Freeze Frame seeks flash drama, the weirder the better
So first and foremost, we want a story. A complete, interesting story. 1000
words or less, any genre, no content restrictions. We want your science
fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, drama, literary works, satire, bizarre
fiction, or anything else you can come up with or mix together. The more
original, the better. The weirder, the better.
***
Mountain Community Theater is currently welcoming and accepting plays for
consideration for our 2023 Season! Anyone interested in MCT productions can
submit a play for possible production including MCT members, subscribers, and
the public.
We typically choose four plays for our season, plus a new play by a local
playwright for our “New Works Night,” (see below). We are looking for comedies,
dramas, musical theatre, winter holiday plays, and other plays that might not
fit in these categories. Is there a great play that you know of that you would
like to see produced on our stage?
***
Quannapowitt Players, Inc. is seeking new plays for Suburban Holidays XI for
2022, our popular annual holiday themed play festival and fundraiser. We are
proud to be presenting our eleventh year of holiday shows. Play submissions
should be between ten and twenty minutes in length and focus on a holiday.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** THE GOD OF VENGEANCE ***
When God of Vengeance first premiered in English on Broadway in 1923, the
entire cast was brought to court on charges of indecency for featuring a
lesbian kiss—a Broadway first. The prolific Polish-Jewish writer Sholem Asch,
who wrote the play, defended his art by insisting that the question wasn’t
whether the play was moral, but whether it was any good. And good it was. And
still is.
God of Vengeance... might not be as scandalous as it once was, but it is
certainly still powerful. The story of Yankl and Soreh, pious Orthodox Jews who
run the brothel downstairs from their apartment, and their beloved, “pure”
daughter Rivkele, burns with immediacy.
Rivkele, in whose name Yankl funds a Torah—which he imagines may be useful one
day as a dowry—is “corrupted” by Manke, a prostitute. In fact, the two women
are in love—and it’s this love that ran the public wild in the 1920s.
More...
https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2017/this-hot-yiddish-play-brought-broadway-its-first-lesbian-kiss
***
Responding to allegations yesterday that Sholem Asch’s drama “God Of
Vengeance,” currently presented in English at the Apollo Theatre, is immoral, a
grand jury released an official complaint against the actors and actresses
performing in the drama as well as the theatre’s manager and owner.
In all, 16 individuals received complaints for performing “God Of Vengeance,”
including acclaimed actor Rudolph Schildkraut, in the lead role, lawyer Harry
Weinberger, the play’s manager, and one of the Selwyn brothers, owners of the
Apollo Theatre.
Since the Sholem Asch drama began being performed in English, those dedicated
to “defending morality” are in agreement that the play is immoral and have
sought means to suppress it. Finally, they were able to convince the District
Attorney’s office to investigate and file official complaints against the
actors and actresses, as well as the management.
At 10:30 they must all appear before District Attorney O’Neil in his office,
where it’s expected that warrants will be issued immediately to the accused,
demanding they then appear before Judge Crane at the General Sessions Court.
More...
https://forward.com/culture/359668/broadway-cast-of-god-of-vengeance-arrested-on-obscenity-charges/
***
Open Letter by Sholom Asch
Because of the wrong interpretation of my play, The God of Vengeance, now
running at the Apollo Theatre, I wish to make the following statement:
I wrote this play when I was twenty-one years of age. I was not concerned
whether I wrote a moral or immoral play. What I wanted to write was an artistic
play and a true one. In the seventeen years it has been before the public, this
is the first time I have had to defend it.
When the play was first produced, the critics in Germany, Russia, and other
countries, said that it was too artistically moral. They said that for a man
like “Yekel Shepshovitch,” keeper of a brothel, to idealize his daughter, to
accept no compromise with her respectability, and for girls like Basha and
Raizel, filles de joie, to dream about their dead mother, their home, and to
revel in the spring rain, was unnatural. About two years ago I was approached
by New York producers for permission to present the play in English. I refused,
since I did not believe the American public was either sufficiently interested
or adequately instructed to accept The God of Vengeance.
