You appear not to be aware of the facts. While it has been staged in NYC now, it was cancelled originally due to pressure asserted--even after a successful run in London.The play was scheduled to be performed at the New York Theater Workshop when its artistic director, James Nicola, cancelled the show in February, asserting that emotions over the play’s theme were running too high. He claimed that the decision was taken in response to a “polling” of local Jewish religious and community leaders, which had found them to be “defensive and edgy.” -snip--
The cancellation caused a storm of protest, including from playwrights Harold Pinter, winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and Tony Kushner, whose Homebody/Kabul had been performed at the New York Theatre Workshop. Actor Vanessa Redgrave called the cancellation “blacklisting a dead girl and her diaries.”
Katharine Viner, in a comment in the Guardian, noted the disturbing antidemocratic implications of the censorship: “If a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded, and dead, American woman, whose superb writing about her job as a mental health worker, ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents, struggle to find out who she wanted to be, and how she found that by traveling to Gaza and discovering the shocking conditions under which the Palestinians live—if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else? The non-American, the non-white, the non-dead, the oppressed?”
In London, the play was moved to the Playhouse Theatre for a nine-week engagement that ended in May. A number of American theaters offered to show it, including the Seattle Repertory Theatre. In March the play was performed in Brooklyn’s Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, once a stop on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War.
Pam Pariseau and Dena Hammerstein of James Hammerstein Productions have now brought the play to New York City, together with Minetta Lane Theater, taking a principled stand for artistic freedom in the decision to bring it to the stage in America’s theater capital. The producers, friends of Alan Rickman, have avoided criticizing Nicola and the New York Theater Workshop, saying that they were motivated by the artistic merit of the play.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/rach-j12.shtmlhttp://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/08/1620208For starters.... see also:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060403/weiss