‘Indecent’ To Close On Broadway

Image by Carol Rosegg

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.

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO