Shock of the old is new again

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This article was published 13/02/2025 (595 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Barring judicial overreach, director Kelly Thornton won’t be jailed on Thursday night when Indecent opens at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

But when God of Vengeance, the play’s source of inspiration, opened on Broadway just over a century ago, the threat of imprisonment lingered in the air at the historic Apollo Theater.

Originally titled Der got fun nekome by the Polish-born author Sholem Asch, God of Vengeance — centred on a brothel owner, his daughter and their joint wrestling match with contemporary morality — first ran in Yiddish in 1907 at Max Reinhardt’s grand Deutsches Theatre in Berlin, where the drama was an undisputed success.

In Europe, where the production was subsequently mounted in arthouses across the continent, Asch’s work was a sensation. In America, where Asch (1880-1957) settled after the outbreak of the First World War, it was mainly considered sensational in the negative sense.

Asch’s plot — which openly discussed sex work, lesbianism and God, often in the same sentence — rankled the more conservative echelons of the theatrical and religious establishments as soon as its first amateur productions touched down stateside.

In a matter of weeks after the curtain fell at the Apollo, the cast, crew and theatre owner Harry Weinburger were staring down jail time on charges of immorality, obscenity and, yes, indecency.

The backstory of God of Vengeance inspired the Pulitzer Prize-winning Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) to revisit the circumstances as the basis of the Tony-winning backstage drama Indecent, an idea that felt especially relevant during the virulent wave of homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism and threats to civil liberties that coincided with the first election of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Thornton, who in 2017 was still working at Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre, took notice, and planned to include Indecent in her first programmed season as the artistic director of RMTC in 2020.

For reasons other than obscenity, the production was shelved, and now, five years later, Thornton says the show’s topicality has yet to diminish a smidgen.

“We started rehearsals the day after Trump’s inauguration, and every day, it seems more relevant that we’re doing this play from its standpoints on homophobia, antisemitism, anti-immigration and censorship. It seems more pertinent to discuss now more than ever. But at the heart of it all is a love story and a question of how art can fight hate,” says Thornton.

The production — which features local actor Josh Bellan as the daring Avram, alongside actors Mariam Bernstein, Andrew Cecon, Amy Lee, Katherine Matlashewski, Dov Mickelson, Alex Poch-Goldin and musicians Shiloh Hiebert, Myron Schultz and Orit Shimoni — is infused with Old World, klezmer sensibilities, stretching across time from the prewar Europe where Asch first flourished to the McCarthyist America where his life ended.

A spiritual twin to last season’s centuries-spanning Lehman Trilogy, Indecent presents a massive scope, says Thornton, who faced the challenge of how to develop a production that felt as inclusive to modern audiences as it did immersive.

To that end, she gave designer Scott Penner a call and assigned him the role of theatrical architect.

The Hamilton-raised Penner — now based in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighbourhood, where he’s constantly within earshot of the rhythms of the Yiddish language — giddily accepted.

“I can’t direct the play until I have a design. It’s always the first conversation: what is the playground I will play in with my players?” she says.

As a starting point, Penner looked at a series of photographs by German artist Klaus Frahm called The Fourth Wall, wherein Frahm’s camera looks out at the audience from the perspective of the actor, capturing in a single frame both the industrial, almost-universal backstage areas and the ornate, impeccably constructed classical houses — similar to Winnipeg’s Pantages Playhouse — where the audience lives. Thornton refers to this area as “the jewel,” and Penner was responsible for fashioning a diamond.

“I showed Kelly that collection of images of those houses, and she was like, ‘That’s it.’ It was easy, easy, easy,’” Penner says.

Then the designer got to work, basing his set on the same Deutsches Theatre where God of Vengeance had its auspicious Berlin première, using the built environment as an extension of the historical conversation the playwright Vogel engaged in.

“The symbolism is in the architecture as a whole,” says Penner, who recently designed his first Broadway play, JOB, starring Succession’s Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon.

“The fact that we are placing these characters in that first theatre they ever performed in the play feels like the true symbolic act.”

Penner’s design places the audience in that same context by flipping the perspective, situating the audience behind the action, looking out across the proscenium into the house.

Where the “backdrop” on the John Hirsch Mainstage is usually found, there are instead rows upon rows of velvety red seating — the front row loaned from Pantages — creating a mirrored image and reframing the audience as active participants in a production of historical magnitude.

“I think the challenge was trying to do something that felt new and doing it in a way that the audience hadn’t seen. A perspective like this — it’s almost like they’re there. They become the actors. They’re living the artist’s life, behind the fourth wall,” says Thornton.

It’s an arresting image.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com