Forbidden Theater

by Paul Foster

Does this right, wrapped in its bold, shining cloak of words, disappear into the border? Are we inseparable from a right that defines us so absolutely? When we take a seat on an airplane, are we invisibly stripped of the warm cloak in a cold world? Is, then, a prayer the only defense? Angels and Ministers of Grace, defend us.

High anxiety questions when you're a traveling American, when you're a traveling American in the arts, when you're a traveling American in the arts who writes in high profile form, the theater. You're out front in the firing line.

A dynamic economy exports some of the darndest things. Like a stowaway hiding among the bags of soybeans and the boxes of software, we are exporting the most subversive line of words ever written - the First Amendment. Free speech, the unintended consequence of free enterprise, is woven into every act we do, into every line we write and send into the world. It is inextricable from the soybeans and the software.

Accelerating this, telecommunications is compressing the world and at the same time expanding the reach of everyone's ideas. Our thoughts - and the speech in which we wrap them, in plays, books, song lyrics, film, video, email, catalogues, magazines, newspapers, comic books, carried on satellites and the Internet - are confronting tentacles of taboos, walls of laws, and even the knout of the censor.

www is testing freedom of speech in places marked, "Terra Incognita," on the maps that the Federalists used, and the battlefield of their Bill of Rights has expanded from the cognita of Philadelphia to the incognita of some dangerous geography. Will a sliver of silica eviscerate or liberate this obstinate passion of the Federalists?

Now then, who will win, who will drink the hemlock? The speaker or the censor? Oh, Thomas Jefferson, what have you started? Oh, Alan Turing, will you finish it?

To frame the issues: Is freedom of artistic expression an absolute or is it conditioned on where the audience is? Should a touring theater production be altered to fit the local audience? The text self-censored? The staging altered? Should a playwright consider this as he composes? Is there an elastic band around the First Amendment that says, " Be prudent or beware"? And conversely, should nothing be forbidden, short of poor grammar? If film shows every possible aspect of human behavior, couldn't theater do the same? Or does the immediacy of the theater, its very "liveness," put special restraints on what is allowed? Does the venue determine how big a slice of the First Amendment pie you get?

The First Amendment attaches no conditions. It's universal. Or is it? If these clouds are seeded full, let's slicker-up and go into the storm.

The program for Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi, as produced at Manhattan Theatre Club, New York City, 22 September 1998 to 29 November 1998. PLAYBILL® is a registered trademark of Playbill, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

In 1998, in New York City, the most liberal of theater venues, Corpus Christi on the stage of the Manhattan Theater Club was picketed. Critics tiptoed lightly, careful not to slobber too much, careful not to bludgeon too much, both of which they do equally well. After all, bomb threats were made. Audience had to pass through a metal detector. Guards inspected the floor under every seat before every performance. It was bold to go to that theater. You would think twice before you took Aunt Kate. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the brave timidity of the critics finished the run before anyone was hurt. The metal detectors were packed up, and the play exported to London where they are more used to bomb threats. However, even London wasn't used to what came next. The fatwah.

In London, the playwright had a price placed on his head, as did the writer of the novel Satanic Verses in 1989.

The fatwah decree is: The assassin who dispatches the one anathematized will be sent to Paradise where he may for all eternity play with lithe and supple fourteen-year-old girls in perfumed swimming pools and smoke hashish until his brains shrink to the size of a pucker.

In the case of Satanic Verses it's hard to believe that the clerics in the holy city of Qum actually read it. The book's as dry as drinking powdered stone.

The reasoning behind the Corpus Christi decree was that although Jesus Christ was not Muslim, he was nonetheless a prophet, and the playwright blasphemed a prophet of God by saying that he was gay.

This is not a new idea. It's been whispered about for two millennia. But not spoken on a stage before an audience paying fourteen pounds for a seat in the stalls. The quadratics being, the Jack in the box equals only giggles. The Jack out of the box equals fatwah.

Some springs must remain forever coiled. Cough discreetly and exit.

The assassin of the writer goes to paradise where he is paid in lithe and supples, plus hashish, plus $2,800,000, plus - in a new twist added this year - the accumulated compounded interest. Naturally, if the assassin himself is killed in the discharge of this religious slaughter, he is sent express to paradise, but the $2,800,000 bounty is rolled over for the next hit man. The interest keeps compounding but not, I think, the lithe and the supples. Qum rewards the needy, not the greedy. Although, it doesn't take a Smith Barney estate planner to calculate that a prudent hashshashin would wait a while for that interest to churn into a gusher.

