Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Censura negli USA

Non solo cartoni.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1720592,00.html
Surely Americans will not put up with this censorship
 The decision by a New York theatre to cave in to pressure over our
play shows how the scope for free debate has narrowed
 Katharine Viner
Wednesday March 1, 2006
The Guardian
 The flights for cast and crew had been booked; the production schedule
delivered; the press announcement drafted and approved; tickets
advertised on the internet. The Royal Court production of My Name Is
Rachel Corrie, the play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring
next month to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the groundbreaking
musical Rent, following two sellout runs in London and several awards.
We always thought that it was a piece of work that needed to be seen in
the US. Created from the journals and emails of American activist
Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey from her adolescent life in
Seattle, Washington, to her death under a bulldozer in Gaza at the age
of 23, we considered it, in a sense, to be an American story, which
would have a particular relevance for audiences in Rachel's home
country. After all, she had made her journey to the Middle East in
order "to meet the people who are on the receiving end of our
[American] tax dollars", and she was a killed by a US-made bulldozer.
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 But last week the New York Theatre Workshop cancelled the production -
or, in their words, "postponed it indefinitely". The political climate,
we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As
James Nicola, the theatre's artistic director, said yesterday: "In our
pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our
communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's
illness and the election of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections,
we had a very edgy situation." Rachel was to be censored for political
reasons.
It makes you wonder. 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
travelling 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?
Anyone who sees the play, or reads it, realises that this is no piece
of alienating agitprop. One night in London, a group of American
students came to a performance and mobbed us afterwards, thrilled that
they had seen themselves on stage, and who they might, in a different
life, have become. Another night, an Israeli couple, members of the
rightwing Likud party, on holiday in Britain, were similarly impressed.
"The play wasn't against Israel, it was against violence," they told
Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother. I was particularly touched by a young
Jewish New Yorker, from an Orthodox family, who said that he had been
nervous about coming to see My Name Is Rachel Corrie, because he had
been told that both she and it were viciously anti-Israel. But he had
been powerfully moved by Rachel's words and realised that he had, to
his alarm, been dangerously misled.
But the director of the New York theatre told the New York Times
yesterday that it wasn't the people who actually saw the play he was
concerned about. "I don't think we were worried about the audience," he
said. "I think we were more worried that those who had never
encountered her writing, never encountered the piece, would be using
this as an opportunity to position their arguments." Since when did
theatre come to be about those who don't go to see it? If the play
itself, as Mr Nicola clearly concedes, is not the problem, then isn't
the answer to get people in to watch it, rather than exercising prior
censorship? With freedom of speech now at the top of the international
agenda, and George Clooney's outstanding Good Night, and Good Luck
reminding us of the dangers of not standing up to witch-hunts,
Americans should not be denied the right to hear Rachel Corrie's words
- words that only two weeks ago were deemed acceptable.
I'd heard from American friends that life for dissenters had been
getting worse - wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing anti-war
T-shirts, Muslim professors denied visas. But it's hard to tell from
afar how bad things really are. Here was personal proof that the
political climate is continuing to shift disturbingly, narrowing the
scope of free debate and artistic expression. What was acceptable a
matter of weeks ago is not acceptable now. The New York theatre's claim
that the arrangement was tentative is absurd: the truth is that its
management has caved in to political pressure, and the reputation of
the arts in New York is the poorer for it.
It is surely underestimating the curiosity and robustness of the
American public, many of whom would no doubt be interested in an
insight into the reality of occupation that led to the Hamas victory.
Artistic communities need to resist the censorship of voices that go
against the grain of George Bush's America, rather than following the
Fox News agenda and gagging them before they have even been heard.
* My Name Is Rachel Corrie will now be shown at the Playhouse theatre
in London's West End from March 28; booking number 0870 060 6631

pressure,
Puttanata che l'autore non e' minimamente in grado di sostenere.
-Stefano