When Paula Vogel’s Indecent premiered a decade ago, it offered a profound meditation on the intersections of queerness and Jewish identity. In many ways, Faygele, written by Shimmy Braun and directed by Hannah Chissick, feels like a tribute.
While Indecent ambitiously weaves together multiple themes, Faygele chooses to focus on the experience of a gay man growing up in an American Orthodox Jewish community who speaks Yiddish. In such a culture, homosexuality — a word we may not have heard for quite a while — is taboo, and being gay means a lifelong navigation between cultural expectations and one’s true self.
The play opens with Ari Freed (Ilan Galkoff) as both narrator and character, recounting his life at his own funeral on David Shields’s richly symbolic Jewish set. This concept could work well if the role-shifting were smooth and the direct address more natural. However, in execution — especially when the spotlight shifts to his parents to reveal their inner monologues — it feels a bit awkward and fragmented, even outdated.
Ari’s father, Dr Freed (Ben Caplan), is portrayed as an authoritarian Jewish patriarch — tyrannical, eccentric, and dictatorial, objectifying everyone but himself. His mother, Mrs Freed (Clara Francis), is a long-suffering, emotionally repressed matriarch who cannot and dare not rebel, using a smile as her coping mechanism. Both performances are strong, but the writing leans too heavily on archetypes.
The characters begin to take on richer psychological depth when the play returns to a more naturalistic mode, rather than Ari jumping in and out of the narrative: his family tensions, his never-realised graduation ceremony, his Star of David tattoo, the full embodiment of his desire, the cutting off of his payot, and his heart-breaking final moment when every member of his community rejects him.
These moments, accompanied by Dan Samson’s melancholic and nostalgic soundscape, feel raw and painfully honest, culminating in a haunting sense of unbearable helplessness and despair. Galkoff delivers Ari’s emotional spiral with vulnerability so convincing that the audience holds its breath.
Like Indecent, there is a play-within-a-play involving a literal turkey prince — yes, really. When Nic Farman’s lighting shifts to glamorous rainbow colours, one of the most brilliant and inventive moments of the play emerges. It’s hilarious, absurd, and unexpectedly moving.
The emotional climax lies in a powerful monologue by Sammy Stein (Yiftach Mizrahi), an older gay man in the same community who has tried to suppress his sexuality through marriage. In this monologue, he sharply exposes the horrifying reality of being homosexual — literally, the imaginary, graphic images of same-sex intercourse conjured in the minds of straight people, images they would never dare imagine for their straight friends or family.
Another emotional high point comes through a monologue written by Ari but delivered at his funeral by the kind-hearted Rabbi Lev (Andrew Paul), a gentle figure of “progressiveness” who still struggles to pronounce “LGBT” correctly. In this moment, the trauma of being gay — and the way the world, society, institutions, and culture have treated us — is laid excruciatingly bare. Anyone with a heart of flesh would find it impossible not to shed a tear.
Faygele speaks with unexpected universality. Same-sex love may feel normalised today, but in the UK, it was only legalised just over a decade ago. If we mark Stonewall as the beginning of LGBT activism, it was just over half a century ago. But the history of gay people being threatened, insulted, silenced, abused, murdered, forced to leave home, to marry the opposite sex, or to take their own lives, is a history as long and shadowed as Judaism — as the Torah (The Old Testament) itself. In this sense, Faygele is a sharp and necessary reminder, urging us not to forget a history so deeply ingrained in our culture.
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