{"id":12,"date":"2008-03-11T07:34:53","date_gmt":"2008-03-11T12:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/?p=12"},"modified":"2021-10-28T09:13:19","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T14:13:19","slug":"contextualizing-editing-censoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"Contextualizing, Editing, Censoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Playgoer is worried that \u201cRachel Corrie\u201d Buffered in Beantown<\/a> may be pointing to a troublesome trend developing in theatre.<\/p>\n

He his talking about the \u201ccontextualization\u201d of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie<\/em> by the New Repertory Theatre in a preview report on the production in the Boston Globe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[New Rep] had originally planned to pair \u201cMy Name Is Rachel Corrie\u201d with the one-act \u201cTo Pay the Price,\u201d about the late Israeli Army hero Jonathan \u201cYoni\u201d Netanyahu. But after the Netanyahu family heard of the plans, it asked that \u201cTo Pay the Price\u201d be pulled from the lineup, deeming the two plays incompatible.<\/p>\n

Forging ahead, New Rep replaced \u201cPrice\u201d with the solo show \u201cPieces,\u201d written and performed by an Israeli-American, Zohar Tirosh, about her experience serving in the Israeli military in the mid-1990s, when peace seemed like a real possibility. The company is also surrounding the two works – staged in its 90-seat black-box space – with related panel discussions,talkbacks, readings, and films, including the Oscar-nominated documentary \u201cPromises.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Rep\u2019s producing artistic director, Rick Lombardo, says that this mini-festival on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not part of an effort to deflect criticism of \u201cRachel Corrie,\u201d but is instead the result of nine months of planning and dialogue that he and his staff engaged in with various communities, from the Arab Anti-Defamation League to the American Civil Liberties Union to the Jewish Community Relations Council.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course this was very similar to the approach that New York Theater Workshop\u2019s artictic director Jim Nicola had wanted to take in presenting the piece. He was roundly criticized and unjustly accused of censorship for postponing the production to accomplish that goal.<\/p>\n

Garrett is right-on in his observation that, \u201cIsn\u2019t it funny that this approach has not been advocated for plays on any other issue<\/em>?\u201d But I think he is off in his concluding observation and fears of a new trend.<\/p>\n

But look: we don\u2019t see this approach taken with plays of any other subject, do we? (Or so far, of any other plays!) So obviously we don\u2019t need to worry about this becoming a trend, right? Or do we\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Jeremy Gerard reported <\/a>at the time of the controversy, \u201cRachel Corrie\u201d was not the first play on this issue that was postponed to await \u201ccontextalization.\u201d There was nothing new or trend setting in the approach that NYTW was attempting and what is scheduled to happen now in Boston.<\/p>\n

In the U.S. this season, an off-Broadway company, the New York Theatre Workshop \u2014 probably best known as the group that developed \u201cRent\u201d as well as TonyKushner\u2019s \u201cHomebody\/Kabul\u201d \u2014 was to have presented \u201cRachel Corrie.\u201d But artistic director James Nicola announced last week that the production was being \u201cdelayed\u201d while the group considered the best way to \u201ccontextualize\u201d the play. Translation: People are complaining that presenting this work gives a bullhorn to Israel\u2019s enemies, and that makes us very nervous. So we\u2019re going to see if we can render \u201cMy Name Is Rachel Corrie\u201d toothless or, barring that, postpone it and pray really hard that the problem eventually just goes away.<\/p>\n

Papp\u2019s `Storytellers\u2019<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Joe Papp also may have hoped when something similar happened to the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and overseer of the Public Theater. In the summer of 1989,Papp abruptly canceled an appearance by a touring Palestinian theater troupe. El-Hakawati (\u201cThe Storytellers\u201d) was slated to perform \u201cThe Story of Kufur Shamma ,\u201d the tale of a Palestinian refugee\u2019s return to his long-deserted village 40 years after the birth of the modern state of Israel.<\/p>\n

As with \u201cRachel Corrie,\u201d protests erupted. Somewhat more transparent than Nicola, Papp simply announced that he\u2019d had second thoughts. Since he had never presented a pro-Israeli play, he told the press, \u201cit just seemed inappropriate\u201d to produce \u201cKufur Shamma\u201d as his first statement on such a hand grenade of an issue. Thinking he could buy time as well as support, he promised to present the play within a year. In fact,Papp, already dying from cancer, never did produce \u201cKufur Shamma.\u201d<\/p>\n

