A 2010 Exchange With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Dramatist Stephen Adly Guirgis

The Pulitzer committee announced its 2015 prizes this past week, awarding its prize in drama to Stephen Adly Guirgis for Between Riverside and Crazy.

Back in 2010, I had a brief exchange with Guirgis on this very blog. He had objected to comments I had penned in 2006 regarding an earlier play of his, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot -- arguably, my first published piece of theater criticism. While I conceded that the play was filled with the sorts of monologues that actors enjoy performing, I considered the play to be poorly structured, and narratively incoherent, as well as containing a pronounced undercurrent of hipster misogyny (because sexual harassment of women is edgy and cool!) and old-school antisemitism: Most notably the Deicide charge that the Jews are to be held responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth (a doctrine explicitly rejected by the Second Vatican Council with the 1965 publication of Nostra Aetate).

The play takes place in a courtroom in the afterlife in which the defense attorney for Judas Iscariot (whom many scholars believe to be a fictitious character whom the Gospel writers created to personify "the perfidious Jews") tries to overturn his eternal damnation -- her strategy is to pin the crime of the crucifixion on another individual -- and since the Roman military governor, Pontius Pilate has washed his hands of responsibility, she ends up trying to pin the crime on another Jew: Caiaphas, the high priest of the Second Temple.

Some point over the years, Guirgis got wind of my critique, and while he was willing to concede that The Last Days of Judas Iscariot might not be the best written play (he wrote "My play is wildly imperfect, [with] lots and lots of flaws"), he objected to my characterization of the play as anti-Semitic (" I can assure you it was not written in hate. It was written, in all it's imperfection, with love.") Perhaps his intent was muddled by the structural problems in the play. Oddly, he never really addressed my concerns about misogyny.

You can read the whole exchange here.

NYT Misses The Point Of Staged Readings

New York Times writer Erik Piepenburg enthuses on the topic of staged readings of plays and while not exactly missing the point that staged readings are primarily for play development, seems to regard play development as an afterthought:

NEW Yorkers love nothing more than to boast, “I was there first,” whether it’s getting a reservation at a buzzworthy restaurant, snatching up the latest handbag or seeing a new film before the rest of the country.

[...]

One way to catch the next potential It play or musical is to attend a reading. Before a show gets a full-fledged production, it has to start somewhere.

So the whole point of a staged reading is to give bragging rights to the audience members? Piepenburg actually spends the first three paragraphs making this argument.

[...] they allow playwrights, directors and troupes to put a work in front of an audience and gauge the reaction with little expense and relatively few risks. (Critics aren’t invited to weigh in.)

Actually, I do invite critics. Should any attend, I do expect them to keep to ethical standards of not publishing a review, but the feedback of a critic (or indeed any professional or semi-professional) who is only motivated by their personal standard of good theatre is invaluable. Actors, playwrights, directors, designers, techies, critics, and audience members all want the same thing: good theatre. So if the aim is to identify flaws within the script so that they can be corrected in a later draft, why would I not invite a critic? Not only have I invited critics but after they come I have invited them back when I'm ready to present a subsequent draft.

Although readings don’t promise quality, in some cases they guarantee star sightings. The actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis were both in the audience last month at the LAByrinth Theater Company’s reading of Mr. Guirgis’s new work, directed by Mr. Hoffman.

Why would anyone be remotely surprised that the playwright should be in attendance at a reading of his own play, especially when he is co-artistic director of the presenting organization, or for that matter, at the presence of the play's director who also happens to be on the board of directors for LAByrinth. This is not a "star-sighting" because Messrs Guirgis and Hoffman are at work, and whatever past arguments I have had with Mr. Guirgis, I have no doubt he takes his work seriously. It simply is not a "star-sighting" when one views a notable individual precisely where one should expect them, doing their job.

This is like somebody being amazed not by the artistry of Marcel Marceau, but Marcel Marceau showing up for his own gig.

It is only thirteen paragraphs into the article that Piepenburg actually has a playwright discuss the value of a staged reading to the writer who is serious about doing his or her job:

Andrew Hinderaker [...] whose play has been produced in Chicago, said readings give him a chance to see his own words with fresh eyes. “Part of what you’re looking for is the audience response,” he said. “I’ll probably tweak things a little bit to some degree. What’s great about a reading is that it’s an opportunity to really hear your work again and focus on any changes.”

Now to be fair, Piepenburg does eventually describe the value that a staged-reading might have to a dedicated theatre goer: the excitement of seeing a work-in-progress, but to sensationalize this experience into being one of bragging rights does not contribute much to theatre journalism.

(Thanks to Matthew Freeman for bringing this to my attention!)

Aporeia or Dialogue? Guirgis and Thal on "Last Days of Judas Iscariot"

A few days ago, through the comments section of another blog entry, I had an exchange with the playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis. He took issue with my interpretation of his play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot which I had written as a letter to the editor some three years ago in response to the Boston's Weekly Dig having picked the Company One production as one of their Best of 2006.