"Hashshashin" is where we get our word "assassin." Survivors of the Children's Crusade brought the word back along with the concept of zero, coffee, algebra, and their dirty laundry for mom to wash.

The quarrelsome clerics of Qum state that their version of appropriate speech does indeed travel across national borders. Yours doesn't. And the resulting tangle is formidable. The playwright is American. The venue is England. The hashshashin and his handlers are Persian. The bank where the bounty is on deposit is in Switzerland. Of course, the Swiss will deny it. Everyone knows that Swiss banks always tell the truth about deposits. Oh, sure. You bet. Natürlich.

It would be reasonable to hold an open public discussion in Qum for both sides to state their cases and stop acting like hateful spiders instead of spinning silk. Oh, sure. You bet.

It was the 1970's. I had five simultaneous bookings in five different languages in state theaters in Europe, some in countries with soul-chilling repression. To get a play licensed behind the Iron Curtain, the translators had to outwit the censors who handled the script like it was printed on fish. It took courage. It took cleverness and sometimes it reeked of genius.

Such a one was Radu Nichita Rappaport. Soon after its Broadway run in New York, Rappaport translated Elizabeth I for the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest, Romania. I was invited to speak at the Writers Union.

I came. I saw. My hotel room was looted daily. Could it be mice? Naw, a Marxist mouse wouldn't. Well, shouldn't. Yet, strangely, every day, little bags of sweet candies I had bought in Denmark were missing. (Of course, so were my T-shirts, socks, shaving cream, a couple of shirts, blue jeans, and a full bottle of Glenlivet Reserve.)

Romania is a major producer of beet sugar, always has been, but just try to buy sugar in Bucharest. The Russians got it all. The Romanians got sweet dreams.

"Rappi" knew his Shakespeare well in five languages. "Sweet are the uses of adversity." He twisted a one-second scene in Elizabeth I into a lion's roar for free speech.

The scene: Teatime in the Star Chamber. E. Regina passes the sugar bowl to Lord Burghley. Burghley turns the sugar bowl upside down. Shakes it. Nothing comes out. The audience is ready for this one. He smacks his lips. He rolls his eyes. He passes the bowl around to the front row of the audience who do the same, smacking their lips loudly. Soon the whole audience is smacking lips in ecstasy of remembered sweetness passed. Ion Caragioli, Romania's great comedian, something like our Zero Mostel, had the audience shaking the light grid with laughter, the tears of bitter frustration running down their faces, streaking their makeup, their voices hoarse with stifled rage. It humbled me. I couldn't write a scene that squeezed my heart like this.

Comrade Ceaucescu's censor could only gnash his teeth. What else could he do? Rappaport had piked him on his ballpoint, good and sharp, long before the populace rose up and shot Comrade Ceaucescu, his bull-headed virago, and his coke-headed son. For once, the good guys won.

The irrepressible urge to speak freely is an impulse that is creative, if not downright godly. The right to get up on your hind quarters and say what's on your mind eventually will be universal because that right is already there, printed on the genome helix of the race. It's implicit. If you have an opposable thumb, it's implicit that you will make a tool. If you have a human mind, it's implicit that you will speak what it thinks. It's erroneous to call it a right. It's an implicity. It's the Bill of Implicities. It's inherent to humans, an essential part of the human condition. It's just not written down yet in some places. But it is there. I know it is. I have been to Romania. I saw the sugar bowl. It overflowed with such sweetness that I will never forget.

Turn ahead a few pages. After being muffled in the rusty folds of the Iron Curtain, it is easy to become disoriented into thinking that all megalomaniacs are left of Lenin. Then, I went to Brazil. This time it was the flip side of the syndrome.

As I said, this little right has some big enemies. And as I said, it was the 70's and discontent seethed from every pore of the body politic. Yet, at that time in Brazil there was good reason to seethe.

