As many readers will know, New York City’s Public Theater presented a production William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park earlier this spring (23 May-18 June, Delacorte Theater). The production became controversial and a lightning rod for harsh criticism and denunciation because director Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the house that Papp built, cast actor Gregg Henry, a tall man with blond hair, in the title role. The production was played in modern dress, and Henry’s Caesar wore a dark blue suit with an over-long red tie, making him resemble Donald Trump. As nearly everyone knows, in act three, scene two of the play, Julius Caesar is stabbed to death in the Forum by a group of senators who fear he’s on the verge of becoming a tyrant, ending Rome’s republic and taking it to one-man rule. It didn’t take much imagination to see that Eustis intended audiences to conflate the would-be tyrant who’s assassinated as our current president, Donald J. Trump, but protesters went further and proclaimed that the production, director, and theater wanted to see the actual president killed.
Following on Kathy Griffin’s execrable video performance this
May in which she held up a prop severed head that looked like Trump, some
people saw the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park as a step too far in its apparent
expression of the director’s opinion of President Trump. Many artists and others who make their lives
in the arts have made it clear that they oppose this president and his government,
including his arts policies as epitomized in his budget proposal, released in
March, in which he revealed his intention not just to cut the appropriations to
the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the
Humanities, but to eliminate their funding altogether. No previous president has proposed a budget
that goes that far, and people in the arts are both frightened and
enraged. (In my report on the 2017
Whitney Biennial, posted on 22 June, I quote from a statement on the museum’s
website by Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney Museum’s director, directly linking
the museum and the Biennial exhibit to this issue.)
I referred to the Public Theater earlier as the house that
Papp built, and I didn’t do that just because Joseph Papp did, indeed, launch
what was long known as the New York Shakespeare Festival, the company that
became the Public Theater sometime after Papp’s 1991 death. (For several years in between, it was known
as the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Theater.) I intended to make a connection with the man
who, in 1990 rejected a $50,000 NEA grant rather than sign an anti-obscenity
“loyalty oath” that he saw as “an abuse of the fundamental ethic in artistic
endeavor.” Papp considered the proposed
restrictions to his “freedom,” his “privileged right to make my own judgment”
according to “principle, taste and artistic standards” to be “unthinkable, if
not downright subversive.” That set the
standard and eventually other heads of important arts organizations followed
Papp’s lead and, despite the great need for the grant money, which was vital in
some cases, turned down NEA cash as long as it came with strings attached. Oskar Eustis, standing as he is on his
predecessor’s shoulders—and in his shadow—is in a similar position. He, too, has stood his ground.
I have often acknowledged on this blog that I am just about
a First Amendment absolutist. Except
under the most extraordinary circumstances—incitement to violence, slander or
libel, falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, for instance—I do not
believe in censoring any speech or artistic expression. I fiercely believe that the only proper response to speech
(including symbolic speech such as visual art) you don’t like is more speech. The only proper response. (By the way, that doesn’t mean shouting
someone down. That’s just a verbal form
of censorship.) I have written about
this often: “The First Amendment & The Arts,” 8 May 2010; “Culture War,” 6
February 2014; “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015. I said so again as recently as last Thursday
in my post on the Whitney Biennial which confronted a controversy over a work
of art on display. Let me state my
position on this matter by quoting a line from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s
musical 1776. The character is Stephen Hopkins, the irascible
delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in
all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it
couldn’t be talked about. . . . Hell
yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . . !”
You debate people when you don’t like what they’re saying, you don’t shut
them down.
In February 2006, the New York Theatre Workshop announced a
production of Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s controversial, pro-Palestinian
documentary play, My Name Is Rachel
Corrie, to run from 22 March to 14 April 2006. After protests from Jewish groups and threats
to withdraw financial support by contributors to NYTW, however, the theater
decided to “postpone indefinitely” the production in order to set up some “context” for the performance (read:
schedule defensive panels
and other counter-events).
