My spouse tells me I take too long to get to the point in these things, so here it is: This May, I'm directing Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning play Indecent. I'm raising $5,000 to cover lighting and sound equipment, costumes, instrument rental and dialect support for the cast, who will be singing in English, German and Yiddish!
This is a community theater, and Indecent is the biggest show we've done since the pandemic started. If you'd like to support the show, you can give a donation of any size to The Generic Theater of Norfolk here and write “Indecent” in the “Notes” section.
I love Indecent because it expresses the universal through the particular. It depicts the true story of Sholem Asch’s 1907 drama God of Vengeance, which toured the Yiddish theaters of Europe before coming to Broadway in1923, causing a scandal, in part because of its lesbian protagonists.
Indecent explores a universal idea: that humans are drawn to create, and to love each other, even in the darkest chapters of history. It takes on themes of censorship, LGBTQ stories, antisemitism, and fascism’s spread across Europe and America.
That was a tight 3.5 paragraphs!
But here's how I’d tell the story.
My town’s weekly newsletter is called "Cape Charles Happenings". It’s a labor of love written by a person named Joan and it’s the place to learn about coat drives, chili cook-offs, a gently-used food processor I now own, and the losing and eventual finding of a 1972 class ring in the town park, which, as a callback to my prior home, is named “Central Park.”
In early 2022, Cape Charles Happenings announced auditions for The Music Man. I hadn’t acted since a 1997 Wellesley College production of Lillian Helman’s doomed-lesbian play, The Children’s Hour. I ended up loving it: singing with my neighbors and learning choreography, and exploring the mindfuck that is acting. Which is like being. But heightened.
There was something else I loved: I left my rural hometown when I was18. And the kind of life I had for the 20 years that followed did not require me to work closely with anyone whose political views were much different from my own.
Doing the town musical during the Virginia midterm elections meant literally harmonizing with neighbors whose yard signs were different from mine. If a group of people wants to stay on tempo or find a not-so-obvious note, everyone has to listen to each other. Our bodies sense this; when people sing in groups, their heartbeats synchronize. The same is true for the practical work of moving sets; there is something intimate about working with a cast mate to carry a heavy bench, in complete darkness, in the seconds before a light cue. Over time, repetition turns to ritual, and coordination builds into trust.
In a three-hour musical, every person has an assigned location and job for every beat of the score.
It’s a three-dimensional homily to our interdependence.
As my neighbors and I worked to create a beautiful world on stage, I began to wonder if we might build the muscle memory to create a more beautiful world offstage. The Music Man is about a town frozen in dissonance. Neighbors move about in factions, making them easy marks for con man Harold Hill, who whips the town into terror over the moral peril of their youngsters. Hill offers to organize the young people into a marching band, so long as their parents pay for lessons… and instruments…and uniforms. The con? Hill doesn’t know a thing about music, but he doesn’t plan to stick around River City long enough for people to find out.
It’s the setup for a modern tragedy of polarization and demagoguery. But that’s not where this story goes. Hill’s con gives the fractious town a project: the bickering school board turns into a barber shop quartet, their dissonance dissolving into four-part harmony. By the time the children’s band performs a barely-recognizable Minuet in G, the town is so filled with pride at their young people in band uniforms, honking on trumpets and French horns, they don’t care that they’d been hoodwinked. Or to be more accurate: they weren’t. The virtuosity of the music wasn’t “the thing”.
Anyone who has sat in the audience of an elementary school play knows that.
I thought it was a Music Man thing. But in show, after show, I found myself in community with artists who also happen to be school bus drivers, pastors, professors, police officers, homeschool kids, private school kids, public school kids, nuclear engineers, house cleaners, and veterans - so many veterans. The cast of Mary Poppins had an age range of 4 - 84 years old, and sidebar: I can’t think of another venture where my colleagues, my literal co-workers who share the same boss as me, are eight year-olds.
I think about sectarianism a lot. It’s one of the reasons I moved back to Virginia. When I got here, I trained as an election official, working the poll book for our County Registrar during elections. I want something better for myself and my neighbors than the promise of polarization and violence.
I wasn’t thinking about that when I auditioned for the town musical. Yet each time we build a world together, we are forced to solve problems. There’s a point in a production where people begin to sense what each other needs - an actor will sing toward a castmate who has a hard time finding a note; a crew member follows an actor into the wings holding the prop they forgot to pick up, right in time for the cue. Those are literal. Equally profound are the million ways that people send silent waves of encouragement as they pass each other backstage.
I keep thinking about the gift Harold Hill gives the town of River City in The Music Man. It’s music, yes. But he also offers them a different way of seeing themselves. Not as rivals, but as fellow players in a marching band.
On the eve of World War II, as Hitler invaded Poland, the land of my mother’s mother, the poet W.H. Auden wrote in September 1, 1939, “We must love one another or die.”
Auden famously loathed the line, and refused for years to include it in his Collected Works. He argued that neither his poem nor "love" changed the outcome of the war. He changed the line in later printings to, "We must love one another and die."
I'm fine with that.
But I like the original; I think we will destroy ourselves - a living death - if we cannot find a way back to one another.
Theater isn’t a utopia. The plagues of the world contaminate theaters too. I hope you weren’t hoping that this story ends with everyone burning their yard signs. We didn’t. The midterms came and went and we celebrated and mourned in our respective groups. Theater is a little simulation of life: the lights dim, the curtain goes up, and the show starts moving. When someone screws up, we get annoyed, we cover for each other, and we keep going. We must love one another or die.
I’m interested in stories that ennoble the human spirit, that offer the chance to see ourselves and our community - in a new way. Indecent explores whether storytelling can heal the fractures of history, or even, (sorry, W.H. Auden) conquer death. It’s also about lesbians, fascism, Jewish life and Yiddish theater! And has a klezmer band!
The Generic Theater is a gem of a community theater that produces shows that wouldn't otherwise find their way down here. If you'd like to help out, please give a donation of any size here and write “Indecent” in the “Notes” section.
If you live in Virginia, or want to visit, come see the show May 17-June 2. I'll even give you a tour of Central Park.
*Excellent photographers deserve credit for two of these shots, and I can't figure out how to write captions, which is probably for the best because then I'd make these even longer:
1. The photo of me upstaging the actual Music Man was taken by Chris Roll @chrisrollingcamera
2. The last photo of me with the cast of Pippin was taken by Josh Stubbs @Jstubbsphotography1