[On
21 March, I posted an article on “The Purim Play” on Rick
On Theater. One of the facts I learned while preparing
the post is that the Purim play, which made its appearance in Europe around the
11th century and took its current form (more or less) in the mid-16th century,
is considered the origin of the Yiddish theater that blossomed in Eastern and
Central Europe (as well as the United States) in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. In my discussion of this
connection, I made mention of the recent (2017) Broadway production of :Paula
Vogel’s play Indecent and the 1906
Yiddish drama on which it’s based, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance.
[On
17 March, my friend Helen Kaye sent me two of the reviews she wrote last year
for the Jerusalem Post,
but I was busy finishing the new article and editing a contribution from
another friend (which will be posted shortly).
I didn’t read Helen’s reviews until after “The Purim Play” was
published. I was gobsmacked to see that
the two notices Helen sent me (she subsequently sent me four more, which I’ll
post in a few days) were of Asch’s God of Vengeance and Vogel’s Indecent. Some little coincidence, no?]
God of Vengeance
By Sholem Asch
Directed by Itai Tiran
Adapted by Tiran & Dani Rosenberg
Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv; 19 August 2018
Poor Yankl Shepshovich (Alon Dahan). He is torn between the
need for heavenly grace and his evil side. His well-patronised basement brothel
makes him a very good living but for 17 year old Rivkale (Joy Reiger), his only
daughter, brought up in ignorance, chastity and innocence, he envisions a life
of dutiful, joyous and fruitful womanhood, married to a pious and learned
scholar. She will be the atonement for his sins, and as additional insurance,
he will purchase a Torah for the community.
Except that lonely Rivkale, unknown to her father, has found
a friend and confidante in Manke (Anastasia Fein), one of her father’s whores,
a friendship that will be the tipping point for the tidal wave of events that
will overwhelm all.
This God of Vengeance is a sort of very
over-the-top Jewish Gothic horror play – complete with tragic ending – that was
presented a bit like a modern art piece with huge, loud splashes of paint
tossed at a canvas, then manipulated, pushed and pulled on, depending on where
they had landed. Both cast and audience were exhausted when it was over, the
audience awed a bit too.
Eran Atzmon’s two level set contributed to the tsunami
effect, as did the costumes by Moni Mednik, the music by Dori Parnes and Nadav
Barnea’s unsettling lighting.
The set was on two levels: Rivkale’s chaste white bed was
above, and above that, the Torah in a little glass enclosure; below the
glass-walled rooms and ‘public’ area of the brothel.
The glass-walled Torah? The glass-walled brothel? Does
anyone remember the man in the glass booth? One Adolf Eichmann, one of the
architects of the Holocaust. Is the glass here just to ensure visibility? With
Tiran as director, I don’t think so.
The whores, corset-straitened, are in various stages of
undress. Rivkale goes from virginal white to a sullen bordeaux. Shloyme (Eran
Mor), a pimp and an opportunistic thug, has an ascot and a velvet vest, like an
ersatz boulevardier. The men wear the black gabardine of the observant Jew in
the early 20th century where the play is set. Here the clothes are not the man
but conceal him.
Dori Parnes eerie music flits in and out like remembered
snatches of song.
Alon Dahan’s Yankl is never comfortable in his own body,
perhaps because his soul is tormented or perhaps because Dahan has not yet
completely made up his mind who Yankl is. Either way, his Yankl is oppressed,
as is Helena Yaralova’s beautifully restrained Sureh, formerly his whore, now
his wife and the mother of Rivka. Becoming a virtuous wife has not liberated
her soul, and when her body is once more abused, she receives it almost as a
matter of course.
Rivkale is hard to play because her sensuality toward Manke
confuses as much as it fulfils her. Later brutality extinguishes her, but she
is still alive. Reiger maneuvers between the two as best she can, but we need
to feel for her more, and we can’t.
As Manke, Fein holds herself apart. Battered though she is,
somewhere she is inviolable, and she holds onto that with such
single-mindedness that even when Leib (Uri Ravitz) pleads with her, she cannot
hear, yet at the end she too is broken. Both performances are finely muted, and
both are touching and powerful thereby.
Mor’s Shloyme is not only a thug but a sadist and morally
blunt. It’s to the actor’s credit that you want to hit him. As Hindel, his
partner, Yardena Bracha vamps a little stereotypically but is also credible as
the conventional-girl-wanting-a-home behind the whore. And a star to Neta Plotnik’s
Reizl and Maya Landsmann’s buxom Basha for the comic relief.
Comic relief is needed because Tiran has made God of
Vengeance deliberately brutal. There’s little let up which is a flaw,
because a play cannot go full-throttle all the time, and for most of the time,
this one does.
And this God of Vengeance asks another question. Is
this hypocritical, violent, oppressed and oppressive society ours today?
[For those who didn’t catch
it, Helen’s reference to “the man in the glass booth” above is an allusion to a
novel (1967), play (1968), and movie (1975) by Robert Shaw, the English actor,
novelist, and playwright. The novel was
inspired by the capture and trial by Israel of Adolf Eichmann, a principal
architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the total extermination of all Jews in
Nazi-controlled territory. Eichmann was
tried (on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the
Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organization) and hanged in 1962,
but in the novel, play, and film Arthur Goldman, the Eichmann character, was
revealed to be neither a Nazi nor a war criminal. During Eichmann’s actual trial and Goldman’s
fictional one, the defendant sat in the courtroom inside a bulletproof glass
booth for his own protection, hence the title The Man in the Glass Booth.
