Date of Award
Spring 5-20-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Art (M.F.A.)
Department
Theater
Language
English
First Advisor
James Palmer
Abstract
Vogel’s subtitle calls Indecent “the true story of a little Jewish play,” Sholem 4 Asch’s The God of Vengeance. A Jewish man is arranging a marriage for his daughter; that man is a brothel owner who raised his daughter in a home just upstairs from his place of business; his daughter falls in love with a girl working downstairs, and they dance naked, together, in the rain. Indecent follows the journey of Asch’s play from its first reading in his bedroom in 1906, through its European tour in the 1910s, to its debut on Broadway in 1923 when the cast and producers were arrested and tried for obscenity. We see a troupe of Jewish actors perform Act Two in an attic in Łódź Ghetto in 1943. We see a Yale student attempt to revive the play, over Asch’s objections, in 1952. And over and over again: the rain falls. An ensemble of six actors (and, in the original production, three musicians) take on all of the characters in and around The God of Vengeance, metamorphosing from part to part. A seventh actor plays Lemml, the stage manager, who is, in turn, transformed by his love for this little Jewish play.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Plattus, Sam, "Every Night We Tell This Story: Remembering, Remaking, and Re-Remembering Paula Vogel's Indecent" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bc_etds/31