Rickman and Viner denounced the decision and withdrew the play. Many First Amendment advocates and free-speech
activists, as well as prominent members of the worldwide theater and arts
community such as Vanessa Redgrave, Harold Pinter, and Tony Kushner, viewed the
NYTW decision as a capitulation to blackmail and an acquiescence to censorship.
NYTW never reinstated the production,
which would have been the U.S. première, and Rachel Corrie ultimately had a commercial Off-Broadway run at the
Minetta Lane Theatre from 15 October to 17 December 2006.
In 1999, after
the opening of Sensation: Young British
Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2
October 1999-9 January 2000), then-New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other
critics publicly denounced one work in the exhibit, The Holy Virgin Mary
by Chris Ofili, declaring
it anti-Catholic because the
artist used elephant dung among his media.
Despite the explanations of Ofili, a British artist of Nigerian
heritage, that the painting was a homage because elephant dung in his African
culture is considered sacred, Giuliani and his supporters unsuccessfully
tried to close Sensation and then moved to
have the museum evicted from its city-owned building. BMA stood
its ground and won its fight for freedom of expression in court.
In May 1998, the Manhattan Theatre Club momentarily caved
under threats of violence and yanked their production of Terrence McNally’s Corpus
Christi,
his contemporary retelling of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and death in which Jesus
and his disciples are all depicted as gay. The play, which no one had actually seen or
even read at this time (it wasn’t even finished), was assailed by conservative Christians and others
as blasphemous and MTC suffered a vehement protest campaign that led to
bomb threats at the theater and threats of death to the theater’s staff and the
production’s company which nearly succeeded in canceling the play’s world
première. (One caller left this message
on MTC’s voice-mail: “Again, message is for Jew guilty homosexual Terrence
McNally. Because of you we will
exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground. This is a message from National Security
Movement of America. Death to the Jews
Worldwide.” McNally is, it might be
worth noting, gay, but he’s Catholic, not Jewish.) Once again, free-speech advocates chastised
the theater for bowing to pressure, with figures like playwrights Arthur Miller,
Edward Albee, David Henry Hwang, and Larry Kramer publicly excoriating the
theater for its action; Emily Mann, a playwright and the director of Princeton,
New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre, also denounced the cancellation. Athol Fugard withdrew his play The Captain’s Tiger from the company’s
schedule while other theaters stepped up to offer the play a stage. A week after announcing the cancellation, MTC
reinstated the production. Similar protests arose wherever McNally’s play
was produced, from professional regional stagings, to college productions, to
community-theater presentations; when the 1999 London première was staged, a
British imam issued a fatwa against
McNally.
The protests against the Public’s production of Julius Caesar at first just succeeded in
driving away two major sponsors, Delta Air Lines and Bank of America; Delta
actually severed its longtime association with the theater as “the official
airline of the Public Theater” while BoA merely dropped its support of the
Shakespeare in the Park production. That lasted until outlets like Breitbart and Fox News got a hold of the story and geed up a
frenzy of manufactured outrage. Then
threats and insults of one kind or another started to be hurled at the Public
and Eustis, including the demand that the play be taken off the stage. That seems to be the standard demand these
days for a work of art some people don’t like: remove it from public view.
That painting at the Whitney Museum I mentioned earlier,
Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, a
rendering of Emmett Till’s mangled body at his funeral—the protesters wanted it
removed from the Biennial; in 2010, Smithsonian Institution Secretary G. Wayne
Clough ordered the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly
from the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American
Portraiture in the face of protests (once again on the grounds of
blasphemy); this past May, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center removed artist Sam
Durant’s sculpture Scaffold, which
referenced the hanging of 38 Dakota Indian men in 1862 by the United States
Army, from the June reopening exhibit in its Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in
response to demands by Native American groups.
The problem with these efforts is that, while no one forces anyone to
see an offending work of art, censoring it prevents everyone from seeing it.