`Contextualizing\u2019 the Play<\/p>\n

When it opened later that summer under a different producer\u2019s banner, no protests ensued, and the review by a third-string New York Times critic referred only obliquely to the earlier controversy, thoughtfully leaving Papp\u2019s name, and that of his theater, completely out of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Interesting that Garrett points to Wally Shawn\u2019s Aunt Dan and Lemon<\/em>, a controversial play which premiered at The Public also in the late \u201980\u2019s, as evidence of a play that didn\u2019t need to run for cover when confronting the unpleasant.<\/p>\n

So by running for cover behind as many \u201cdiverse views\u201d as possible, we deprive the theatre of that special frisson<\/em> that can only come from confronting the unpleasant. Even if it is <\/em>\u201cwrong.\u201d Think of that ending from Wallace Shawn\u2019s Aunt Dan and Lemon, <\/em>for instance, where the heroine leaves us with an atrocious monologue justifying Kissingerian ethics on warcrimes, assassination, and such. Now imagine someone coming out after the show having to explain to you, \u201cNow boys and girls, that was justa play<\/em>. We<\/em> don\u2019t really think that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, as Jeff Jones points out in his smart essay On Geezer Theatre<\/a>, although Aunt Dan and Lemon <\/em>did not exactly run for cover, its author Wallace Shawn did invent his own special species of buffering or contextalizing to frame the play.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The really curious thing about Shawn\u2019s play-and the best evidence of the theatre\u2019s provinciality in these matters-is that the author felt it necessary to add both prologue and epilogue explaining at length how one could write (and read) a play which didn\u2019t unambiguously reflect the beliefs of the playwright.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The epilogue that Jeff Jones references is an essay that Wally Shawn wrote as addendum to the published text of the play. The prologue refers to a peculiar act of contextalization by the playwright who was also an actor in the original ensemble.<\/p>\n

At the original production of this play at The Public in 1986, there was reportedly such a vocal and disturbed response from some in the audience that Shawn wrote an essay \u201cNotes in Justification of Putting the Audience Through a Difficult Night at the Theater,\u201d and handed it out to the audience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Garrett found it a preposterous notion that someone would need to explain Aunt Dan and Lemon<\/em> with a statement like \u201cNow boys and girls, that was just a play<\/em>. We<\/em> don\u2019t really think that.\u201d But in reading the \u201cwritten prologue\u201d<\/a> passed out to the audience, the playwright Shawn seems to be accentuating exactly that very simple reality of \u201cit\u2019s just a play\u201d to his audience, so as to guide them into the correct reception of the play and afterthoughts of the experience.<\/p>\n

A play represents a self-enclosed little world for the audience to examine. It\u2019s an opportunity to look objectively at a group of people, to assess them, to react to them, and to measure oneself against them, to ask, \u201cAm I like that?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The politics of reception are complicated. Both playwright Shawn and artistic director Nicola were similarly attempting to manipulate audience reception. Nicola\u2019s action like Shawn\u2019s should be labeled production dramaturgy, or perhaps even public relations, but not censorship. To do so trivializes the fact that real and dangerous forces of censorship do exist in the world. Jeremy Gerard does exactly that when he suggests that even threats of violence should not give producers pause.<\/p>\n

