With Her Eerily Timely "Indecent," Paula Vogel Unsettles American Theatre Again
When the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch presented his play "God of Vengeance" at a Warsaw salon in 1906, his mentor, I. L. Peretz, told him to burn it. It's a shtetl tragedy: a Jewish brothel owner buys a Torah to celebrate his daughter's wedding to a scholar, but, when he learns that his daughter has fallen in love with one of his prostitutes, he casts her and the Torah down into the brothel. Asch ignored his mentor's w…