Review: Controversial Yiddish drama makes waves anew at SF Playhouse

Making its much-anticipated Bay Area premiere at San Francisco Playhouse, Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” is a play within a play about another play.

It explores the journey of Sholem Asch’s controversial 1906 Yiddish drama “God of Vengeance” from early success all over Europe to its 1923 English-language Broadway premiere that got the entire cast arrested for obscenity due to its depiction of brothels and a lesbian relationship, including the first kiss between women on a Broadway stage.

Permeating “Indecent” from beginning to end is the tension between those who find Asch’s play a beautiful, righteous masterpiece that allows them to speak their truth onstage and those who find it to be dangerous filth that could only feed into anti-Semitic sentiments and stereotypes. Vogel omits another aspect of “God of Vengeance” that sparked outrage at the time: its depiction of rabbis willing to overlook scandalous offenses in exchange for generous contributions.

Kicking off SF Playhouse’s 20th anniversary season, “Indecent” is a coproduction with Berkeley’s Yiddish Theatre Ensemble, which did an online production of “God of Vengeance” last year that’s available for viewing during this run.

Co-commissioned by Yale Rep (where it premiered in 2015) and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of the latter’s American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle, “Indecent” gave Vogel her much-belated Broadway debut in 2017, 20 years after the premiere of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive.”

It’s a marvelously compelling, bone-achingly resonant play beautifully staged by Playhouse cofounder and producing director Susi Damilano. Opening with the performers somberly spilling ash on the floor, the play takes the form of a performance that’s been reenacted over and over as a kind of act of remembrance, presided over by an enthusiastic stage manager. As the play goes on, this framing device gains tremendous new layers of poignancy.

Richard Olmsted’s terrific set features a small stage with a freestanding proscenium arch flanked by assorted suitcases, wooden chairs and racks of costumes.

Lemml the stage manager is really the heart and soul of the play. We soon find out he’s been with “God of Vengeance” since its very first reading and was so overwhelmed by it that he decided to devote his life to helping shepherd the play from country to country.

Dean Linnard exudes intensity as Lemml, unfailingly kind, seemingly selfless and quietly zealous about this one particular play. In the company of true believers, he’s the truest of all. Even in his most jubilant moments, there’s a haunted quality about Linnard’s Lemml, a melancholy lurking beneath the surface that foreshadows sorrows to come.

Seven actors play more than 40 roles, and the metatheatrical framing allows them to shift seamlessly from one character to another without leaving the stage. The three musicians also step in from time to time as various nonspeaking characters.

Billy Cohen portrays writer Asch both with youthful passion and with deepening depression over the horrors he’s witnessed in Europe. Malka Wallick deftly shifts between very different characters, such as Asch’s supportive wife, a distressed Yiddish actress held back by shaky English and the green but enthusiastic American gentile who takes over the same role to shock her parents. Rivka Borek is riveting as another performer forced to choose between her heart and her career.

Ted Zoldan memorably plays a pompous colleague and a producer overready to compromise the work for market concerns. Victor Talmadge exudes gravitas as the actors starring in Asch’s play as the father, and Rachel Botchan is a grounding presence as the performer playing the mother.

Played by a violin-clarinet-accordion trio with music direction by Dmitri Gaskin, the music is stirring and omnipresent, with a lot of klezmer, some cabaret and the occasional jazz standard. The performers slip in and out of occasional song-and-dance numbers with lively choreography by Nicole Helfer.

Short sections of “God of Vengeance” are beautifully utilized throughout the show to give tiny tastes of what all the fuss was about. Sometimes funny and sometimes devastating, “Indecent” is the kind of play that sticks with you long after you leave the theater, and really makes you understand how this other play did the same.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.