BY BEN WINTERS
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| Corpus Christi |
It’s
easy for us in the theatre business to roll our eyes smugly when religious
types protest plays like Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi.
Sure, we say, McNally is “evil” because he wrote a play about
a gay Jesus. Whatever.
But
what Joe Adcock’s consideration of that play’s short, combative
history in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (on the occasion of a new production
at Seattle’s Northwest Actor’s Studio) reminds us is just
how serious these sorts of protests can be. When Manhattan Theatre Club
(MTC) announced the original production of Christi in 1998, “The
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights promised to 'wage
a war’ against the show. An organization calling itself the National
Security Movement informed McNally that 'we will exterminate every
member of the theatre and burn the place to the ground.” When MTC
decided, after some flip-flopping, to go through with the show, “[m]etal
detectors were installed at the theatre’s entrance. And the show
went on. Disorder was limited to pickets—one of them carrying a
sign that read 'Terrence McNally sodomizes Jesus—and your
mother is next.’”
When
the show was later produced in London, “the Muslim Shari’ah
Court of the UK issued a fatwa against McNally condemning him to death.”
One
recent production of Corpus Christi caused a little trouble for
a Cincinnati theatre company called Know Theatre Tribe. Kevin Osborne
wrote in the Cincinnati Post that the City Council “approved spending
$1.3 million on arts-related construction projects but not before removing
from the list of recipients the name of a local theatre group that staged
a controversial play last year.”
As
Osborne’s article makes clear, the Council’s move is largely
symbolic since the money was never earmarked for the theatre company directly,
but rather for capital improvements on a facility of which Know Tribe
makes use. But “Mayor Charlie Luken wanted the troupe’s name
removed [from the bill] to prevent misconceptions.”
So
that’s settled: Cincinnati does not think Jesus was gay.
FOOL
FIGHTS AIDS
Just
as Agence France Presse concluded their “most foolish Americans
of 2004…April Fools Day US opinion poll,” naming Michael Jackson
and his sister Janet as numbers one and two, MJ himself traveled to the
most foolish place in the country: Washington, D.C.
It
was, of course, a bald-faced effort to rehabilitate his reputation by
getting involved in the world anti-AIDS movement. Jackson “walked
the halls of the Capitol, met with members of Congress and was lauded
for his work fighting AIDS,” reported Reuters, “even as a
grand jury in California was hearing testimony in his child molestation
case.” Marty Kaplan, director of the University of Southern California’s
Norman Lear Center, gave a great quote: “It could be a skit on `Saturday
Night Live.’ I can imagine in a writer’s room people pitching
it: 'Yeah, and Michael Jackson, while the grand jury’s in
the middle of the indictment, goes to Congress and behaves like nothing’s
happened.’”
Jackson’s
business in town was to discuss a tour of Africa performing benefit concerts;
one potential snag, noted in most media outlets, is that Jackson’s
visa has been revoked. He probably won’t be going anywhere for quite
a while.
Some
legislators were less than eager to associate themselves with Jackson,
but Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, at least, saw the benefits
of having a world-famous musician roped into the anti-AIDS effort—even
if he is an alleged pedophile: “I know you’re interested in
the sideshow,” she told the New York Times, “but we’re
grateful to Michael Jackson for bringing attention to this issue.”
BRIT
BOOKSTER BARRED
Ian
McEwan is no Salman Rushdie. That’s not intended as an insult to
McEwan, a Booker Prize winner for Amsterdam; he’s just always been
the kind of writer known more for his novels than for drawing fire from
religious extremists, angry politicians, and so forth.
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Not
for long, perhaps. On March 30, the British author was en route to Seattle
to deliver a lecture when he was stopped at the airport and “nearly
missed his own lecture…after U.S. immigration officers at the Vancouver,
British Columbia, airport refused to let him board a flight to the United
States,” according to Erin Van Bronkhorst in the Associated Press.
It
generally takes rather exceptional circumstances for a British citizen
to be stopped at the U.S. border, Great Britain being “one of 29
'visa waiver’ nations whose citizens do not need visas to
enter the United States.” But Van Bronkhorst quotes a Homeland Security
spokesman’s explanation that the visa waiver is “for people
who are visiting for pleasure, they can come here on a passport and don’t
need a visa, but if they are coming here to work, they must have a work
visa.” McEwan was to deliver a lecture for money, and the customs
inspector decided that meant work.
McEwan
doesn’t sound too upset about the incident (“I’m not
really blaming anyone in this. I think the law has been left too vague
and too open to local interpretation as I understand it, and I just got
unlucky”) but the incident could create “aftershocks”
for artists, according to book critic John Marshall writing in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer. “Officials of Seattle Arts & Lectures were
concerned,” for example, “that other events with noted authors
from abroad may be jeopardized by the bureaucratic wrangle that ensnared
McEwan.”
Margaret
Rankin is the executive director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, and she
explains exactly why they’re worried: The “concern is that
other international artists might not be willing to go through this kind
of thing. This has never happened before in our 16 years of presenting
authors, so it’s unclear to us if this could have been avoided if
McEwan had gone through a different port of entry or had a different official
questioning him.”
The
problem seems to be a bureaucratic loophole that leaves field agents unsure
whether fancypants British authors should be allowed to come speak for
pa, or not.
“What happened to Ian McEwan illustrates the inconsistencies in the process to enter this country, and this happens more often than most people think,” Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott told the Post. “The only reason that we are even aware of this incident is because Mr. McEwan is famous.”