God of Vengeance

A pious Orthodox Jew, Ieikl earns his living by a decidedly unorthodox trade: he keeps a brothel. Guilt and remorse sound in him without pause, and he tries to become respectable by buying himself a better moral life: he pays for a Torah scroll to be written and wants to marry his daughter to a yeshiva student. Seemingly a scandalous play - it excels in its nuanced portrait of the lives of Jewish prostitutes, which is what got the entire cast arrested on charges of obscenity at the Broadway premiere in 1923 - this representative work of Sholem Asch remains in essence a morality play with contemporary force, in its attempt to win forgiveness and reach a state of grace. Under Alexander Hausvater's direction, the struggle for atonement works today as a reflection and a warning about what follows when a society's spiritual ideals dissolve, a society ruled by corruption and falsehood, much like the wholly collapsing world of God of Vengeance.