The Klezmer band welcoming us to the auditorium promises a low-stress evening, but there are things you need to know before the play starts (and your playbill doesn't include a syllabus), so here they are: In 1910, a play by a young Polish author named Sholem Asch premiered in Berlin, titled (in English) God of Vengeance. It was an immediate hit, touring throughout Europe for the next ten years and eventually making its way to the United States, where it enjoyed similar success in the Yiddish Theater flourishing on New York City's Lower East Side. On February 19, 1923, however, the English-language version of the play opened on Broadway. Within two weeks, the company was arrested for presenting an "indecent, obscene and immoral"—and therefore, illicit—exhibition. What was the abomination that so shocked the cosmopolitan Gothamites? Not a plot revolving on a brothelkeeper who shelters his daughter so she can make a good marriage, nor the dramatic climax when the enraged father renounces the sacred Torah, but a romantic scene between two attractive women wearing wet nightgowns who—gasp!—share a kiss onstage. This is the agent propelling Paula Vogel's epic-theater examination of the enduring power of art and the necessity for eternal vigilance in protection thereof. After inviting the original production's long-deceased actors to shake off their grave dust, she guides us through a panoramic history of the play that refused to die, but instead defied the censorship of social prejudice and government oppression to instill in artists a never-ending desire for freedom. Even in 1953, as Asch is summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a Yale scholar labors on a new translation of the play that changed the lives of its defenders. Vogel packs a lot of chronicle into 100 minutes, so audience members feeling a step or two behind the text are not alone. Virtuoso director Gary Griffin and an ensemble of agile actors drawn from many sources are quick to assist us in catching up whenever the sprawling narrative and swift pace threaten to render us dizzy with vertigo. If this whirlwind time-travel journey served no purpose beyond introducing Yiddish Theater (other than S. Ansky's The Dybbuk) to the classroom curriculum, however, it would still be a timely lesson, worthy of our attention today.
