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Mohammed Play Protesting Censorship Gets Censored
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 20, 2015 @ 8:15 am In The Point | 7 Comments
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Neil LaBute is a professionally controversial playwright and writer. He’s the sort of writer whose work is always “controversial”. But it’s been safely controversial in a politically correct way.
Bash: Latter-Day Plays attacked Mormons. The Mercy Seat mocked 9/11 survivors. The movie Lakeview Terrace had a villainous conservative black cop played by Samuel L. Jackson terrorizing an interracial couple.
LaBute put in just enough épater le bourgeois to titillate liberal audiences while reaffirming their basic prejudices. Think Mad Men as filtered through Mad Magazine on crack.
And then he offended the one group that good liberals will not allow offending. Muslims [2].
A June showcase of four short plays addressing the critical and growing incursion of censorship into arts and culture has been cancelled by the presenting venue, Greenwich Village’s Sheen Center for Thought and Culture. The event was to have opened “Planet Connections Theater Festivity” and was a benefit for the National Coalition Against Censorship. The key issue was Mohammed Gets A Boner, a monologue that Neil LaBute contributed to the quartet of plays, called “Playwrights For A Cause.”
William Spencer Reilly, executive director of the self-described non-sectarian Sheen Center, told the New York Times that when the the contract for the event was signed in February, he wasn’t aware of the title of the play (which the Times deemed unfit to print).
Glory Kadigan, the founder of Planet Connections, described the LaBute work as “a discussion of whether or not it’s all right to poke fun at religion or religious figures.”
Not when those figures are Muslim [3].
Mr. LaBute, in a statement, said that he had voluntarily pulled his one-act play from the event, which will benefit the National Coalition Against Censorship, in order to avoid taking attention away from the other playwrights on the bill.
The substance of the monologue looks like more of Neil LaBute’s usual épater le bourgeois fare
In an email last week, Mr. LaBute declined to give many specifics but noted that the play did not depict “the actual prophet” of Islam, whose name is more commonly rendered “Muhammad.”
In a description of it that has since been removed, the Planet Connections website said it is about an actor asked to perform in an offensive satire in which “the prophet ‘Mohammed’” reminisced about “the first time he made love to a white woman.”
So it was going to be a take on the Innocence of Muslims with a monologue about performing in a play, rather than an actual performance, for the distancing effect. But no one cares about details when Mohammed’s name is on the program.
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