‘Corpus Christi’ redux
Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a column on its coverage of the controversial Terrence McNally play Corpus Christi. Public Editor Clark Hoyt writes:
When Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi” was first produced in New York 10 years earlier, the Manhattan Theater Club said there were threats to burn down the theater, kill the staff and “exterminate” McNally. The play was canceled, but then reinstated after an outcry from other playwrights and the theater community. With protesters and counter-protesters in the street, the audience had to pass through metal detectors.
This time, there were no protesters and no metal detectors, but The Times’s coverage of “Corpus Christi” — a sympathetic review and an article linking the uproar a decade ago to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Colorado — hit a raw nerve with the group that organized the demonstrations against the play in 1998.
Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, called “Corpus Christi” a “vile play” and charged that The Times liked it “not for artistic purposes but for its assault on Catholicism.” He urged his members to write to the public editor, and more than 150 did.
(…)
It is tempting for a secular and culturally liberal newsroom like The Times’s to dismiss such objections, especially because many appear to have come from people who neither saw the play nor read in full what The Times said about it. No self-respecting newspaper is going to avoid writing about a controversial work of art because it might offend some segment of the public. That would go against everything a newspaper stands for — examination of anything that happens in the public square — and Donohue told me he agreed that The Times should have covered the “Corpus Christi” revival. He just did not like what the newspaper said about it.
A number of Catholics I spoke to expressed outrage or embarrassment at Donohue’s methods. “He overreacts; he caricatures the things he objects to,” said Paul Baumann, editor of the independent Catholic magazine Commonweal, who himself gave “Corpus Christi” a negative review in 1998. “He raises the temperature in the room in a very unhelpful way.”
Grant, thanks for posting this. Many issues converge here. I will comment on a couple:
* I’m convinced that rhere is a genuine need for an organization that does what the Catholic League attempts to do – if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. But I believe that Paul Baumann’s characterization is spot-on – Bill Donohue tends to bring more heat than light.
* The public editor’s critique of the Times’ most recent review seems well-taken. My assumption is that the reviewer probably isn’t sufficiently literate in Christianity to understand all of the issues at work in the play. I run into this from time to time in my own (pretty limited) dealings with newspaper reporters about religious stuff – they’re bright and skilled, but don’t understand all the nuances. I haven’t seen the play and I’m not familiar with the reviewer or his body of work, so I could be all wet – just an assumption on my part based on my experience.
* Just speaking for myself – I’d like to see a more well-rounded presence for religion in the artistic life in the US. I’m thinking specifically of theater here. Religion does get a fairly sympathetic treatment, on the whole, on television. Theater tends to be edgier, and it tends go get edgy in ways that bash religion. Istm that a lot of this centers on gay rights and similar political issues. I don’t deny that religion is fair game for this type of treatment, but religion encompasses, much, much more than politics.
Jim makes a fine point in that we need a (less than overheated) spokesperson/organization to speak out against what’s offensive in the arts.
While I don’t agree about TV being symapthetic to religion(I think at best it’s politically correct when it has to be), the theater is an area where one should exercise some caution: it’s often been ahead of the game on “rights” issues.
On race, say, going back to Showboat, up through South Pacific (rememberthe uproar over “You’ve Got to be carefully Taught”), the theatre was ahead of its time; there’s a lot of emphasis in the theatre on gay rights now.
A prize winning play like “Angels in America” carries weight that a play like Corpus Christi does not.
Whether it’s possible in this polarized American Church, especially in the “neuralgic issues” to bring a good balanced view on a broad scale is a trick I’d like to see happen.
Hi, Bob, I confess I’ve never seen “Angels in America” – the prospect of an eight-hour play has always daunted me. So I don’t know to what extent it bashes the church or Christianity.
There is a lot of drama in trying to live as a Christian, even apart from sexual orientation.
“Just speaking for myself – I’d like to see a more well-rounded presence for religion in the artistic life in the US. I’m thinking specifically of theater here. ”
There is the Storm Theatre on W 46th and Broadway in NYC (www.stormtheatre.com), co-founded in ’97 by Peter Dobbins after he was inspired by Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy”. They had a great Karol Wojtyla Theatre Festival last year which I attended which grew out of a grass-roots movement at WYD ’05 in Cologne. Small, stuffy, cramped theatre with alot of low-budget, grass-roots stuff, but they have both explicitly religious works, like some of the Woityla ones, as well as general pre-modern/modern ones – Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, et al.. Nice change at the very least from the ubiquitous post-modern stuff in that neighborhood these days, IMHO.
I think that the idea of a Catholic-identified organization complaining about how a gay writer portrays what it holds to be valuable is, at best, laughable. Specious is a better definition.
Well, this time around, Donohue et al. were actually complaining about how the newspaper described the way this gay writer portrayed the life of Jesus:
And they’re right, really, that “reverent” was not an appropriate word; Zinoman (the critic) should have stopped at “earnest,” which is what he apparently meant. I personally wouldn’t write a letter about it — I mean, if I wrote a letter every time a second-string drama critic at the NYT did a bad job describing the show under review, I’d never get anything else done. But I also think it’s a stretch to say this is evidence of an anti-Catholic agenda at the NYT. It’s just carelessness.
I was surprised that Zinoman stood by his word choice — he can defend the play, if he wants, but he should admit that “reverent” it ain’t. This part is what the NYT should be embarrassed about:
Let’s hope they never send him out on the religion beat.
Three cheers for Mr. Hoyt. Can we get him for dotCom?
I don’t think “reverence” is the same thing as “showing orthodox belief.” Reverence denotes uncritical respect, adoration, veneration, being in awe of, etc. There’s nothing to say you can’t be in awe of a sexually active Jesus just because sexual activity isn’t part of orthodox belief of most Christians.
As usual, this is Donohue trying to own the conversation on Jesus — and determining whose views are accorded what kind of acceptance.
Barbara: Why do you say that “reverent denotes uncritical respect…”? Why “uncritical”?
No, I think it’s flat-out inaccurate to describe Terrence McNally’s approach as “reverent.” Reverence was exactly what McNally wanted to remove from the equation. Reverence isn’t very dramatic, after all. It sounds like McNally’s intentions were relatively benign — perhaps that’s the word Zinoman wanted? But the phrase “reverent spin on the Jesus story” is itself problematic. If it’s a spin, it’s irreverent, by definition.
That may be a critical objection, but hardly one that fits Donohue’s domain. I am pretty sure Donohue was objecting on grounds of orthodoxy not vocabulary choice.
Barbara: it was both, sort of. The letter-writing campaign in this case wasn’t a protest against the play itself (Donohue’s feelings on that topic are known), but against the NYT, for printing a review that describes this play as “reverent.” Donohue interpreted that as a deliberate insult to believing Christians and asked his minions to register their outrage. Like I said, I think that’s off-base; it was careless writing. But I’m impressed with what Hoyt was able to make out of the whole thing.
“Angels in America”, while 8 hours long, is split over 2 showings. It is well worth the potential fanny-fatigue to see it. The version I saw in San Francisco a few years back was excellently done.
With no respect intented for the vituperative Mr. Donahue, “reverent” has multiple meanings, to wit:
Dictionary.com Unabridged reverent–adjective
feeling, exhibiting, or characterized by reverence; DEEPLY RESPECTFUL: a reverent greeting.
The word has application outside of an attempt to restrict it to what religionists might want it to mean.