Threaded Order Chronological Order
| Censorship is bad | |
| Posted by: Greg_M 08:56 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
| In reply to: re: IS "MAME" NOW UNPRODUCABLE DUE TO CHARLOTTESVILLE? - summertheater 04:21 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
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| you have to learn from the past and you can't do that is you alter it, that's why old plays are still worth producing | |
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| re: Censorship is bad | |
| Posted by: ryhog 10:29 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
| In reply to: Censorship is bad - Greg_M 08:56 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
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| Mame is not a play one learns from. That's really preposterous. We must study our history, warts, cancers and all, and the theatre can and should and does play an essential part in that, but that does not mean we have to glorify the ugly aspects by making them seem swell. | |
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| re: Censorship is bad | |
| Posted by: summertheater 10:43 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Censorship is bad - ryhog 10:29 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
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| Should Manhattan Theater Club have had the right to show Corpus Christi in the 1990s even though it highly offended Catholics (and audience members had to pass through metal detectors)? Or should we have censored that as well ? To Catholics, it was a "wart", "a cancer" and highly offensive. It's literally frightening that anyone would think to censor any of these: Mame, the Michael Moore show, and Corpus Christi. Each of these shows offend certain people. But censorship is exactly what "1984 on Broadway" warned about. Once you start to censor any of these shows (no matter how reprehensible they may be to some), we slowly lose our free speech as Americans. |
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| re: Censorship is bad | |
| Posted by: ryhog 11:18 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Censorship is bad - summertheater 10:43 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
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| I am not in favor of censoring anything. And I don't think most folks here are talking about censorship. Censorship is what a government does, not what individuals do. Every theatre company selects what to present and what not to. That's what I refer to. I am in favor of not patronizing things that glorify what I believe is not worthy, and even protesting against them. I support the rights of (those) Catholics who protested Corpus Christi, and of course they are not obliged to go see what offends them. When we talk about what cannot be produced, we are making an assessment of whether people would go see it, whether others would protest against it and whether a theatre wants to spend its resources on something hideous. |
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| re: Censorship is bad | |
| Last Edit: Singapore/Fling 11:21 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 11:16 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Censorship is bad - summertheater 10:43 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
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| Those three examples all speak to very different issues, and nothing links them aside from the fact that certain people may be offended by them. That's a broad category, one into which we could fit any number of unrelated things, and one which doesn't serve us in this current discussion. My opposition to monuments to the Confederacy is not that they are offensive, it is that they are oppressive. So if we are going to draw a line from Charlottesville to "Mame", I'd argue that the best line to draw is how the effects of slavery have warped our society, our culture, and our humanity. The Peckerwoods are warped by their devotion to an idealized version of the past in which they held control over other human beings, the same as the people who were marching in Charlottesville have been warped by their devotion to white supremacy. In its way, that devotion is something that the musical skewers. If anything, the events in Charlottesville make me *more* interested in seeing a revival of "Mame", but only if the production finds a way to put even more pressure on the Peckerwoods and their backwards belief system, which relies upon the oppression of fellow human beings. You mention the metal detectors at "Corpus Christi", but not their reason for existence: the theater had received threats of violence because it posed a threat to christian teaching and ideology, and because it elevated homosexuals to the realm of the saintly. Those who wished to silence the play were those who wished to oppress homosexuals, and their violent rhetoric was not far removed from the violent rhetoric of white supremacists, including those who marched in Charlottesville. When ryhog wrote of warts and cancers, he was writing of the institution of slavery. If we're going to advocate for free speech and the commemoration of our history, I think we also must use that speech to acknowledge that ours is a history of oppression, and that the tools of oppression that were used in the past are also used in the present. It is a wart and cancer that carries a moral weight with it, a weight that White America must grapple with, in terms of the stories we tell and the ways that we influence our society. Part of the moral weight, as I see it, is not to make false equivalencies and otherwise diminish the gravity of the wrong that was done and continues to be done to non-white people in America. While you frame this as a story of people being offended, I encourage you to consider it instead as a story of people being oppressed, and to ask yourself: should we as a society oppress or elevate people of color and other outsiders? How are the stories that we tell as a culture part of that work? And i would also kindly remind you that no one has actually spoken of censoring "Mame". A poster who seems to share your values and point of view raised this as a hypothetical. That poster is the person who thought of censoring "Mame" by imagining others doing it, but no one (to my awareness) has actually proposed that we do so. |
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| re: Censorship is bad | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 09:19 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
| In reply to: Censorship is bad - Greg_M 08:56 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
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| Part of learning from the past is changing our civic behavior and adjusting our society so that it is less oppressive. Nothing that we are seeing in the removal of these statues is an alteration of our history - it's an alteration of our present. To many of us, the removal of these statues is an example of how we are learning from the past, and how we are making strides to break down systems of racism. As had been noted elsewhere on this thread, many of these statues are not benign markers of the past; they were erected, well after the war, as a way of reminding people of color of this country's history of oppressing them, so that they would stay oppressed. Removing those statues is a small step towards liberation. The removal of these statues isn't censorship, which would suggest that the government or some other authority is silencing critical or dangerous viewpoints. The removal of these statues is happening in response to a citizenry who has stated that they have learned from the past, as you request, and that they are ready to create new public spaces that don't demand that we revere oppressors who literally risked their lives in order to maintain the institution of slavery. The removal of these statues does not change the past. The people who advocate for the removal of these statues do not request that history books be re-written to show that the United States peacefully ended slavery in the 1860s. Many of those who advocate for the removal of these statues do so with the belief that the history must still be taught, so that we don't forget the genocide and oppression that our country was built upon. This country was built upon slavery, and this country has always been morally compromised by it. Removing these monuments to slavery does not in any way alter those facts. "Hamilton" hasn't been re-written to remove the slavery rap battle. "Molasses and Rum" hasn't been excised from "1776". These great works of art still stand, and they still carry a powerful criticism of our horrific past. Let us celebrate the lesson we have learned, rather than celebrating the sins that are ancestors committed. And let's say that race-based oppression does belong to the past, rather than the present. And let's start that conversation by doing the simples thing possible: removing the tools of those oppression from our public space, so that we may build something better from our blood-stained legacy. |
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| re: Censorship is bad | |
| Posted by: joerialto 03:45 pm EDT 08/18/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Censorship is bad - Singapore/Fling 09:19 pm EDT 08/17/17 | |
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| If they could 'fix' 'Annie Get Your Gun' & make it palatable to Broadway audiences in the 1990s, they can figure out another way to do the title number of 'Mame' without glorifying the Confederacy. | |
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| re: Censorship is bad | |
| Posted by: Chromolume 04:00 pm EDT 08/18/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Censorship is bad - joerialto 03:45 pm EDT 08/18/17 | |
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| How did they "fix" Annie Get Your Gun? By starting with the truly over-obvious choice of taking the "Show Business" number and putting it at the top of the show, now halfway through Act I where the writers put it? (The writers were smart enough to AVOID the obvious choice. They were right.) And going "cliche slow" to start with, building the tempo as the number goes? Cheapened the show, IMO. (They did the same kind of thing with that revival of Kiss Me, Kate in the same season.) Simply taking out "I'm An Indian Too" and other judicious cuts might have been fine. The fact that they felt like they really had to re-invent the whole show certainly wasn't a "fix" by any means. |
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