Milwaukee Chamber Theatre Brings ‘Indecent’ to Milwaukee

×

Expand

Photo: Milwaukee Chamber Theatre

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre - Indecent

Rachael Zientek and Elyse Edelman in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's 'Indecent'

“It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever executed as a company; certainly the most complex,” says Brent Hazelton, the artistic director of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre and director of Indecent, playwright Paula Vogel’s music theater drama opening March 10. “Seven actors play 40 people over 50 years, with a three-piece klezmer band onstage and many scene changes. Structurally, it’s very much a musical.”

Indecent tells the story of Sholem Asch’s 1906 play The God of Vengeance and the artists who performed it in Europe and America. Written in Yiddish in Warsaw, Poland, for a Polish Jewish audience, Asch’s melodrama about a Jewish brothel-owner and his family includes a lesbian love affair presented without censure. It was initially considered un-producible, but its initial amateur production was a controversial hit. Soon the play was staged all over Europe to a similar response.

In America, the celebrated Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, artistic home of Eugene O’Neill (who appears in Vogel’s play) presented the first English language production. Its success at that theater and in several other downtown NYC locations led to a Broadway production in 1923, but with Asch’s script altered by its producers to turn the lesbian romance into something ugly and condemnable, in hopes of pleasing a Broadway audience. Instead, it was vilified and shut down, ending some careers and sending several artists back to Europe and the Holocaust.

“It’s a play about a group of artists coming together to tell a story they believe in, and that they believe is going to have some positive impact on the world and doing everything they possibly can to find a space to keep that story going,” Hazelton says.

“There are big things at stake in the play,” he continues. “Even the individual scenes between characters feel huge and vast and world changing. It speaks deeply to religious hypocrisy. The relationship between the two women at the center of the play is so beautifully wrought and so humanly wrought; they’re a wonderful love story, more than anything else. And the people who are telling this story are trying to navigate all the antisemitism, not just of the 20th century but throughout world history.

“It aligns well with our company’s mission values of quality texts and ensemble-based storytelling,” he adds. “And it’s a tremendous fit for a lot of local artists. And while it isn’t Paula Vogel’s most awarded play, I think it’s her best, given the amount of ideas and territory she’s able to cover in an hour and 40 minutes.”

Monumental Script

Hazelton’s passion for the script is entirely justified. It’s an extraordinary read. It feels monumental.

Playwright Vogel found fame in 1992 with The Baltimore Waltz, her play about AIDS. Five years later, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Learning to Drive, about child sexual abuse. Indecent began as a 2015 co-production of the Yale Repertory Theatre and La Jolla Playhouse. It moved successfully to Broadway in 2017 and was widely presented by regional theatres across the country before the pandemic struck.

It’s worth noting that Vogel is married to a woman. “The play can be a massive touchpoint for our LGBTQ+ community,” Hazelton acknowledges. “I’m excited to center that story in the play, as well. I think that was one of the things that really astonished Paula about The God of Vengeance, the depth and the honesty and sincerity of the love scenes between these two women, particularly in a play that was written in 1906.

“We always assume that the moment we’re living in is the most progressive moment that’s ever existed,” he adds. “But the theatre in the early 1900s was a hugely progressive place, mirroring the industrial revolution era, and the individual human advocacy that started with the workers’ rights movement and expanded to a pan-human rights perspective. At the same time that Upton Sinclair is writing The Jungle, about the awful working conditions in Chicago’s meat-packing plants, Sholem Asch is writing about awful religious hypocrisy, specifically in the Jewish community, and doing it through the lens of a relationship between two women. For a play that’s almost 120 years old, it would be almost shockingly progressive today.”

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre is partnering with the Jewish Community Center, UWM’s Stahl Center for Jewish Studies, the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Education Resource Center with this production. A series of educational events at the Broadway Theatre Center and the partnering organizations’ locations will take place during the run. Asch’s grandson will be a guest speaker.

“It’s emblematic of the way we want to position our work in the community,” Hazelton says. “The point is not to put the play on the stage. The point is to put the play onstage for an intersectional audience that is going to carry its ideas out into the community and use those ideas to bring us a little bit closer together.”

Performances are March 10-27 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre, 158 N. Broadway St. Visit milwaukeechambertheatre.org for further information on the show and the related events.