‘Indecent’ To Close On Broadway
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Talya Zax June 14, 2017
Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” will close on Broadway on June 25.
The play was Vogel’s Broadway debut. Director Rebecca Taichman, who co-created the show with Vogel, won this year’s Tony Award for best direction of a play.
“Indecent” isn’t the only play to announce an early closing following the Tony Awards. Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat,” also her Broadway debut, and the star-studded revival of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” will both close before the end of June.
Fans of “Indecent” need not despair, despite the closure of the Broadway production. Regional productions, as Playbill reported, are already scheduled for a number of cities in the United States, including Minneapolis, Chicago, and Boston, as well as for Tel Aviv and Toronto.
Vogel, commenting on Twitter, laid blame at the feet of New York Times theater critics Ben Brantley and Jesse Green for the closing of “Indecent” and “Sweat.”
Brantley&Green 2-0. Nottage&Vogel 0-2. Lynn, they help close us down,&gifted str8 white guys run: ourplayswill last.B&G#footnotesinhistory.
— Paula Vogel (@VogelPaula) June 14, 2017
“Lynn, they help close us down,&gifted str8 [sic] white guys run,” she wrote.
Brantley, reviewing “Indecent,” wrote that the production was “deflatingly earnest” and lacked “the lightning-struck stratosphere of the play it portrays.” Green, reviewing “Sweat” for New York Magazine prior to becoming the Times’s co-chief theater critic, wrote that while the play was well-researched and had good intentions, “What it isn’t, I’m sorry to say, is a great play.”
Elsewhere, both plays received generally positive reviews.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