It was a writers' workshop. I hobbled to a little platform. I had fractured my ankle playing ice hockey with my faster-than-Wayne-Gretzky-ninth-grade-nephew a few days before I took the plane to Belo Horizonte. I paid for my hubris. Ninth-graders take no prisoners. A few journalists were there. I was asked what did I think about censorship of the arts, and I replied without giving it a second thought, "Censorship is the death of the arts." What other answer can there possibly be?

Headline from article by Luis Fernando Emediato, dateline Belo Horizonte in Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 3 February 1977. (Translated: "Paul Foster: Censorship is the death of the arts.")

The next morning my casual comments were on front pages across the country. Their Minister of the Interior called the US ambassador. The US ambassador called the US consulate. The US consulate called me at my hotel and told me not to leave my room and don't eat breakfast. He would be there within thirty minutes.

The Consul arrived in fifteen minutes with two magna cum laude graduates of Gold's Gym. Their bulges had ammo clips, and, strangely, I felt my hair roots prickle. Their eyes were like Instamatics, their lenses wide open. Their irises were so compressed I couldn't see the color.

"No, don't pack. Crossing the lobby with a suitcase will… just no." We took the stairs from the 32nd floor, my ankle screaming for mercy. "Have you seen the newspapers this morning?"

Once outside, I was told that a Time magazine correspondent had gone missing a few weeks prior. In a country as big as Brazil, it's easy to lose a writer. I was told that on the 32nd floor, I was ripe for defenestration. Get in the car.

I slept that night inside the Consulate. Once each hour, a Marine guard laid a rough finger behind my ear to make sure I still had a pulse. The next morning, I was on a plane to Bogotá in a borrowed baseball cap and raincoat, thanking angels and ministers of Grace. The Consul didn't leave until the plane was in the air, then he walked away with the Gold's Gym grads and out of the story.

It's there in news clippings, USIS and Embassy memos at Rutgers University, Alexander Library, Special Collections. Unrealized by me, in a place strangled by censorship, I spoke the unspeakable. I said the unsayable, "Censorship is the death of art." In the plane flying over the Amazon, I felt like Candide, the unknowing fool, when I was expected to feel like Dr. Pangloss, the all-knowing cynic.

Do we, wherever we are, carry this 200-year-old freedom like a jewel in our heads? Whether we do or not, whether it's conditioned, or whether it's imprudent to stress, in my personal doxology, all the Federalists went to heaven.

A commentary appears nearby, a learned, lawyerly exegesis. Bear in mind what Shakespeare himself thought about letting lawyers speak their mind, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

About the Author:

Paul Foster is an author and award-winning dramatist whose plays have been presented on Broadway, in London's West End, at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, and in Paris, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Bucharest, and Vienna. He co-founded La Mama Theater and was its president for fifteen years. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild in New York and Societé des Auteurs, Paris. He has authored seventeen plays and twelve books, published in six languages. He has written specials for American, British, French, and German television.

Paul Foster's play, Tom Paine was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Pictured: from hallucination scene, Act II, Tom Paine, Stage 73, New York City, April 1968. Left to right: Mari-Claire Charba, Sally Kirkland, Kevin O'Conor, Marilyn Roberts, Rob Thirkield and Beth Porter.

Photograph and newspaper clipping from the Paul Foster Papers provided courtesy Special Collections and University Archives, Rugers University Libraries.

Resources:

The Paul Foster Theatrical Collection, archived at the Alexander Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, contains the writer's complete body of work. Fully catalogued, the collection (Call Number MC865) comprises 21 cubic feet of manuscripts and other theatrical papers. For further information, contact the Library by email to edskip@rci.rutgers.edu or write to Dr. Ron Becker, Head of Special Collections, The Alexander Library, Rutgers University, 69 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.

Paul Foster's previous article, ITI at TCG - A Backstage Match, appeared in the January Newsletter.

Elsewhere in this Newsletter, in Anne Carley's article, Sugar Pill or Tonic?, the global legal status of the right to free speech is examined.

In a more recent news item, Las Vegas, Nevada is becoming a residence for writers persecuted for advocating free speech in their home countries. Becoming the first city of asylum in North America, Las Vegas will welcome its first writer in the fall of 2000. CNN News presented an item about Las Vegas as an asylum for writers http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news/05/16/writers.asylum.ap/index.html
See also, 16 May 2000 issue of ArtsWire Current http://www.artswire.org/current/