If Shakespeare was still alive and writing; I bet he’d have written scripts for The L Word
A standard Canadian performance of Romeo & Juliet brought out the censor vibe in Nashville to protest the bawdy sexuality of the play reports the Toronto Star. After much hullabaloo the play was performed as written and directed. A good time was had by all except for a few who squirmed. Toronto Star
After much discussion, they decided to present the show as planned and Monday’s audience was, by and large, enthusiastic.
Danielle Moffitt, 18, from Goodpasture Christian School, said, “The sexuality was a good thing, the way they addressed it openly back then, not like now.” On the flip side, a woman who identified herself as Val, a home-school teacher from Hermitage, “struggled being here with my son. The sexuality was too much. Our children need to be more pure.” Several other teachers echoed her opinion.
Too pure, uhm. In that case, better to ban their bibles as too racy for their ‘pure minds; otherwise who knows what might transpire if they got a hold of it and read about Lot and his daughters, Ruben’s fling with Bilhah, Amnon raping his half-sister Tamar! They read that, and before you know it; Tennessee will be a kind of ‘your father’s your uncle kind of place’…
I am the Education Director for the Classical Theatre Project and I am a native of Nashville. What has been reported in the media about our production of Romeo and Juliet is untrue. We were never asked to cut any lines from the play. The people of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center have been great supporters of the Classical Theatre Project and this production of Romeo and Juliet.
We did have discussions about the the physical actions during the bawdy lines (Mercutio putting the Nurse’s hand on his own genitals during the “prick of noon line” or Sampson using his arm between is legs as his penis and wiggling it about on the “maidenheads” line), but TPAC left all decisions up to us as a company. To repeat: they NEVER tried to cut any lines from the play.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t sell papers, so the story became grossly distorted in favor of sensationalism.
The response to the show in Tennessee was overwhelmingly positive (you can see the comments on our Facebook fan page for evidence of that). We did have a couple of teachers take their classes out, but we’ve had complaints about sexuality in the production ever since we first produced it in 2006 in Toronto. Yes, that’s right, even Canadian teachers wrote letters of complaint. Since I started this job about five years ago, I learned that our society in North America is much more sensitive about sex than violence. We’ve never received a complaint about some of the graphic murders depicted in our plays, but we have regarding the references to sex in Romeo and Juliet.
I believe it’s important to point out the difference between the reaction of a few audience members and the behavior of a major cultural institution. The papers suggest that some official body wanted Shakespeare’s text altered, and that’s just false. As far as the reactions of the audience members, we received three standing ovations during our week in Tennessee. As for those few who walked out, I noticed that the only time teachers left was when the actor playing Mercutio stood on the armrests of the students seats in the audience and then simulated sodomizing someone during the Queen Mab speech. When his movements were not so graphic, nobody left the theatre. So, even for those few who did leave, were they reacting to Shakespeare’s play, or the the graphic actions in the actor’s portrayal of the role?
The great lesson in this story is that prejudice goes both ways. In reality, the show was a big hit with students and teachers, and the workshops in the schools were some of the most rewarding we’ve ever conducted as a company. Meanwhile, the bigotry and hatred directed at Tennessee through the media and blogs like this one has been disheartening to say the least. It’s as if people have been chomping at the bit to revel in their own prejudice towards the South. All of this spurred on by a handful of journalists and their unethical desire to wage a culture war.
As a company, we have never been treated better than by the people in Tennessee. The crew and staff of the Dixie Carter Center were fantastic and so were the people at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. The actors fell in love with the city and several of them related to me that they had the best week of their lives in Nashville. The real shame is that the city and the theater were so slandered in the press, that the company will probably not get invited back to town.