But removal hasn’t been sufficient remedy for the aggrieved
parties. Protesters wanted both Open Casket and Scaffold destroyed, though only the Durant sculpture was actually
dismantled and burned. (The Whitney
refused to remove Schutz’s painting from the Biennial.) I find this problematical beyond the act of
censorship the removal demand represents: it smacks of book burning, one of the
most heinous acts against human thought anyone can commit. It’s the province of totalitarian governments
like the fictional one in Ray Bradbury’s
1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 and the
very real one in Nazi Germany. The puritanical priest-prophet
of 15th century Florence, Girolamo Savonarola, burned books he deemed
“immoral”—a judgment of which he, alone, was the final arbiter. Modern-day dictators and would-be dictators
like Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the ’70s and Bosnian Serb nationalist leader
Ratko Mladić in the ’90s burned books of their enemies and opponents. The Taliban and Isis burn books and destroy
art works and cultural treasures of which they disapprove. This is the line into which protesters in
our own democracy fit when they demand the removal and destruction of paintings
and sculptures which they claim harm or distress them.
Like the Corpus
Christi protests, warnings of death and other assaults were phoned into
Eustis’s home, targeted at him, his wife, and his daughter. One call, picked up by Eustis’s 26-year-old
daughter, threatened, “I want to grab you by the pussy”—a clear evocation of
Trump’s offensive “locker-room talk” during the campaign. “Your husband wants Trump to die. I want him
to die.” (This kind of verbal assault
spilled over to other theaters around the country unconnected to either the
Public or the Julius Caesar production. Whether this is a case of tarring all
theaters with the same brush or ignorance on the part of the callers isn’t
clear. Considering the spelling in some
of the e-mails, I’m inclined to go with the latter.) At the final performances of the play,
activists invaded the stage at the Delacorte Theater or shouted from the
audience: “Goebbels would be proud,” yelled one protester, referring to
the Nazi propaganda minister of the Third Reich, on the closing performance on Sunday,
18 June, as he stormed the stage.
In a statement published by the theater, Eustis affirmed:
We recognize that our
interpretation of the play has provoked heated discussion; audiences, sponsors
and supporters have expressed varying viewpoints and opinions. Such discussion is exactly the goal of our
civically-engaged theater; this discourse is the basis of a healthy democracy.
Our production of “Julius Caesar”
in no way advocates violence towards anyone.
Shakespeare’s play, and our production, make the opposite point: those
who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and
destroy the very thing they are fighting to save. For over 400 years, Shakespeare’s play has
told this story and we are proud to be telling it again in Central Park.
In an interview with Michael Paulson of the New York Times, the Public’s artistic director asserted:
Those thousands of people who are
calling our corporate sponsors to complain about this—none of them have seen
the show. They’re not interested in
seeing the show. They haven’t read
“Julius Caesar.” They are being
manipulated by “Fox & Friends” and other news sources, which are
deliberately, for their own gain, trying to rile people up and turn them
against an imagined enemy, which we are not.
The director pointed out that five years ago, director Rob
Melrose staged a production of Julius
Caesar for the Public that had an Obama-like Caesar. “That production played all over the country,”
said Eustis. “Not one peep from anybody.” Furthermore, he insisted when asked “Is Trump
Caesar?”: “Of course not. Julius Caesar is Julius Caesar.”
What we are doing is what we try
and do in every production, which is make the dramatic stakes as real and
powerful for contemporary people as we can, in our time and our place.
Eustis acknowledged, “This production makes some fun of him”—as
it does of “this president or any other president.” The director made public statements reminding
people that Shakespeare’s play does not support the assassination and, in fact,
warns audiences that violence is no way to preserve democracy. Indeed, Julius Caesar’s death precipitates
the very danger the conspirators were trying to avert when Caesar’s nephew,
Octavius, seizes power as Augustus Caesar and the Roman republic becomes an
empire. “This production does not hate
Julius Caesar,” averred Eustis, ending his comments by stating firmly and
unequivocally: “This production is horrified at his murder.”
But all this was to little avail. The opponents to the Public’s production of Julius Caesar had gotten up a head of
steam and it seemed nothing could stop them.
After the 14 June attack on Republican congressional baseball players in
Virginia that left Steve Scalise, a representative from Louisiana, gravely
wounded, Donald Trump, Jr., appeared to link the shooting with the performance
at the Public. He also tweeted: “Serious question, when does
‘art’ become political speech & does that change things?” I guess he doesn’t know that it’s irrelevant
since political speech, just like artistic expression, is also protected under
the First Amendment to the United States Constitution—so, no, it doesn’t change
things.
