Indecent, a Tony Award-winning play by Paula Vogel, is returning to the Wilbury Theatre in Providence beginning Wednesday, November 30th. The highly acclaimed production has been described as “truly magical and undeniably unforgettable” by Broadway World and “a powerful indictment of oppression and censorship” by Edge Media. For the Wilbury, Indecent has been one of the most successful productions in its history. Click here for tickets.
“The play belongs to the people who labor in it and the audiences who come see it,” said Director Susie Schutt, quoting a line from the show.
I spoke with Schutt about the play that tells the true story behind Sholem Asch’s God Of Vengeance, a Yiddish work that transferred to Broadway in 1922 and was shut down by the police for offensive content six weeks after opening at the Apollo Theater. It tells the story of the courageous artists who risked their careers and lives to perform a work deemed “indecent.”
After a successful run in April, the play returns with its themes of intolerance and anti-Semitism, more relevant than ever.
“We’re really trying not to reinvent the wheel,” said Schutt over the phone last week as she prepared for the upcoming three-week run. “It’s coming back for a reason – it was successful last time. We’re lucky to have a large majority of our production team and all but one actor returning, and that has allowed us to speed up the rehearsal process in a way I was not expecting. It’s gone so smoothly, so quickly.”
“What’s been so exciting – when we go through it, we see what worked and ask if there are any small adjustments we want to make that we couldn’t do the first time around. There are changes that people who have seen it already might notice – a slightly different feeling, but nothing major,” she said. “I think anyone who works in theater has the feeling that you can work on any given play forever, like you’re always making discoveries and always wanting to experiment. It’s a pleasure to be able to actually do that.”
Part of the success of Indecent lies in its ability to relate to diverse audiences.
“It’s a gorgeous play, it’s very rich, and it’s short, but it holds a lot of humanity. There are a lot of touchpoints for audiences, and a lot of inroads. Watching it, it’s got music and dance, it’s got joy, it’s got love, and it’s got heartbreak,” said Schutt.
“The story is incredibly nuanced,” she continued. “You can decide that the story is about a writer struggling with his identity. You can decide that the story is about a troupe of actors putting on a show under challenging circumstances working against them. You can decide that it’s a play about the Holocaust. You can decide it’s a play about Jews in America. It can also be a story about women struggling to have their love and relationships validated. We all watch the same play but lock into the story that feels most resonant to us.”
“There are themes of identity and love, Jewish identity, non-Jewish identity, what it means to be a witness, what it means to be loved, what it means to be gay, what it means to persevere in the face of terrible atrocities, and what it means to be an actor, a storyteller, somebody who is an artist who wants to create things. It holds so much,” said Schutt.
“In a run-through last night, I noticed, as an audience member, that a lot of the lines I was hearing that were very familiar to me sounded different, because of what’s going on globally. It hit my heart in a different way, it hit my ear in a different way. The play asks a lot of the questions that we are asking on a global scale. I’m hopeful people will come to see this play because they want to, and if those people who have seen it already decide to come again, I think they will have a different experience than the first time, because of the environment we’re living in now.”
Tickets for all performances are $5-$55 through the Wilbury Theatre Group’s innovative “All-Access” ticketing program, and are available at thewilburygroup.org/indecent.
