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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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