Silencing Rachel Corrie

Update: James Nicola, stung by criticisms of censorship, has issued yet another statement. Playgoer and Superfluities are giving his third different explanation in as many days short shrift...Also worth noting is the apparent lack of reaction within the press and the NY theatre community. The bloggers are making the running on this one.

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The theatrical blogosphere is abuzz with the New York Theatre Workshop's recent decision to cancel or postpone - it's unclear which - the Royal Court's production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play based on the diaries and emails of the young American activist who was crushed to death by Israeli bulldozers as she attempted to stop Palestinian homes from being razed by the IDF.

The play, devised by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, was first produced in 2005 at London's Royal Court, and the Royal Court production was preparing to take it to the New York stage later this month when NYTW artistic director Jim Nicola pulled the plug. As Katherine Viner comments in an article in the LA Times:

Last week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the production — or, in its words, "postponed it indefinitely." The political climate, we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As James Nicola, the theater's 's artistic director, said Monday, "Listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation." Three years after being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored for political reasons.

I'd heard from American friends that life for dissenters had been getting worse — wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing antiwar T-shirts, Muslim professors denied visas. But it's hard to tell from afar how bad things really are. Here was personal proof that the political climate is continuing to shift disturbingly, narrowing the scope of free debate and artistic expression, in only a matter of weeks. By its own admission the theater's management had caved in to political pressure. Rickman, who also directed the show in London, called it "censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theatre Workshop, the Royal Court, New York audiences — all of us are the losers."

Check out George Hunka's Superfluities and Garrett Eisler at Playgoer for more.

Put this together with ongoing intimidatory campaigns in the US against Arabic or left wing academics, the fuss about Stephen Spielberg's Munich and now Israeli agitation to get the film Paradise Now disqualified from contention for the Oscars, and a pattern begins to emerge... some things, it seems, are not to be discussed. At all. Anywhere.

The implicit equation of bringing Rachel Corrie's story to the stage with support for fundamentalist terrorism is, frankly, absurd. And the kind of absolutism that such an equation expresses is absolutely hostile to the freedoms that art represents.

Now, as regular readers of this blog will know, documentary theatre isn't my cup of tea. But I will defend to the death its right to exist. The disturbing thing is that, were the Royal Court to bring their production here, it quite possibly could be prosecuted under our shiny new sedition laws. Freedom of expression certainly looks under threat in the States, but my suspicion is that it might be insidiously worse here.