PUTNEY — “In response to anti-LGBTQ+ legislation against trans folks that's on the rise and, especially, as a response to anti-semitism that's now palpable in New York City.”
That's the reason Putney native and actor/playwright Kati Schwartz is bringing Indecent, by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Paula Vogel, to Next Stage Arts at the end of the month.
Now based in New York City, Schwartz, whose energy and mission are behind the upcoming production, is an alumna of Putney Central School who went on to The Putney School, where she worked in theater with Karla Baldwin, the school's former academic dean and drama director.
Having availed herself of the area's performing arts offerings, Schwartz recalls formative times at both New England Youth Theatre and at Brattleboro School of Dance. A silks performer and musician as well, she started playing clarinet in grade school and performed in the jazz ensemble at Putney School. Having started at Bard College, she continued her theater training at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Schwartz's plays, honored by the New York New Works Theatre Festival, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference, the Hollywood Fringe Festival, and others, have been produced off-Broadway and in regional theater venues.
Her acting credits include The Wolves at the Studio Theatre (Washington, D.C.), for which she won a Helen Hayes Award, as well as roles in August: Osage County at The Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Robin Hood at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, for which she was an on-stage musician, playing recorder and clarinet.
A frequent improvisational performer, she's been seen in several venues, including Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and The Groundlings in Los Angeles. Recently, her Bad People - which premiered at New York's Dixon Place - has garnered attention as an audio play, listed online as a “hilarious and poignant window into the mind of a [#metoo era], grief-stricken young woman.”
In film and TV, Schwartz recently finished filming Lars Shrike Walks the Night with Kelsey Grammer and will appear in Season 5 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
A play within a play
Indecent, co-created by Vogel with Rebecca Taichman, has its inspiration in the frenzy-generating 1923 Broadway production of Sholem Asch's The God of Vengeance, which centers on the erotic awakening between two women.
According to a synopsis from its publisher, Dramatists Play Service, Inc., that 100-year-old play was “seen by some as a seminal work of Jewish culture, and by others as an act of traitorous libel. Indecent charts the history of an incendiary drama and the path of the artists who risked their careers and lives to perform it.”
Key to the scandal in the original Vengeance was the first lesbian kiss on an American stage. Shortly after the play moved to Broadway, where it became a hit, the kiss was cut, but the play caused an uproar still because of its lesbian themes.
According to an article in The New York Times in March 1923, the producer and cast of Vengeance were indicted “for violating the penal code in giving an alleged indecent, immoral, and impure theatrical performance.”
A play within a play, the structure of Vogel's 2015 Indecent assumes the audience is watching a Yiddish theater company creating a production of Vengeance, over the span of a few decades.
First produced off-Broadway in 2016, Indecent soon moved to Broadway, garnering one Tony Award and three Tony nominations.
According to a 2021 review in The Guardian by Mark Lawson, “As the years tick down like a bomb, the defining moral horror of the 20th century waits at the end of the fuse.”
Lawson's review cites the play's exploration of “the histories of antisemitism, Jewish culture, and the debate between assimilation and celebration of identity” and called it a “a brainy play staged with the panache of a musical.”
'A play about banned material'
About the upcoming Next Stage production, directed by Ellie Handel, Schwartz says, “It's an act of resistance to mount it.”
She wants to share the work with her hometown, because “people now seem to feel empowered to share transphobic, queerphobic, homophobic rhetoric in such a way that it's suddenly considered acceptable.”
In New York, she says, “I've noticed a lot of outright antisemitism. I see it now in graffiti and in the things people say. And some of my Jewish friends have experienced antisemitism directed at them.”
Schwartz likens the play to “a mirroring of the time [when Vengeance] took place, and now.”
Handel, who saw Indecent on Broadway, says that “from the violin's first note, I felt a connection to my Jewish roots and knew that this play was going to be pivotal for me.”
She immediately started researching the play's backstory and decided that she eventually would stage The God of Vengeance.
“When Kati and Sarah called me to ask if I could direct this production, my answer was an immediate 'Yes!'” she said.
“I have loved exploring my heritage and sharing the Jewish experience with our company of actors and musicians - some who are Jewish, some who are not, and some who are half and half,” Handel continued.
The entire company in the Next Stage production is New York–based. Schwartz is joined by Sarah Hogewood, a new collaborator she'd met in final call backs for a couple of New York productions of Indecent.
“We were tired of waiting to be cast,” Schwartz says. “That, combined with what's going on in the world, and given that Sarah is an incredible actor and multi-hyphenate theater person,” inspired the Putney production.
“This is a play about banned material,” Hogewood says. “And ever since Kati and I began working on [this production], there have been productions of [it] that have been banned due to the lesbian plotline. It could not be more timely.”
Adding her attraction to the script, Hogewood says, “I love this play so much and have been working on learning the dialects (for fun) ever since I saw the show on Broadway when I was still in college. I am just thrilled to have the opportunity to work with this company.”
Schwartz says she is choosing to present in Putney, not New York, because beyond the draw of the hometown audience, there are, she says, “far more venues to choose from in this region than are open for such work in New York.”
In addition to Schwartz, Handel, and Hogewood, the company of Indecent, a musical, includes Miles Eichenhorn, Patrick Grizzard, Abigail Lumsden, Caroline McPherson, Marissa Ruben, and Isaac Wellhausen; costume consulting is by Nicole Gentile and lighting design by Charlotte Seelig.
When asked to what she could attribute the hate we see ubiquitously today, Schwartz, 34, says, “To be blunt, I believe that Donald Trump started the culture of saying hateful things under the guise of freedom and liberty when it's just hateful nonsense.”
For her, “the antidote to what's going on in the world is art. It's the inverse of what we're seeing.”
Digging further, Schwartz adds: “A mentor once, while Trump was in office, asked if there were any artists - real and respected - who like Trump.”
She pauses and reiterates: “The arts are the antidote; they are what we have to counter the current escalated level of hate, misinformation, and ignorance. “Michele Obama said, 'When they go low, we go high.'”
“And this production,” Schwartz says, “is our way of going high.”