Another person Nicola might turn to for guidance is Lynne Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club. When Meadow announced plans to offer \u201cCorpus Christi,\u201d a TerrenceMcNally play suggesting that Jesus might have been gay, she faced demonstrations and threats of violence. So she and executive producer Barry Grove canceled the production, briefly suffering the very public indignity of an artists\u2019 boycott of her theater. Ultimately the play went up, uncontextualized. The protests and threats came and left, life went on, Christendom endured.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The more apropos play and production which Jeremy Gerard doesn\u2019t cite in his article is one with which both he and I had an unique relationship. He was working for the theatre section of the New York Times in 1987 when our theatre sent out our press release on Rainer Werner Fassbinder\u2019s Trash, The City and Death. <\/em>Jeremy Gerard was the first journalist to contact us. He then called and talked to me as director probably every third day in the final weeks of our rehearsal. He insisted up until the production opening that he was writing an article for the Times. The last word I heard from him was laden with the frustration of a writer suffering under censorship or self-censorship in some way and yet still emphatically insisting, \u201cI will write something. I don\u2019t know what. But I promise that I will write something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fassbinder\u2019s Trash, The City and Death<\/em> had a history of failed attempts at productions as well as volumes of critical debate on its merits. Branded anti-Semitic by some, consensus was that the play was unproduceable for that reason. Fassbinder\u2019s piece was speaking to real estate speculation exploiting the city of Frankfurt; our production found parallels in mid \u201880\u2019s Lower East Side on New York. (Fassbinder had stipulated that the play\u2019s premiere had to be in either Frankfurt or New York.) After rehearsing the play for nine months with an ensemble of twenty-five, we produced its premiere in the celebrated artists\u2019 squat ABC No Rio<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Happenstance had one third of the ensemble members Jewish, which would be odd in any American city other than New York. At the time, and probably still true today, there were more Jews in NYC than any other city in the world, including TelAviv. The issue that this play scrutinized was our issue. The issue of our ensemble and our city. Whatever bravado the ensemble assumed or projected in the face of the censorship and threats was eclipsed by the mostly unacknowledged grace that the art form itself provided us. Theatre is still that near sanctified space where we come face to face with the vulnerability of our humanness.<\/p>\n

As someone who was in constant contact with me, Jeremy Gerard was well aware of the layers of covert and overt censorship surrounding our production. Ten days prior to our opening, the Anti-Defamation League of the influential Jewish B\u2019nai B\u2019rith organization spread warnings on the play, calling it a \u201ccatalyst for antisemitic and racist reactions.\u201d A few days later we received a tacit death threat on our phone machine, this at a time when the violent Jewish Defense League was still active in the city.<\/p>\n

This world premiere production of Trash, The City and Death <\/em>was an international news story. Press from four different countries in Europe came to film the opening. This \u201cuncontextualized\u201d controversial play and production received every type of press coverage imaginable, locally in New York and throughout Europe, but Jeremy Gerard\u2019s promised story never appeared. I never asked him why and he never told me. Most of us in the ensemble assumed his editors at The Times had nixed it. If I asked Jeremy Gerard now, he might not even remember the story he was trying write. I know that my own two-decade old memory of facts is as they say, convenient, so I would imagine his memory to be the same. It\u2019s a memory that edits and contextualizes. It\u2019s a memory that censors the story until it fits into the truth we want to believe and recite.<\/p>\n

CORRECTION<\/strong>: I had not talked to Jeremy Gerard in twenty years or followed his journalism in that time. Turns out that he has been a longtime advocate for artistic freedom. He pointed me to this feature in New York <\/em>magazine<\/a> that gives a fuller look at his journalism on the Manhattan Theatre Club controversy ten years ago. As this excerpt proves Jeremy obviously never minimized the threats of violence or any other attempts at censorship against the producers. The article shows his sincere attempt to differentiate the various concerns involved in this complex issue. I had suggested something different above.  My bad.<\/p>\n

In fact, they had good reason to be fearful. After reports about the play appeared in the New York Post, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights called on elected officials to cut off the company\u2019s public funding and attacked the play \u2014 or at least the idea of the play, since clearly no one at the league had read it \u2014 as \u201cdespicable\u201d and \u201csick beyond words.\u201d And lest anyone not share that view, the league promised to \u201cwage a war that no one will forget\u201d against anyone foolhardy enough to present Corpus Christi.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the theater was getting telephone threats addressed to \u201cJew guilty homosexual Terrence McNally. Because of you, we will exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground . . . Death to the Jews worldwide.\u201d Those threats, Meadow and Grove insisted, led to their decision to delay the production until they could ensure adequate security<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Playgoer is worried that \u201cRachel Corrie\u201d Buffered in Beantown may be pointing to a troublesome trend developing in theatre. He his talking about the \u201ccontextualization\u201d of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie by the New Repertory Theatre in a preview report on the production in the Boston Globe. [New Rep] had originally planned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theatre-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":798,"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intlculturelab.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}