[In
a coincidence of timing, the New York Times of 25 March reported the death at 92 on Saturday, 23 March, of Rafael Eitan,
the Israeli intelligence officer who planned and executed the capture of
Eichmann in Argentina on 11 May 1960.
The obituary was accompanied by a photograph of Eichmann in a Jerusalem
courtroom, standing in his glass booth flanked by a pair of uniformed Israeli
guards.
[Oh,
in a later e-mail, Helen wrote: “Itai Tiran, who directed God
of Vengeance, is something of a
wunderkind. As well as acting and
directing, he’s also a concert level pianist, tho’ he doesn’t play
professionally.” FYI.]
* *
* *
Indecent
By Paula Vogel
Translated by Joshua Sobol
Directed by Yair Sherman
Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv; 21 November 2018
In 1923 Sholem Asch’s blistering God of Vengeance,
the story of a Jewish brothel owner hoist with his own petard when his virgin
daughter forms an intimate friendship with one of his whores, is playing on
Broadway. Police halt the show, arrest the cast and producer who are then tried
and convicted of obscenity, a conviction later overturned on appeal. In 2015
Vogel’s Indecent, the story of the play and its people preceding and
following that trial, premiered at Yale Repertory theater, going on to win
acclaim wherever it ran.
The very adept nine member cast – six actors, three
musicians – play multiple characters in a multi-scene drama that goes from the
first reading of the play in 1906 to its partial performance in the Lodz ghetto
in 1941. It is set in a black box, Nadav Barnea’s lighting illuminating only
the actors, against Nimrod Zin’s often enigmatic, - places, people, events
barely remembered - ever-moving, rear-screened kaleidoscope of images whereon
places and dates are also projected in Hebrew (to keep us straight on where and
when we are).
Indecent also has comedian Shmuel Vilojzny as
Lemml/Lou. Lemml is the narrator, the emcee, the play’s stage manager as it
moves from triumph to triumph all over Europe prior to falling flat on its face
in the Land of the Free.
With never even a hint of his usual schtick, Vilojzny
plays Lemml with a gentle, courageous, laced-with-flashes-of-levity grace that
humanizes and gives this fractured (undeniably skilful) docu-drama a lot of
whatever depth it has. The rest of that comes from singer/actor/cellist Eli
Gorenstein who plays all the Elderly Men with his usual understated authority.
Dudu Niv also shines in his many versions of Adult Men, especially as crass
Broadway producer Weinberger and, together with Esti Koussevitzky, in a
poker-faced rendition of “Ain’t we got fun.”
And yet there is the inescapable feeling that the actors are
rushing – “let’s get this over with” – and despite the introduction of quite a
few scenes from God of Vengeance, if you don’t know the play, Indecent
will lose you, and finally why bring it to us? Indecent tries to explain
Jews and being Jewish to gentiles. We know all that. We’ve lived it.
[For the record, God of Vengeance was written in 1906 and, after it was
greeted with less than enthusiasm by his writer friends in Warsaw, Asch took
the play to Berlin, where it was first staged in 1907. It was directed by the great Max Reinhardt at
the Deutsches Theater and starred Rudolf Schildkraut. It ran for six months, a long run for those
days. Later that year, Asch brought the
play to New York City; it was booed and ignited a war of words in the city’s
Yiddish press. The conservative Tageblatt
called the play “filthy,” “immoral,” and “indecent”;
the radical Forverts called it “moral,”
“artistic,” and “beautiful.”
[In 1922, American producer
Harry Weinberger presented an English translation of God of Vengeance in Greenwich
Village and then moved it to the Apollo Theatre on Broadway in February
1923. Schildkraut directed and appeared
(as Yekel Shepshovitch) in the production, along with such theatrical lights as
Morris Carnovksy (Reb Aaron) and Sam Jaffe (Reb Ali). (Note that the characters’ names in English
transliteration vary greatly from one translation to another, as well as from
Helen’s renderings above.) It ran for
six weeks before city authorities arrested Weinberger and the whole cast on
charges of obscenity. Weinberger, as it
happened, was also a prominent lawyer and represented the company, but, as
Helen Kaye points out above, the defendants were convicted. Weinberger fought on, however, and eventually
overturned the guilty verdict on appeal.
[Despite its troubles in the
United States, Asch’s God of Vengeance was popular in
Europe. It was translated into many
languages and was performed across the continent in German, Russian, Polish,
Hebrew, Italian, Czech, Romanian, and Norwegian, among other translations. It’s had at least three Off-Broadway revivals
in the past 30 years, including a 1992 production by the now-defunct Jewish
Repertory Theatre that included my former acting teacher Lee Wallace (Yankel) and
his wife Marilyn Chris (Sore) in the cast.
(An earlier Off-Off-Broadway mounting, in 1975, featured my then-acting teacher,
Carol Rosenfeld, as Sarah. I went to
Brooklyn to see her perform in the show.)]
