A review by colin_cox
Indecent (Tcg Edition) by Paula Vogel

5.0

Indecent is a stunning play that traces the performance history and reception of God of Vengeance, an early 20th-century Yiddish play by Sholem Asch that dramatizes the provocative love affair between a brothel owner’s daughter and a prostitute. The play within a play is an oft-recycled theater trope, yet Vogel utilizes this narrative device to have a thoughtful conversation about authorial intent, lost cultures, and sexuality. For most of the play, the looming threat of the Holocaust exits along the periphery. Once Third Reich blooms in earnest, Asch's play acts as a counter-weight to the atrocities and cruelty of the Holocaust, and by staging underground performances of God of Vengeance, many of the principal characters withhold a piece of themselves and their culture from the horrors of an oppressive, genocidal regime.