From the Executive Director

Censorship or Delay?

By Ben Cameron

Every few years, TCG conducts formal roundtables to capture the field's most pressing issues and assess the tenor of the times. Realizing the last set of conversations pre-dated 9/11, seismic shifts in the funding climate and radical changes in the body politic, we convened new conversations in February, asking: What are the foremost challenges the field faces today? Are they the same challenges we had faced before, albeit different in degree? Are there new challenges that confront us? And what are the triumphs, the causes for celebration, that we can harvest to inform and inspire us all?

Each of the four 2006 conversations had its own set of issues, its own tone, its own dynamics. But each addressed the intensity of the times, the increased sense of pressure, the heightened scrutiny that organizations now undergo. "The pressure for every show to hit its mark is unprecedented. Gone is the sense of seasonal evaluation," one manager noted. "Audiences reactions are now more extreme. People love things or hate things—shows, concessions, you name it—in a way that makes every move and every decision subject to heated criticism." Artists too felt the new intensity. "Everything must now be contextualized and justified," one noted. Decisions to mount standard titles at theatres more noted for unusual fare; for theatres of color to produce authors outside of their own culture; for Middle Eastern theatres to mount plays not about politics and Iraq—all now demand extensive explanation and justification. "Outsiders define what we should do," one artist said, "and we repeatedly have to explain why we choose what we choose."

These words were fresh in my mind when I heard of New York Theatre Workshop's decision to postpone My Name Is Rachel Corrie. To be frank, I am a huge fan of this organization: It is among the boldest and most courageous of theatres that I know. It premiered Homebody/Kabul at a moment in our national history when few others would dare mount it. It has consistently nurtured artists, not only through its Usual Suspects network (in which independent artists share information and debate ideas) but in its very architectural choices, ensuring that administrators must encounter artists every day as a tangible reminder of what the theatre exists to serve. It guts the entire auditorium, if necessary, in order to create a white surround to support Ivo van Hove's conception for Hedda Gabler, or to create theatres within the theatre, building a stark wooden operating amphitheatre for its very next production, A Number. And when the needs of artists have conflicted with schedules, New York Theatre Workshop has not hesitated to delay productions or to move works into future seasons, even while risking subscriber ire, to give the artist the best of all possible experiences. Jim Nicola is a man of remarkable integrity, and given his track record, his courage, his real sensitivity to artists, I had—and have—no doubt that when he announced a postponement was needed to secure more time to properly prepare the environment for Rachel Corrie, that he was telling the truth.

As our field conversations made clear, if productions of even the standard repertoire must sometimes be justified, tackling a play with the potential to incite community controversy demands even more time. There are meetings with funders to help them understand our decisions, in order to protect the theatre from inappropriate reaction when grant applications are reviewed. There are meetings with the press to convey motive and intent. There are meetings with community groups: Can we broker better understanding with people likely to oppose the play (on whatever grounds)? Can we galvanize goodwill around our choice to produce? Are there community partners to participate in audience discussions? Are there formats for opposing viewpoints to be heard? How will we think about program notes and ancillary materials, and more? At heart, how we can present the work in the most responsible way, preparing the community to be its most receptive, creating the environment for the artist to be heard in the most supportive, most responsible, most appropriate environment? By their own admission, the Workshop artistic team's enthusiasm for the play and their own naivetë about key issues led them to try to mount the play in a severely compressed time period—a period that they quickly realized was insufficient for the task at hand.

Is a postponement tantamount to censorship? There is a huge difference in my mind between "No" and "Not yet," and the better conversation lies not in pointing fingers but in asking, "What do we do next in order to be able to produce the work we may not be quite ready to do?" Engaging the entirety of our organizations to rally behind the artist's programming choice, to prepare the environment for the work to ultimately succeed—these are responsible choices, especially in an environment where the arts are under such intense pressures, and the larger world itself is in a moment of increasingly violent polarization.

The gift of our February field conversations was, even in moments of disagreement, the generous and considered way participants listened to one another. It was a dynamic that I hope guides us through any and all controversies that lie ahead. But for now, lobbing charges of censorship against an organization that, earnestly and with the best of intentions for the sake of the artist, asks for reasonable delay, strikes me as incendiary, polarizing and, frankly, too easy. Let's reserve the charges of censorship for those places where they really belong—for those who seek to silence and to suppress, not for those who labor in all earnestness for voices to be heard. Especially if all they ask from us is a gift of time.