![]() But a second viewing of the play, now pumped up and retuned for Broadway, only makes its problems more obvious. I say that with sorrow and surprise - and yet not too much surprise, because I already found Indecent more worthy than fine when I saw it Off Broadway last year. And now comes Paula Vogel’s Indecent taking a huge slice of cultural and social history as its subject, it is in some ways the most ambitious of the three, and in all ways the least convincing. Less convincing, though it just won the Pulitzer prize, is Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, which is based on intensive research into Rust Belt deindustrialization but attenuates its power in the very process of forcing the facts into drama. ![]() Rogers’s Oslo, in which the secret negotiations that led to the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian accords are used as the framework for a kind of exploded documentary, credibly filling in blanks in the record to make an already surprising story astonishing. This spring alone, we have on Broadway three new works that set out to tell essentially true stories of the recent past, only one of which is thoroughly successful. (They were set eons before his own day.) Contemporary playwrights interested in history, especially American history, have a harder task, with only two centuries to exploit - and no kings. One of the reasons Shakespeare’s history plays are the greatest examples of their genre is that he took care to write about events no one could possibly remember. ![]()
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