INDECENT

A story that refuses to disappear

I came to Paula Vogel’s Indecent at a moment when its history was beginning to feel disturbingly present.

In early 2023, a Florida school cancelled its production of Indecent, prompting a public dispute over censorship and LGBTQ+ representation. A play tracing the suppression of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance a century earlier was itself being challenged.

The historical distance collapsed.

I wrote to Paula Vogel, and we connected over what this production meant and what it was asking of us. For me, Indecent became a canary in the coal mine: a warning about the narrowing of imaginative space—about who may tell a story, which bodies may appear, which languages may be heard, and which artists may speak.

From archive to embodiment

That urgency shaped my approach at the University of Alberta. I conceived and led an interdisciplinary artistic and research process, bringing together theatre practitioners, professional musicians, scholars, archivists, dialect specialists, community partners, and artists connected to the original and touring productions.

Live klezmer music was central to the production. Performed by professional musicians, the score functioned not as accompaniment but as a theatrical language in its own right: carrying memory, shaping movement, and giving voice to what could not be spoken.

Relationships with members of the Asch family, alongside collaborations with the Wirth Institute of Austrian and Central European Studies and the Sound Studies Institute, connected our work to the historical and cultural worlds from which the play emerged.

The Sound Studies Institute’s holdings of the Asch family’s historic Folkways record collection became part of this process of discovery. An exhibition and related programming brought archival material into conversation with live performance, inviting audiences to encounter history as something still resonating in the present.

Through connections with the original and touring productions, I brought original-production dialect coaches into our process. Their work supported the German and Yiddish with specificity, care, and attention to the cultural worlds held within language.

Partnerships with Edmonton’s Reform Jewish community extended the project beyond the university. Public-facing events opened a wider conversation about Jewish history, censorship, music, memory, and artistic survival.

A historical moment

I could not have anticipated the circumstances in which our production would open. In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and the devastating violence that followed, a play about persecution, displacement, artistic survival, and human connection carried an immediacy I had neither intended nor could have manufactured.

These circumstances did not make the story simpler. They made it more difficult, more urgent, and more necessary to sit with.

Indecent offered no easy answers. My hope was that the theatre could become a place to pause, listen, grieve, and encounter histories that resist simplification—a temporary refuge, not from the world, but in which to attend to it more closely.

The responsibility of gathering

My aim was not to create a museum piece or a historical reenactment. It was to make Indecent alive to its own warning: what happens when a society begins by censoring a play, and what responsibilities fall to those of us who make theatre when that process begins again?

For me, the work became a meeting between archive and embodiment, historical memory and present danger. Music carried what could not be spoken. Language preserved worlds that censorship had attempted to erase. Gathering to tell this story became, in itself, an act of affirmation.

The production was more than the realization of a complex theatrical work. It was an act of collaborative research, cultural listening, and collective remembrance: artists, scholars, musicians, and audiences gathered around a story that refuses to disappear.

Context: reporting on the Florida cancellation ↗

Production credits

The Team:

Director: Benjamin W. Smith
Dramaturgs: Dana Taner-Kennedy, Daisy Brazil, Bailey Batrice
Cultural Consultant: Rabbah Gila Caine
Stage management: Stuart Lindsay
Set design: Brock Keeler
Costume design: Payal Jotania
Lighting design: Guido Tondino

The Cast:

Maxwell Vesely | Lemml
Megan Holt | Ingenue
Aidan Laudersmith | Ingenue
Alexander Mahon | Middle
Jacquelin Walters | Middle
Dov Mickelson | Elder
Elena Porter | Elder
Michael Bridge | Accordionist
Kornel Wolak | Clarinetist
Guillaume Tardif | Violinist