I selected all the music, and I always write to music - music’s very important to me … it goes back to this Wagnerian notion of a total work of theatre. “I immediately heard a Klezmer band as I was writing it,” said Vogel, “and I recorded over 600 Klezmer songs to find the songs I wanted. Part of what makes “Indecent” so special is its music - while it’s not a “musical,” per se, it’s certainly a play with music that plays an integral part in the storytelling.

“Even with directors I’ve never met who are doing my work” (like Joel Greenberg, who is directing the Toronto production).

“I wrote it, but I feel very collaborative,” she continued. “On the other hand, you know, I would hand her a few pages, and say something like ‘do a tour around the world in four scenes on the stage.’ And she’d say, ‘how do I do that?’ And I told her I didn’t know - that’s her problem,” said Vogel with a laugh. “If there’s a word in the script that’s a stage direction, that’s coming from me,” said Vogel. Vogel made clear in our interview that while Taichman is credited as a “co-creator” in the printed version of the play, Vogel “wrote every word” of the text - including those haunting stage directions. “Indecent” was Vogel’s Broadway debut, despite an illustrious playwriting premiere including a Pulitzer Prize for “How I Learned to Drive.” “Indecent” had its Broadway premiere in 2017 - nearly 100 years after “God of Vengeance” hit the Great White Way in 1923. And what I saw the moment she called me was a dusty theatre troupe rising from a kind of limbo in an attic room. “I tried a version just concentrating on the trial, and I thought it was kind of flat and not really getting at the issues of why this was shocking. “I didn’t just see this as a play about the obscenity trial,” Vogel said. She would direct it, and I would write it.” “Fast forward 20 or 30 years, and I get a call from Rebecca Taichman, who for a directing project had directed a performance of the ‘God of Vengeance’ obscenity trial … and she asked if I’d like to work with her. “It was an important play for me to read.” “I read ‘God of Vengeance’ when I was 22 years old, and it always stayed with me,” said Vogel in an interview. In 1907, “God of Vengeance” was called filthy, immoral and, yes, indecent for its content - and that’s where Vogel’s investigation into the play’s history begins. The play in question? Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” which in 1907 became the subject of Yiddish newspaper headlines in New York due to the play’s strikingly contemporary lesbian plot line.

The story then begins as we meet Lemml, the stage manager, who promises to tell us a story about the play that changed his life. That opening moment is a haunting image - a troupe of actors coated in dust, seemingly lost to history before this instant. “From ashes they rise,” opens Paula Vogel’s play “Indecent,” at the CAA Theatre on Yonge Street starting this Friday.

Indecent by Paula Vogel