More...
https://web.uwm.edu/yiddish-stage/an-open-letter-by-sholom-asch-author-of-got-fun-nekome
***
David Mandelbaum, artistic director of New Yiddish Rep, admits frankly that
mounting Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, a 1906 play that explores religious
hypocrisy, prostitution, and lesbianism, was in large part a business decision.
The timing was irresistible.
After all, Paula Vogel’s Indecent, now heading for Broadway after successful
runs at Yale Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, and Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre, is
based on the events surrounding Asch’s groundbreaking drama, from its birth in
Poland and its evolution throughout Europe and the Lower East Side to its
explosive run on the Great White Way in 1923, and beyond.
It was a controversial play—indeed, it sparked a mini-donnybrook—when it bowed
at the Apollo Theatre on 42nd Street, not least for featuring the first lesbian
kiss on a Broadway stage. The cast and producers were arrested and jailed on
obscenity charges.
More...
https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/12/21/but-is-god-of-vengeance-good-for-the-jews/
***
“It won’t sell out,” Clare wrote in December, as Kate insisted on pre-booking
the tickets to Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) promised in lieu of a
Christmas present. “This isn’t Warsaw in 1937.” As we crammed ourselves into La
Mama’s packed black box theater for the final weekend of Got fun nekome’s
January run, struggling to find two unoccupied folding chairs next to each
other, Clare was glad to eat her words. Back with a vengeance, the play will in
fact run for another two weeks this March.
Directed by Yiddish theater great Eleanor Reissa, New Yiddish Rep’s Got fun
nekome brings ageless tensions between sacred and profane, respectable and
shameful into stark contemporary relief. Yankl Tchaptchovich (Shane Baker) and
Sore (Eleanor Reissa/Caraid O’Brien) try desperately to present an upstanding,
observant household to the outside world and Jewish community while managing a
brothel beneath their house. Their daughter Rivkele (Shayna Schmidt) is their
key to absolution, a nice Jewish girl destined to marry into a good family and
fulfil all the social expectations her parents cannot. Rivkele’s purity
unravels as she forms a relationship with Manke (Melissa Weisz), a sex worker
at her father’s business who lives downstairs.
More...
https://ingeveb.org/blog/di-fester-shvester-review-got-fun-nekome-god-of-vengeance
***
Behind the Curtain: INDECENT
Go behind the curtain of the Tony Award-winning play Indecent with Writer Paula
Vogel, Director Rebecca Taichman, Producer Daryl Roth, and various cast members.
INDECENT is a story of a play called THE GOD OF VENGEANCE.
That was written in Poland in Yiddish in 1907.
Our play, Indecent, is about the history of The God of Vengeance.
This play will cause a sensation!
The play The God of Vengeance was an incredible and sort of tumultuous journey.
More...
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/indecent-behind-curtain-indecent/7732/
***
Formally, it’s essentially a biography of Asch’s play. It starts in Warsaw,
1907, when the youthful author and his wife Madzhe are giddy with excitement
about the possibilities of his new work. This horrifies the local Jewish
intelligentsia, who are alarmed that a drama set in a Yiddish brothel featuring
a lesbian love story is terrible PR for their embattled community.
Following the play’s eventual European success, ’Indecent’ sweeps on into the
’20s, when the Aschs uproot to New York. There, ‘God of Vengeance’ becomes a
hit on the Yiddish-language stage, then the English-language one, then finally
a bowdlerised version moves to Broadway, where a moral panic fuelled by fearful
local rabbis leads to the entire cast being arrested for indecency.
It’s a wonderful story, most of it true, including the final section where we
see ‘God of Vengeance’ illegally performed in Łódż ghetto, on the cusp of the
Holocaust. Yes, Vogel oversimplifies the arguments of the play’s detractors,
and focuses her vindication of it on the queer-heavy second act (generally held
as the best bit of an uneven work). And though Finbar Lynch is terrific as
Lemmi, a rube from the Polish shtetl who happens to be present at ‘God of Vengeance’s
first reading in a Warsaw salon and becomes its most ferocious champion, I’m
pretty sure the character is fictional. His Zelig-like appearance at every
stage of the play’s story strains credulity somewhat.
More...
https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/indecent-review
***
GOD OF VENGEANCE - script in English
https://images.shulcloud.com/946/uploads/PDF-Files/God-of-Vengeance.pdf
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