The company of Indecent, U of A Studio Theatre, Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“From ashes they rise…”

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Monday night I saw a memorable play on the Timm’s stage, that steps in and out of time to tell a theatre story, a real one. Not only does Indecent connect us to the highly charged historical and cultural currents of the last century, it speaks to us of the tragic arc emerging from our own. And it has something substantial to say about art and courage, love, tradition and freedom, censorship, the immigrant experience, cultural diversity.

As playwright Paula Vogel said in her program notes to the Broadway production of Indecent I saw in 2017, “I believe the purpose of theatre is to wound our memory so we can remember.” And in Benjamin W. Smith’s beautiful production at Studio Theatre, the route to memory is marked theatrically — in luminous stage imagery that steps out of shadows, in klezmer music played live, in song, in dance, in ingenious stagecraft, in a repeated projection that says “a blink in time.”

Blink. Led by tailor-turned-stage manager Lemml (the excellent Maxwell Vesely) — “we have a story we want to tell you” — we meet the troupe of actors who will bring Sholem Asch’s landmark 1907 Yiddish play The God of Vengeance, his first, from the capitals of Europe to America.

Dov Mickelson (centre) and from left Maxwell Vesely, Alexander Mahon, Kornel Wolak, Michael Brige, Aidan Kaudersmith in Indecent, Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

The first reading of the play happens in the Warsaw salon of I.L. Peretz (Dov Mickelson), a Yiddish literature bigshot, and his wife (Elena Porter). As the parts get divvied up, controversy erupts about a lyrical love scene between two women. And here’s an inflammatory question: is the depiction of flawed Jewish characters “pouring petrol on the flames of anti-Semitism” as one participant argues?

In The God of Vengeance, the play that lives within the play, the daughter (Megan Holt) of a pious Jewish patriarch (Mickelson) who runs a brothel falls in love with one of the prostitutes (Jacquelin Walters) who lives in the establishment downstairs. The play creates a stir in Europe. And across the Atlantic, in Yiddish, it’s warmly received in the Greenwich Village of 1921, the first lesbian kiss on an American stage. But the move uptown to Broadway, in English, is disastrous. Even though the love scene, of which we catch glimpses from time to time, has been pre-emptively written out of the script, much to the cast’s dismay, it’s shut down by the vice squad. And the actors are prosecuted for obscenity. The playwright (Aidan Laudersmith), embittered, turns from theatre to other kinds of writing.

Later, under more ominous circumstances still, we’ll see the company fatally return to Europe. And, under Lemml who has never wavered in his belief in the genius of the play, they perform it, in heartbreaking weekly instalments, in an attic in the Lodz ghetto in Poland.

The very title, Indecent, flickers dramatically, luridly, tragically, in and out of shadows, in the course of the evening, as it follows Sholem Asch and his play through time, to the indecent viciousness of the McCarthyite era in America.

Indecent, U of A Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang.

This is complex theatrical portraiture, the capture of dramatic snapshots over the course of half a century to conjure a powerful sense of art, and what it means, in times that are always dangerous. And it’s artfully assembled and set in motion seamlessly by director Smith and a committed 10-member ensemble in this his MFA production. Guido Tondino’s lighting is a striking participant in the weave of time and place that reverberates, onstage and off-, in the production. Brock Keeler’s design is dominated by a simple wooden stage that sits in the centre, surrounded by secret, dark spaces where the actors melt away between scenes. It locates a theatre story in a dark world. And that thought resonates through an evening in which the chief prop is a selection of battered suitcases.

That the story is true gives an added affirmation to Indecent. The local connection is a fascinating proximity: Sholem Asch’s son Moses (Moe) Asch was the founder in 1948 Greenwich Village of Folkways Records, an invaluable collection of American folk, roots and “world” music. And Moe’s son Michael Asch, for many years an anthropology prof at the U of A before retirement in Victoria, secured that archive for the university.

We are not far away from the story. Indeed, as our times continue to darken, and anti-Semitism and exclusionary forces gather dangerous strength, Indecent seems even more powerfully of this moment for us. “Please don’t let this be the end,” says a character in the play. It’s never the end.

REVIEW

Indecent

Theatre: U of A Studio Theatre

Written by: Paula Vogel

Directed by: Benjamin W. Smith

Starring: Michael Bridge, Megan Holt, Aidan Laudersmith, Alexander Mahon, Dov Mickelson, Elena Porter, Guillaume Tardif, Maxwell Vesely, Jacquelin Walters, Kornel Wolak

Where: Timms Centre for the Performing Arts, 87th Ave and 112th St.

Running: through Saturday, Thursday night’s performance is ASL assisted

Tickets: showpass.com, 780-492-2495