‘This is what theatre is supposed to be:’ How Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent’ remembers a century of dramatic censorship

“From ashes they rise,” opens Paula Vogel’s play “Indecent,” at the CAA Theatre on Yonge Street starting this Friday.

That opening moment is a haunting image — a troupe of actors coated in dust, seemingly lost to history before this instant. The story then begins as we meet Lemml, the stage manager, who promises to tell us a story about the play that changed his life. The play in question? Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” which in 1907 became the subject of Yiddish newspaper headlines in New York due to the play’s strikingly contemporary lesbian plot line.

In 1907, “God of Vengeance” was called filthy, immoral and, yes, indecent for its content — and that’s where Vogel’s investigation into the play’s history begins.

“I read ‘God of Vengeance’ when I was 22 years old, and it always stayed with me,” said Vogel in an interview. “It was an important play for me to read.”

“Fast forward 20 or 30 years, and I get a call from Rebecca Taichman, who for a directing project had directed a performance of the ‘God of Vengeance’ obscenity trial … and she asked if I’d like to work with her. She would direct it, and I would write it.”

“I didn’t just see this as a play about the obscenity trial,” Vogel said. “I tried a version just concentrating on the trial, and I thought it was kind of flat and not really getting at the issues of why this was shocking. So I went at it just from what I saw. And what I saw the moment she called me was a dusty theatre troupe rising from a kind of limbo in an attic room. I knew that was the play.”

“Indecent” had its Broadway premiere in 2017 — nearly 100 years after “God of Vengeance” hit the Great White Way in 1923. “Indecent” was Vogel’s Broadway debut, despite an illustrious playwriting premiere including a Pulitzer Prize for “How I Learned to Drive.”

Vogel made clear in our interview that while Taichman is credited as a “co-creator” in the printed version of the play, Vogel “wrote every word” of the text — including those haunting stage directions.

“If there’s a word in the script that’s a stage direction, that’s coming from me,” said Vogel.

“On the other hand, you know, I would hand her a few pages, and say something like ‘do a tour around the world in four scenes on the stage.’ And she’d say, ‘how do I do that?’ And I told her I didn’t know — that’s her problem,” said Vogel with a laugh.

“I wrote it, but I feel very collaborative,” she continued. “Even with directors I’ve never met who are doing my work” (like Joel Greenberg, who is directing the Toronto production).

Part of what makes “Indecent” so special is its music — while it’s not a “musical,” per se, it’s certainly a play with music that plays an integral part in the storytelling.

“I immediately heard a Klezmer band as I was writing it,” said Vogel, “and I recorded over 600 Klezmer songs to find the songs I wanted. I selected all the music, and I always write to music — music’s very important to me … it goes back to this Wagnerian notion of a total work of theatre. A total work of theatre always includes music and dance in some ways and movement.”

“Indecent,” while weaving in music and dance, also pays homage to a long legacy of theatrical censorship — from Edward Bond’s “Saved” in 1965 to Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” 30 years later. In the early 20th century, “God of Vengeance” was similarly reviled for its content and themes — and through “Indecent,” Vogel has honoured this history of great work being smothered by its context.

“There’s a long history of what I call benign censorship,” said Vogel. “You suppress someone through criticism and the marketplace. You can’t say it’s illegal — although before 1968 in England, you could say it was illegal — but I think capitalist marketplaces do that benign censorship, through criticism, through marketing. There are so many writers not being done because what they’re saying isn’t the status quo.”

Vogel has spent the past few years working to make sure those writers rejecting the status quo can get produced — and paid — for their work, in an initiative titled “Bard at the Gate.”

“I’m in my third year of producing digital theatre of BIPOC writers in America, who are writing brilliant plays that are not being done by American theatres,” said Vogel.

“We have to have a resistance to the censorship going on. We’re not looking at it as censorship because when we think of censorship, we think of book-burning in 1933. We think of the 1930s in Germany.”

“But I feel like we need to resist that. We need to create desire. I’m hoping 18-year-olds start to watch these plays and they think, ‘this is what theatre is supposed to be.’”

“Indecent,” a Studio 180 Theatre production. Onstage at the CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge Street, Oct. 14 to Nov. 6, 2022. For tickets, visit mirvish.com or call 1-800-461-3333