That’s the rub, isn’t it?
Art people like Donald Trump, Senior or Junior, can ignore—it’s
meaningless to them (unless it’s a portrait of the Donald he can charge off to
his foundation). That’s why President Trump can blithely propose to zero out the miniscule government support for
the arts this country parsimoniously and grudgingly provides. In terms of the national budget, it’s
insignificant—but it’s annoying, like a fly buzzing around in the Oval
Office. Those pesky artists!
But let it turn political or socially conscious . . . . Whoa,
Nelly! Then we got trouble. Because art can make people listen—and, more
dangerously, it can make them think.
Vaclav Havel’s plays made a generation of Westerners think about the
Soviet communist domination of Eastern Europe and what that made life like
there. Athol Fugard made people see apartheid the way South Africans saw it
day to day, and it was painful and ugly.
Their art traveled the way no history book, essay, or political lecture
could. It touched people. Larry Kramer’s plays and David Wojnarowicz’s
paintings and sculptures made people look at what gay life and the AIDS crisis
was like for the people living inside it.
Turn that kind of spotlight on an American politician or a political
philosophy or a proposed policy and something might happen. Better put the kibosh on that, double
quick! Can’t let that imp out of the
bottle.
But the Constitution won’t allow adversaries to censor
it. They can try to go after the
financial support for the art or the art’s presenters—that’s what the opponents
to My Name Is Rachel Corrie did—and
it worked for a while. The challengers
to the Public’s Julius Caesar took
aim at that, too, but it didn’t succeed this time—and, as far as I’m concerned,
Delta and BoA looked craven for buckling.
So the forces who don’t want to see art of which they disapprove and
don’t want others to see it, either, fall back on the last resort of the
fearful: violence—or the threat of violence.
The Manhattan Theatre Club turned tail and ran in the face of that, but
found their courage again when they were assailed by their own
constituency—theater artists. Oskar
Eustis and the Public, true to the spirit of Joe Papp, stood up to the scare
tactics and prevailed.
Forgetting for the moment that the Public’s Julius Caesar was never advocating
assassination—not of Caesar nor of Trump—the real message of the production,
the warning that William Shakespeare was sending and that director Eustis made
contemporary and relevant, is one we all have to hear, and hear again, and hear
often. And, yes, it is political—not
partisan politics, or the “intrigue or
maneuvering within a political unit or a group in order to gain control or
power,” as the American Heritage
Dictionary defines it-—which is what Little Trump meant (because
it’s the only kind he or his ilk knows about, I imagine), but “the art or
science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political
entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal
and external affairs”—a bigger, more august matter. In that context, we must heed the advice of
Walter Lippmann from his 1939 essay “The Indispensable Opposition” (I’ve
republished the entire essay on Rick On Theater,
and I strongly recommend everyone read it—http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/11/indispensable-opposition.html.):
We take, it seems to me, a naïvely
self-righteous view when we argue as if the right of our opponents to speak
were something that we protect because we are magnanimous, noble, and
unselfish. The compelling reason why, if liberty of
opinion did not exist, we should have to invent it, why it will eventually have
to be restored in all civilized countries where it is now suppressed, is that
we must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what
they have to say.
Like it or not, we have to hear what the people we disagree
with say. Doing politics in an echo
chamber, which has become the practice for too many politicians in this country
for too long, is dangerous—not to mention just plain counterproductive. Donald Trump doesn’t think he does, and he
doesn’t like to, but he, most of all, has to hear what opponents and critics
have to say. Lippmann’s analogy is most
apt: He likens
listening to our opponents to paying a doctor “to ask us the most embarrassing
questions and to prescribe the most disagreeable diet.” We recognize, Lippmann held, “that if
we threaten to put the doctor in jail because we do not like the diagnosis and
the prescription it will be unpleasant for the doctor, to be sure, but equally
unpleasant for our own stomachache.”
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