IRINABRAVO

GOD OF VENGEANCE

Directed by Kern McFadden

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About The Play

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies has transported Sholom Asch's 1906 Yiddish melodrama from Asch's native Poland to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1923 and in the process has transformed a classic morality tale into a drama of spellbinding power and sweep. Jack Chapman lives on the second floor of his tenement with his ex-prostitute wife, Sara, and seventeen-year-old daughter, Rivkele, and runs a brothel downstairs. The brothel has made Jack prosperous, but he aspires to something more—respectability, and towards that end, he hopes to marry his precious daughter to a Talmudic scholar. But the sheltered Rivkele has struck up a friendship with Manke, Jack's most-desired prostitute, and the gentle and genuine love affair that develops between the two young women threatens to destroy Jack's dreams for the future.

Calendar

This show was performed during May and June of 2017.

Adaptation BY david marguLies/ DRAMA

Other Information

Asch’s 1907 play, esteemed and widely produced in Europe, caused a scandal when it was staged in New York, ultimately opening on Broadway in 1923 and creating such a ruckus that the entire company was hauled into court on charges of indecency. The timeliness of this production — performed in Yiddish with English supertitles — has everything to do with the arrival on Broadway this spring of Paula Vogel’s “Indecent,” a powerful drama depicting the tumultuous history of the play and including some passages from it.

Production Stills

Pictures taken by Kenneth Shook Photography at the Stella Adler Studio Of Acting.