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A row of suitcases on an otherwise bare stage,that clouds of steam soon reveal to be a railway platform. Travellers in bulky overcoats grab their suitcases and fall into line. This will become a recurring image, in a show about many kinds of exile. When projected signs; ( "Warsaw'", "1902’) and plaintive klezmer music tell us these migrants are Jews in 20th c. Europe, it is impossible not to think of later trains, rolling to Dachau and Auschwitz. But the music turns gay and the line beomes a whirling dance--the migrants become a troupe of travelling actors, and a rush of joy and energy onstage disperses dark thoughts. If Yiddish theater was often as electric as Paula Vogel imagines it in INDECENT then I wish I'd been born a generation sooner, and not so far from New York. 

Vogel co-created the show with director Rebecca Taichman,and SF Playhouse director Susan Damilo collaborated with Yiddish Theater Ensemble choreographer Nicole Helfer and musical director Dmitri Gaskin, so it's hard to know whom to praise first. Same goes for the actors, an all-star ensemble playing multiple roles and instruments. The epic backstage drama is based on a notorious theater story: THE GOD OF VENGEANCE, by Sholem Asch, the first Yiddish play to be widely translated, was produced all over Europe to great acclaim but arriving in the land of the free, was banned on Broadway.

We see bits of the play: the father owns a whorehouse, the daughter falls in love with one of the prostitutes, the two women cavort lightly clad in the rain , and they soul-kiss onstage. A New York court convicted playwright, producer and theater owner of obscenity in 1923. The producer, a civil rights attorney, appealed and won a reversal, but Asch later disavowed the work. What must have demoralized him most is not the accusation or the conviction, but the fact the attack was led by New York's Jewish establishment, who feared the play would give aid and comfort to anti-Semites, with Hitler already on the rise. The Orthodox reacted also to irreligion: one character desecrates a Torah scroll.

Any artist who belongs to a minority, racial, sexual, or political, is called on to represent, and sooner or later will hear: " You make us look bad!" Vogel. half- Jewish and a lesbian, has likely heard that more than once. "Warts and all--really?" Tell the truth, or whitewash your tribe? Eminent among the first generation of secular Jewish intellectuals, Asch was bound to the truth. When he calls his play dated, Vogel's becomes a tragedy.