"the entire congregation is holy"
Jerry Goralnick, Living Theatre company member, writes about his experience performing in Indecent by Paula Vogel
We asked long time company member Jerry Goralnick (he/they) to write about his feelings surrounding performing in Indecent by Paula Vogel, which played last month in Sedona, AZ and featured several Living Theatre company members; Jerry wrote one entry before rehearsals began and wrote another one after the show closed. Below are both entries:
entry 1
The play, INDECENT covers forty years of the history of a Yiddish theater company from the 1920s to the 1950s. One of my last lines in INDECENT is, “Six million have left the theater.” All my life I have studiously avoided anything that has anything to do with the holocaust. I don’t watch films or read books about it. I am a person who knows little of my family history before my grandparents. Three of the four grandparents were the only ones in their families to survive. I have one photo of my maternal grandfather’s family and written on the back it says, all died in the war. Playing in INDECENT will be a first for me. Just learning the lines brings up genetic memories. At the end of INDECENT the actors are presenting a clandestine performance in Poland and are arrested and sent to Auschwitz. When The Living was performing in Warsaw I was invited to go to Auschwitz but didn’t join the group that went. In the play the playwright of INDECENT, the play within the play, goes on a fact finding tour to Vilna and Kyiv to see the aftermath of pogroms. Those are the two cities where my great grandparents lived. As a pacifist anarchist artist/activist I have a good understanding of the geo political machinations that led to the Second World War. The holocaust has always been too close and this will be the first time I have seriously confronted my feelings about my family history. I’m not sure how good it will be for me and I’m interested to see myself when I come out on the other side of this project.
INDECENT is the story of a Yiddish theater troupe. Yiddish has always fascinated me. It was only spoken in my family when they didn’t want the kids to know what was being said and in the Jewish community I grew up in it was felt that Yiddish was part of an unwanted past and we were taught to read Hebrew so we could participate in religious services. I always felt slighted that I grew up in what could have been a bilingual home and I could have learned this cool second language.
The Living has always celebrated Passover, the Jewish holiday about the Exodus from Egypt, because it is a holiday that commemorates liberation. The ceremony is guided by a text, the Haggadah, which Judith Malina rewrote taking out the patriarchy and violence. It was a wonderful yearly gathering of sometimes up to sixty people. The other aspect of Judaism embraced by The Living is the idea of Unity. In Judith’s play, KORACH In which I played the title character, he sings, “The entire congregation is holy.” Asserting that everyone is equal.
The most beautiful part of INDECENT, the part that caused a scandal, is the celebration of non-binary love, an attitude that was always taken as a given in The Living.
entry 2
Paula Vogel’s Indecent is a celebration of non-binary love but it takes place during a time in history of massive oppression. The story is told by the ghosts of a Yiddish theater company who all perished in the death camps of WWII. They rise from their ashes every night to retell the story. Theatre is one of the few rituals which can take people through such a story. Communal rituals like theatre allow the audience to experience the horror together and obtain catharsis. Coincidentally we opened this very Jewish play on October 7th as violence and revenge detonated in the Middle East. The producer made a short curtain speech calling for peace which was appropriate. In The Living we would have been out in the streets quickly devising a piece calling for the end of the cycle of violence.
Indecent tells the story of State sponsored violence against a group of people and against the individual. The troop who made up our Indecent company were a diverse group of people and coming to consensus about an action in the face of genocide would have taken much time that we didn’t have. In The Living no one had to explain the pacifist-anarchist point of view because everyone in The Living was a pacifist-anarchist. If you weren’t you wouldn’t have stayed too long in the company realizing that it wasn’t your affinity group. So my job in Indecent was to create characters that helped to tell the story the Paula Vogel wanted to tell. I hoped that it would open people to discuss ways to end violence. We might have had a group discussion with the audience after the play. That might have ended up much more interesting than the performance.
BONUS: Live from the “Smooth Spot” with Michael Kevin Walsh
Jerry will be interviewed live by Michael Kevin Walsh on Friday, November 10th on Michael’s online show Live from the Smooth Spot to talk about his experience in the show as well as his long career as an avant-garde theatre maker and activist. Tune in to see how Jerry stays cool!
Thanks, Jerry!