In November 2014 my whole world fell apart. A knock at the door at 6am one cold November morning began a chain of events that even in my worst nightmares I could never of imagined would ever happen to me.

In November 2014 my whole world fell apart. A knock at the door at 6am one cold November morning began a chain of events that even in my worst nightmares I could never of imagined would ever happen to me.

Alex is kicked out of the house by his wife. Down on his luck, he signs up with an investigative agency in Houston. The job takes him to France, Switzerland, and Germany. He blows his assignment in France, and gets shot, twice. While he's recuperating in a Paris hospital, God begins to invade his vivid dreams. The reason? Could it be that the Grim Reaper is reaching out for him, and God was giving him one last opportunity to right his immoral ways? Alex thinks so, and decides to walk the straight and narrow road. This is the story of a colorful but wicked Panamanian lothario from Texas who tries to find high ground. Throughout his surrealistic European journey, Alex is always in the company of irritable men, who chastise his behavior, and willing women who encourage it. He spends time in brothels, both real and imagined. Does he succeed? Not hardly. In France he gets arrested for indecent exposure. Upset with the French's “Higher than Thou” attitude, he goes to Switzerland where they arrest him for immoral behavior and resisting arrest. Upset with the Swiss' inability to tolerate proper “American Behavior,” he leaves for Germany for one last attempt at salvation. Then on a train leaving Munich, he meets Helga…

“Revelatory…As intimate and immediate as a whispered secret. Vogel’s play thrums with music, desire, and fear, and it’s shrewd about the ways in which America isn’t free, and about how art does and doesn’t transcend the perilous winds of history.” —New Yorker “Superbly realized…Indecent, the powerful play by Paula Vogel, sheds an eye-opening light on a little-known time when theatrical history, Jewish culture, and the frank depiction of homosexuality intersected, with explosive results.” —New York Times “Gorgeous. Illuminating and heartbreaking. Rich in sympathy and humor, Indecent has the scope of an epic but the intimacy of a chamber piece…It celebrates and illustrates the power of theater.” —Time Out New York “A moving and fascinating play…A singular achievement… The historical perspective is vast and knowing…Has there ever been anything quite like Indecent, a play that touches—I mean deeply touches—so much rich emotion about history and the theater, anti-Semitism, homophobia, censorship, world wars, red-baiting, and oh, yes, joyful human passion?...An extraordinary play.” —Newsday “Indecent is more than a play about forbidden love: It’s about theater as a life force.” —New York Post When Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907, he didn’t imagine the height of controversy the play would eventually reach. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play’s subject matter wasn’t deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel’s newest work traces the trajectory of the show’s success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923—including the arrest of the entire production’s cast and crew. Paula Vogel is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of How I Learned to Drive. Her other plays include Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, A Civil War Christmas, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and The Baltimore Waltz, among others. She has also had a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to younger playwrights, first at Brown University and then at the Yale School of Drama.

Men and women struggling for control of marriage and sexuality; narratives that focus on trickery, theft, and adultery; descriptions of sexual activities and body parts, the mention of which is prohibited in polite society: such are the elements that constitute what Nicole Nolan Sidhu calls a medieval discourse of obscene comedy, in which a particular way of thinking about men, women, and household organization crosses genres, forms, and languages. Inviting its audiences to laugh at violations of what is good, decent, and seemly, obscene comedy manifests a semiotic instability that at once supports established hierarchies and delights in overturning them. In Indecent Exposure, Sidhu explores the varied functions of obscene comedy in the literary and visual culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. In chapters that examine Chaucer's Reeve's Tale and Legend of Good Women; Langland's Piers Plowman; Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford, Troy Book, and Fall of Princes; the Book of Margery Kempe, the Wakefield "Second Shepherds' Play"; the Towneley "Noah"; and other works of drama, Sidhu proposes that Middle English writers use obscene comedy in predictable and unpredictable contexts to grapple with the disturbances that English society experienced in the century and a half following the Black Death. For Sidhu, obscene comedy emerges as a discourse through which writers could address not only issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage but also concerns as varied as the conflicts between Christian doctrine and lived experience, the exercise of free will, the social consequences of violence, and the nature of good government.