| INDECENT questions: MAJOR SPOILERS and way too long | |
| Last Edit: lordofspeech 11:12 am EDT 07/08/17 | |
| Posted by: lordofspeech 11:01 am EDT 07/08/17 | |
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| I had a difficult time following the story: 1) Was the beautiful actress who played the prostitute in the play-within-the-play supposed to be the same actress-character during all the various incarnations of the play-within-the-play? At one point, she seemed to be playing a renowned European actress who was a non-Jew welcoming the younger, Jewish actress into her company. And then they seemed to develop a romantic relationship through their "onstage" kissing scenes. But, later, didn't the younger actress get fired because she was Jewish and the non-Jew stayed on? And this was a betrayal/complication in their relationship, right? But there was no pay-off to their break-up, right? Because then they hired a new actress who was (according to the super-titles and her hyper-American accent) a non-Jew, right? And this actress/character also became a lesbian through her participation in the onstage kissimg scenes? Or was that supposed to be just comedic and not real? And then did the non-Jewish other actress (Katrina Lenk), the one who played the prostitute in the play within the play, fall in love/lust with this newly engaged shiksa actress? And did the former, non-shiksa actress (played by the actress who had also played the Jewish counterpart) ever appear again and have any sort of confrontation with her former lover who was now making out and in love with this new girl? The doubling (or maybe it was tripling of these roles) completely obscured whatever ongoing narrative was intended. 2) I think the wife of the playwright and the first, Jewish actress who essayed the virgin-role in the play-within-the-play were meant to be different characters, right? 3) The actresses Katrina Lenk played may have been one or two or three different characters, right? The most identifiable was the one in Berlin who smoked cigarettes and was glamorous and not Jewish and became lesbian (or at least became open to and experienced a physical relationship with a woman) through her work on the play-within-the-play. But was this the same character who went on tour with them? And, though I don't know exactly when she became a different character, but was this the same character when they got round to doing the show, in Yiddish, in New York? And what about when they opened uptown in English? Was that the same character playing the role in English and now, presumably, carrying on an affair with the new, younger, shiksa-actress she was playing opposite? And did she leave for Europe with the troupe? And was she supposed to be the same one who was sickly but went on anyway in the performance in the Polish ghetto? I began to doubt all markers of time/space/history as we watched these actors (not only Lenk) live through both the first and second world wars and still be being cast in their same roles in the play-within-the-play. 3) Were we supposed to believe that Paula Vogel's details of storyline were accurate or merely charmingly fanciful? By the time that the fantasy-escape-of-the-two-lesbian-characters-in-the-play-within-the-play occured, I was already wondering what, if anything, was real here. Was the troupe really arrested, mid-performance, in the Polish ghetto and then taken to a concentration camp? And was it the same troupe from the first show, including the central actor-manager (Schildkraudt?)? 4) and what about the endearingly played stage manager (played by Richard Topol)? Was he just a writer's conceit or had he indeed participated in the play-within from its inception through the New York opening, the return to Europe, and then the troupe's being killed by Hitler's forces? 5) was the history intentionally fast-and-loose because the playwright was making a somewhat far-fetched meta-statement parallelling the current US immigration policy with the censorship of the play-within's New York debut, or was the history for real? 6) were we supposed to think that if the playwright of the play-within-a-play had made an appearance in court he could've had any impact on the verdict? It didn't seem that his testimony would've made a difference: the play had been judged indecent; what could he have done anyway? But this seemed to be a big deal in the storyline, that he didn't go. 6) there were similarities between what Moises Kauffman did with GROSS INDECENCY and what Vogel was trying to do here. Recreate history with a modern lens and extrapolate an overarching perspective about how gayness, sexual transgression, and theatre reflected the entire universe at one moment in time. But perhaps Vogel didn't have the extensive historical documents available to her to fix the details in her story to a reality. And, quite possibly, the doubling and tripling of roles was a really bad choice, which unhorsed the entire narrative at key moments. Or perhaps, in a desire to show the roles of the two Jewish lesbians in the play-within-the-play as being more important than the actresses who played them, Vogel (and her director) just lost me. 7) the audience kinda liked it; seemed to like its politics...? But whether the point was that The playwright never shoulda let the lesbian scene be cut because if he hadn't, the play as a whole wouldn't have been censored Or that once the first, Jewish girl was fired, the production's lack of integrity doomed it to failure... Or that the Censorship and closing of the play was an ad hoc expulsion of the troupe from the US and, ipse facto, delivered them to the concentration camps in Europe Or (now I'm being flip, but it seemed so) that every actress who plays either of the two lesbian characters in "God of Vengeance" will probably become a lesbian herself...? I was left behind by the story-telling in this one, for sure. Admiring of Richard Topol's charm in (lucky he) a very consistent role, of Akerlind's lighting (and shadows), and of Katrina Lenk's stage charisma, singing and dancing, and arresting beauty. |
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