![]() ![]() ![]() The very fact that "Indecent," previously seen at the Vineyard Theatre, has made it to Broadway is a post-facto vindication of Asch and his colleagues, who got closed down. Nonetheless, there is no questioning the force and sincerity of Vogel's determination to elevate the biography and artistic contribution of a little-known playwright whose early 20th-century work suffered the discrimination widely faced by the Yiddish theater, and by the immigrant artists whose stories it represented. Had it really tackled those complicated questions, it would have been a far more controversial piece among its target demographic and thus, to my mind, yet more in the spirit of the maverick work of Asch, a fearless man who dared to write about a rabbi who kept a brothel right under his own apartment, and who even dispatched his own daughter down there to fend for herself. "Indecent," which opened Tuesday at the Cort Theatre as a very rare Broadway drama without any celebrities in the cast, doesn't fully answer either question, even though Sholem Asch's deeply empathetic act of creativity seemingly violates the common contemporary assumption that it would be a questionable artistic act of appropriation. ![]()
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