God of Vengeance: A Play

by Donald Margulies, Sholem Asch

“Diabolical ingenuity and rueful tenderness…a playwright with a particularly pungent and intelligent vision.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times

“A vivid panorama of a Lower East Side street scene crammed with grimy tenements, riotous store fronts and packed pushcarts…epic theatre…a fascinating new adaptation of Sholom Asch’s 1906 drama.” –Malcolm Johnson, Hartford Courant

Jack Chapman runs a brothel on the first floor of his tenement and while he is prosperous, he is not virtuous. For his daughter Rivkele, however, Jack aspires for something more—respectability through her marriage to a religious scholar. But Rivkele’s tender love affair with Manke, one of Jack’s prostitutes, threatens to destroy the upcoming marriage, and with it, Jack’s dream of redemption. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Donald Margulies transforms Sholom Asch’s classic mortality tale into a work of spellbinding power.

Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends . The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance , his many plays include Collected Stories , The Country House, Sight Unseen , The Model Apartment , The Loman Family Picnic , What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Time Stands Still . Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Jewish, Judaism, LGBT, Fiction

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Born in Brooklyn in 1954, Donald Margulies grew up in Trump Village, a Coney Island housing project built by Donald Trump's father. Margulies was exposed early to the theatre. His father, a wallpaper salesman, played show tunes on the family hi-fi and, despite a limited income, often took his children to Manhattan to attend Broadway plays and musicals.

Margulies studied visual arts at the Pratt Institute before transferring to State University of New York to pursue a degree in playwriting. During the early 80s, he collaborated with Joseph Papp, and his first Off-Broadway play, Found a Peanut, was produced at the Public Theatre. In 1983, he moved with his wife to New Haven, Connecticut, so that she could attend Yale Medical School.

In 1992, Margulies' career really began to take off when Sight Unseen won an Obie for Best New American Play. Some of his other plays include The Loman Family Picnic; Pitching to the Star; Zimmer; Luna Park; What's Wrong With This Picture?; The Model Apartment; Broken Sleep; July 7, 1994, and The God of Vengeance. Dinner With Friends--which tells the story of a seemingly happy couple who re-examine their own relationship when their best friends decide to divorce--won Margulies a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He had previously been nominated for a Pulitzer for Collected Stories, a play about a Jewish writer who is betrayed by her young disciple.

Elected to the Dramatists Guild Council in 1993, Margulies has received grants from Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His plays have premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Jewish Repertory Theatre. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.

Reviews

[Lily Redman · Rating 5 out of 5]

My only critique is that I wish it was longer

[Robert Teeter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an adaptation of a play by the Yiddish playwright Sholem Asch. A Jewish family lives above a brothel, which the father owns. He and his wife have a daughter. They want to go respectable and marry her off to a good husband. Meanwhile she falls in love with one of the prostitutes. Asch set his play in the time and place in which he wrote it: 1906 Poland. Donald Margulies, in this adaptation, moves the setting to New York in 1923, which happens to be the time and place when an English translation of the play caused a scandal that resulted in the cast being convicted of obscenity. (That story is at the core of Paula Vogel's recent play, "Indecent.")

It's a beautiful story with many themes to chew on. Why is it so hard to reform oneself? Is it force of habit or opposition from powerful forces? There's the individual against society. Both Jack (the father) and Rivkele (the daughter) find themselves at odds with the world. There's the secular-observant dichotomy. Can American Jews have a foot in both worlds? There's filial love and romantic love, and sometimes they conflict. There's the gay-straight dichotomy (though I read an essay that said that Yiddish didn't have a word for "lesbian" in 1906).

I'm reading various translations of this play -- this one before seeing "Indcent," the others after. I'm not sure which I'll like best, but in all of them the conflicts Asch identifies can be clearly seen.

[Shell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need Rifkele to live a happy life with Manke is all.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I taught the play 17 years ago in an LGBT theatre course, I hadn't read it since, and I wanted to revisit it after watching the PBS presentation of the new Broadway play, 'Indecent', which revolves around the censorship of the play when it was presented in America in 1923. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that Margulies' version is an adaptation, rather than a literal translation, which transposes the action from 1906 Poland to 1923 America, and in doing so, dilutes a lot of the power of the original. Enough of Ashe's version remains that it isn't a TOTAL loss, but it made me seek out a more faithful translation.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slightly updated version of Sholem Asch's play of the same name. Donald Margulies has moved the action from Poland to New York in the 1920's. Can you bargain with God for another person, when you, yourself have no relationship with God? How does love manage to manifest when there is no stable example of it around you? Read this in preparation for Paula Vogel's Indecent which is a play about the controversy God of Vengeance caused in the US in the 1920's, when it had played around the world with nary a problem.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

A play written by a Polish-Jewish playwright. After a performance in the United States in 1923 the entire cast was arrested for indecency. I wanted to read it because the recent Broadway play Indecent is based on that story. I failed to read it prior to seeing the show, which I wish I had. I was still able to follow the story, but still wish I had knowledge of the original play going in. The broadcast a recording of Indecent on PBS earlier this fall, which I have saved on my DVR to rewatch now that I've read the play. It is much more scandalous than I would have expected from the time. 

[Richard Odier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy play beautifully translated in English/ yiddish, a must read in yiddish literature.
Written at the beginning of the XXth century by Sholem Asch and still very modern and amazingly but nicely provocative towards some kind of believers.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard about this play through seeing Indecent on Broadway, which I very much enjoyed. God of Vengeance lives up to the picture painted of it in Indecent. It is complex, engaging, and very much ahead of its time. I would love to see a production of it some day.

[Stacie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Read” this play as a live staging by Augustana College in Rock Island IL. What do we owe God? What do we owe ourselves? What do we owe our children? How can we live as moral human beings?! Pretty important questions to ponder on a Saturday night.

[Kelly Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The scene in the rain is heartbreakingly lovely

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

The original "God of Vengeance" was a play by Sholem Asch that achieved notoriety in its day through the frank depiction of a same-sex love affair between two women. This is a contemporary adaptation of that play that evidently restricts itself to leaving out some of the scenes so as to make the play manageable in length. The sense of the original evidently remains.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't understand why this is not more widely known and performed, besides being one hundred years ahead of it's time, it's dramatic and fun and well-structured and sensual. It's Fiddler on the Roof, but subversive, with a father figure to rank up their with the dramatic men of the stage. This should be part of the theatrical canon as much as Streetcar, or Death of a Salesman. I cannot think of a more instantly classic scene than two women having relations on one side of a door while a mother loudly describes one of the girl's betrothed from the other room. It just feels as iconic as say, the Balcony Scene. And it should be that iconic. And this is a wonderful, immediate translation.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this play, but reading its companion piece “Indecent” creates a larger story behind the original. Understanding the world around Asch while this was being performed and seeing the outcome, brings a more in depth appreciation for the original. By itself: 3.5⭐️