latimes.com: "The Sixth Coffin" has been officially buried. Derided as anti-Semitic agitprop, this work by recently deceased Hungarian playwright-politician-polemicist Istvan Csurka has been the focal point of controversy until it was finally scrubbed from Budapest's Uj Szinhaz's — or New Theater's — new season. But how this production (think: the Hungarian equivalent of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion") ever got anywhere near the performance schedule of a major municipal venue in the first place is part of a larger drama involving this country's leadership and its assault on culture. And that drama has a few more acts to go.
3 comments:
I love this article. I am not all too surprised that the play exists, but I am by the overwhelming response. I believe in artistic right so if they really want to put on the play they should be aloud, but others also have the right to protest. I'm really torn on this one I have to side more with preventing this play, though I might be a little bias being Jewish and all. It looks like the country is moving in the right direction though, the play clearly political in nature was rejected en masse by the people and with some of the stuff going on in the world, i.e. Greece looking like it might elect someone from the Nazi party to be their new leader (among others) its nice to know that somewhere people are pushing for more positive change.
I completely agree with Isaac. The last article was about a government trying to repress a play and trying to jail the producer when they couldn't. I'm against trying to prevent an artistic statement. It would be hypocritical to say that i'm glad they couldn't/wouldn't produce the play, even though i am.
Instead of protesting the play happening, i would let them put it up and protest people going to see it. It would hurt the theater company more if it was a flop and they also probably won't put on another play like that. I don't know if that would actually work though.
"A degenerate, sickly liberal hegemony." That's my new email signature for sure! "Coming to you live, from a degenerate, sickly liberal hegemony near you!" But seriously, the lesson here, in my totally unsolicited and unprofessional opinion, is not that a theatre proposed to stage a controversial play, but that they did it for the wrong reasons. Personally I think nothing should be off the table when it comes to art, and just because you choose to put on a play that may be construed to be or may even overtly be ignorant or ugly or downright messed up, doesn't mean you are those things too. There may be very good reasons for a group to look honestly into their past and re-envision some of the ugliness their culture has produced. It's a whole lot better than imagining the ugliness never existed. It seems to me that as long as the staging is neutral and exploratory in nature, not hegemenous like the kind decried by Mr. Dorner, then it should be an avenue for people to understand and learn from their own history. As long as there's honest, open dialogue available and no one is getting it shoved down their throats, it's still a way for us to express our ambivalence about ourselves and our place in time, and what isn't art about that?
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