messages to the enemy to 'convert' them).

Rhetorical gods: gods whose followers possess reality-warping powers of language itself (which is why 'rhetorical god' is a polite way of saying 'liar's god'). In other words, the paranoia around them comes partly down to the fact that a disciple like Val may appear to be a limitless shaper of new forms, rather than shaped into a limited form of their own, as a result of their worship.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Hello! I'm currently a graduate student working on my thesis. I'm hoping to make it a study in the overlap (both geographic and cultural) of the Yiddish Theatre and Queer communities of turn of the century New York City. I know that is not your forte specifically, but I wondered if you had any contemporaries with specializations in either of those areas? Thank you so much for your time, and Shabbat Shalom!

I have colleagues who come close to those areas, but no one who does exactly what you're hoping to look for.

I did, however, do a lot of brainstorming regarding resources and archives. My former place of work, the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), has a great Yiddish Theater Poster collection, while the YIVO Institute, which collects materials relating to Yiddish-speaking Jewry is likely to have quite a bit in the way of relevant collections.

As for queer communities (and this is just what I'd do if I was hoping to work in the spaces you described), I suggest grabbing a copy of Gay New York by George Chauncey and checking out which archives he used while writing it; you could email him if you're looking for more specific information.

These are just places to start and I know you didn't ask for my take on these, but it's the reference archivist in me.

@tinderbooks any thoughts?

ETA: @thecaptainsarcasm @tinderbooks replied: National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine has been around for over 100 years. https://nytf.org/. I’m not sure what kind of archives they have or are able to keep but they are certainly an organization whose history (and contemporary work) is worth exploring. Oh and of course you should look at the modern play INDECENT by Paula Vogel. Which tells the history of the Yiddish play GOD OF VENGEANCE. The cast was tried for public indecency when they presented the English translation in New York. The story is about a Jewish girl who falls in love with one of the prostitutes in the brothel owned by her father.

[brechtian]

hi rosemary! i love your blog. what are your favorite contemporary plays?

thanks so much! <3 for the sake of this ask, I’ll consider contemporary to be anything written after 2000

Indecent by Paula Vogel

An Octoroon and Appropriate, both by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury

The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe

Mac Beth by Erica Schmidt (though most of the script is Macbeth)

Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau

Though much of the text is from Wilde’s novel, Kip Williams’ modern one-woman staging of The Picture of Dorian Gray still definitely counts imo

Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard

Tiny Beautiful Things, adapted by Nia Vardalos

The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman

I’m going to see Dark Noon on Sunday, so hopefully that one will get added to the list! There are some plays from the 90s I love as well (hello angels in America and metamorphoses) but I stuck to the post-2000 rule. Also obviously there’s SO much great contemporary theatre I haven’t seen or read yet, but, of what I have, these are my favorites for sure!

[familyabolisher]

hi, ave! have you ever read How I Learned to Drive, by Paula Vogel? im asking because the play digs heavily into themes of sexual abuse both in the family and outside of it, and how the structure of the family itself both creates the abuse and allows it to continue

i haven't! i have read indecent which made me insane for a while a few years ago. i will check it out :~)

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Paula Vogel

Paula Vogel was born in 1951 in Washington, DC. Vogel won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive. She later won a Tony Award for her play Indecent. Vogel's plays explore subjects such as AIDS, domestic violence, LGBT rights, and censorship. She has won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and an lifetime achievement award from the Obies. In 2015, Vogel was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

[power-chords]

PAULA VOGEL, the Pulitzer-prize winning dramatist of How I Learned to Drive, has again collaborated with director Rebecca Taichman in Indecent. Taichman, who just won the 2017 Tony for best direction of a play, is billed as “co-creator” of Indecent, having worked with Vogel to devise the play’s highly theatrical presentation. The play is at once a compressed history of a daring Yiddish play, God of Vengeance, written by the Polish novelist Sholem Asch in 1907, and a celebration of the stagecraft that makes theater distinct from film.

[...]

Scandalous in its time, God of Vengeance was nevertheless celebrated in St. Petersburg and Moscow and in other European capitals. On first hearing play, the founding father of Yiddish literature I. L Peretz advised Asch to “burn it.” Peretz and other naysayers were reacting as much to the implicit critique of Jewish life as to the idealistic yet carnal presentation of two young women in thrall to each other. Asch’s depiction of flawed, complex Jews and his willingness to approach lesbianism in his play may well have been the very ingredients that allowed sophisticated theater-goers before the Great War to find God of Vengeance worthy dramatic fare.

[...]

Sitting out World War I in New York, Asch visited Europe after the Great War and was deeply shaken by the depredations visited upon Jewish communities. Back in New York, his devoted wife was alarmed at his increasing depression and his quick temper. An English-language production in Greenwich Village in 1922 was another success, but the play’s move uptown to Broadway encouraged the producer to cut the crucial “rain scene” with its joyous lesbian kissing and embraces, and to shift the lesbian relation to one of female manipulation. The troupe protested this desecration of the text, but Asch yielded to the producer’s reading of the uptown audience. Even with the cuts, however, the entire cast and the producer were indicted for obscenity and found guilty at trial, although the verdict was overturned on appeal.

Living in America, Asch seemingly abandoned his play, refusing future performances of God of Vengeance in the wake of Nazi restrictions on Jewish life. However, Vogel shows a group of desperate Jews, confined to the Lodz ghetto, performing the Asch play under the leadership of the original stage manager, a character here called Lemml. Vogel uses Lemml as a distant echo of Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager in Our Town, a “narrator” who breaks the fourth wall and introduces us to the world of the present drama and the past history of Asch’s play.

[...]

The world in which Asch came of age has almost disappeared by the time we see him in the early 1950s. This is toward the end of Vogel’s play; he is being interviewed by a young Jewish student from Yale. This prompts an embittered Asch to quip—I paraphrase—that it is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a Jew to enter the sanctum of Yale.

[daphneblakess]

for the book ask meme? :D 8, 18, 21, 27, 39, 44, 45

favorite queer fiction books? ugh, i have to list at least a few; The Locked Tomb series, One Last Stop, Meddling Kids, An Education In Malice, Into the Drowning Deep, Honey Girl

favorite unfinished book series? *me in the nursing home* we're going to get the Alecto the Ninth cover reveal any day now

books you read in school that you actually enjoyed? Shakespeare, The Color Purple, and Jane Eyre my beloveds

first book you remember reading? probably something from American Girl, Kaya was always one of my favorites

do you read reviews before picking up a book? reviews have swayed my opinion before, but negative reviews have also made me think 'this book sounds fucking awesome' (hello The Bone Orchard <3)

books who've become a part of your makeup? have you watched the proshot of Indecent by Paula Vogel everyone must watch the proshot of Indecent by Paula Vogel

what book would you sell your soul for an adaptation of? the Indian Lake trilogy would be very hard to pull off and would need a masterful director, but i have the vision!!! it could be done!!! mostly i need Jade Daniels character of all time on my laptop screen

[cherubiian]

paula vogel's indecent is still probably the most beautiful piece of theater ive ever seen

[fvckyouimaprophet]

Top 5 plays!

Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

Indecent by Paula Vogel

delicacy of a puffin heart by Stefani Kuo

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Ask me my top 5 anything.