Outraged Nashville censors try to gut TO's Shakespeare
When Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he must have had the city of Nashville in mind.
Toronto's Classical Theatre Project presented Romeo and Juliet in the capital of Tennessee to an enthusiastic audience of 1,000 students and teachers Monday afternoon, but the performance was almost derailed Sunday night by a group of self-appointed censors who found the Bard of Avon a bit too racy for Music City, U.S.A.
David Galpern, artistic director of the theatre company, was taken aback when confronted with requests for a series of cuts to Shakespeare's text and a general "toning down" of the bawdier elements in the show.
"We've performed this for 100,000 people in Canada without a single complaint from a teacher or student. Why should it suddenly change here?" he said on the phone from Nashville Monday.
Since it was founded in 2001, the acclaimed company has become Canada's largest producer of classical theatre for youth and has played to more than 350,000 students. The production of Romeo and Juliet being performed in Nashville was nominated for a Dora Award in 2009.
Most of the worries were about the sexuality explicit in the script and how it was brought to accurate life by the group, especially in scenes involving the ribald Mercutio.
Charles Roy, co-founder of the company, admitted there was an element of bawdry in some of the passages, but, as he pointed out, "If Mercutio doesn't offend the Nurse with his line about the bawdy hand of the dial being upon the prick of noon and she doesn't try to exit in protest, then what happens to the rest of the play?"
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U.S. school bans the dictionary
A Southern California school board has pulled the Merriam-Webster dictionaryoff its shelves after a parent complained about the entry “oral sex.”
The collegiate-level dictionary was being used in grade four and five classrooms. The school now promises to begin a thorough scouring of the dictionary for other offensive entries.
“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Menifee Union School District spokesperson Betti Cadmus told the local The Press-Enterprise newspaper.
Merriam-Webster defines oral sex as “oral stimulation of the genitals.”
The dictionaries were originally intended for use by children working at advanced reading levels. Now the California town, pop. 70,000, looks like the staging ground for a First Amendment battle.
Full story
When Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he must have had the city of Nashville in mind.
Toronto's Classical Theatre Project presented Romeo and Juliet in the capital of Tennessee to an enthusiastic audience of 1,000 students and teachers Monday afternoon, but the performance was almost derailed Sunday night by a group of self-appointed censors who found the Bard of Avon a bit too racy for Music City, U.S.A.
David Galpern, artistic director of the theatre company, was taken aback when confronted with requests for a series of cuts to Shakespeare's text and a general "toning down" of the bawdier elements in the show.
"We've performed this for 100,000 people in Canada without a single complaint from a teacher or student. Why should it suddenly change here?" he said on the phone from Nashville Monday.
Since it was founded in 2001, the acclaimed company has become Canada's largest producer of classical theatre for youth and has played to more than 350,000 students. The production of Romeo and Juliet being performed in Nashville was nominated for a Dora Award in 2009.
Most of the worries were about the sexuality explicit in the script and how it was brought to accurate life by the group, especially in scenes involving the ribald Mercutio.
Charles Roy, co-founder of the company, admitted there was an element of bawdry in some of the passages, but, as he pointed out, "If Mercutio doesn't offend the Nurse with his line about the bawdy hand of the dial being upon the prick of noon and she doesn't try to exit in protest, then what happens to the rest of the play?"
Full story
....and
U.S. school bans the dictionary
A Southern California school board has pulled the Merriam-Webster dictionaryoff its shelves after a parent complained about the entry “oral sex.”
The collegiate-level dictionary was being used in grade four and five classrooms. The school now promises to begin a thorough scouring of the dictionary for other offensive entries.
“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Menifee Union School District spokesperson Betti Cadmus told the local The Press-Enterprise newspaper.
Merriam-Webster defines oral sex as “oral stimulation of the genitals.”
The dictionaries were originally intended for use by children working at advanced reading levels. Now the California town, pop. 70,000, looks like the staging ground for a First Amendment battle.
Full story