Where we disgreed is that I interpreted the play as hipster revival of the old anti-Semitic canard that places the blame for Jesus' crucifixion on the Jews. Guirgis contends that this was not his intent. I have no reason to doubt his sincerity and at this point choose to look at this as an illustration of the real hazards that Jewish-Christian dialogue can sometimes smash itself upon, even when the interlocutors' intentions are the best. Yet, despite these hazards, this dialogue needs to occur, precisely because of an often horrific shared history.

To begin, a Dig staffer added this bold faced title caption to my letter:

Every point made in a play must be countered by an opposing point consisting of exactly as many words and spoken at a comparable volume. Only that way will theatre come alive again.

Dear Dig,
I wonder by what criteria Jenna Scherer selected to include The Last Days of Judas Iscariot as part of her roundup of the year's best theatre (12.20.06). While I confess that Stephen Adly Guirgis has a gift for writing dialogue that led to excellent performances by some of Company One's better actors, Guirgis's overall sloppiness placed it close to the bottom of my list for 2006.

Numerous scenes were completely irrelevant to the courtroom drama. Lengthy monologues by characters that appear nowhere else in the story implied that Guirgis either had not finished writing the play before opening night, or that he was simply trying to give some of the actors something to do instead of sitting backstage for over an hour. The ending, to the extent there was one, demonstrated that Guirgis was unable to handle any of the cans of worms that he himself had opened.

Leaving aside the structural problems, the second half of the play repeats again and again the old anti-Semitic canard that the Jews are the ones who murdered Jesus (a central theme of the Passion plays, and Mel Gibson's film version). Pontius Pilate even makes a point that he had washed his hands of the affair, and is a saint in the Ethiopian Church. It is not wrong for a writer to create anti-Semitic characters, but to leave their statements un-countered is highly questionable.

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot also has countless moments of misogyny to which there is never any rebuttal. How does a male witness sexually harass a female defense attorney with impunity? Or a male prosecuting attorney sexually harass a female witness? Guirgis seems to like his female characters neatly classified as mothers, whores and nuns, and he appears to take pleasure in humiliating the mothers and the whores.

Guirgis does a great job writing for the mafia characters on HBO's The Sopranos, but theology is well beyond his abilities, as is anything whose form demands that the plot threads be tied up by the end of the evening. Does Jenna Scherer pay any attention to the writing?

Ian Thal
Somerville, MA

This letter, no longer available on The Dig's website, simply floated on my soon to be neglected pages on authorsden (neglected because I desired the greater flexibility of the blogger platform) and on rare occasions referenced here and there.

Eventually, some three years later, on January 28, 2010, on an unrelated blog post, I received this comment from an anonymous poster, apparently identifying himself as Stephen Adly Guirgis:

Mr. Thal

I have learned that one never wins when contacting those who criticize one's work. And yet is it curious to me that my play has been performed all over the world and to my knowledge you are the only person to ever accuse me of perpetuating ant-semitic stereotypes. I don't know what you saw in Boston four years ago that compels you to keep associating me with Hate, but it saddens me because I happen to take racism/anti-semitism/hate pretty seriously. Maybe you were in the bathroom during the cross examination of Caiaphas by El-Fayoumy? Maybe you were asleep when the play pins 2000 years of hate -- not on "The Jews" -- but on the writers of the Gospels? I don't know... Clearly, you're completely entitled to dislike my play, dislike me, and say whatever you want to say. And you're not alone in criticizing the play -- some like it, some don't. I only hope that when hurling accusations of anti-semitism, that you feel you've done your due diligence to study the subject matter sufficiently so as to to feel confident in your own mind that you're correct in your assertions. You're an artist yourself so you know the deal: you put your stuff out there and people say what they're gonna say. So, I'm not complaining. My play is wildly imperfect, lots and lots of flaws. But, however you received it, I can assure you it was not written in hate. It was written, in all it's imperfection, with love. And with that, in this late night hour, I send love to you. I just wanted to say my piece. So, thanks. And best wishes to you and yours. SG

Taken at face value, I had to consider Guirgis' point of view as sincere, even if that's not what I saw in his play, so after several hours, I posted this response:

(Allow me to assume that Anonymous is exactly whom he claims to be.)

Dear Mr. Guirgis,

Thanks for writing. I much rather have a dialogue where in the end I can say "I stand corrected" than persist in some intractable feud.

Because of this, I have to accept your stated intentions at face value, and explore why I felt that quite the opposite of those intentions were communicated to me.

Keep in mind that the production I saw of Last Days of Judas Iscariot was some three-and-a-half years ago: July of 2006, to be exact, and the criticism I wrote was from a few months later after the play was picked for a "Best of 2006." I assure you that I did not nod off or leave for the bathroom during the performance.

I definitely did not get the impression that your play pinned the blame on Christian antisemitism on the Gospel writers , as neither they, nor their sectarian agenda (to make the young Jesus movement appealing to gentiles by stripping it of its Jewish context) was placed on trial.

Instead, the appeal on behalf of Judas (whom some scholars now view to be a fictitious personification of "the Jews") was largely based on finding an alternative Jewish culprit such as Caiaphas, as a representive of the Temple priesthood.

Frankly: I don't remember after all this time whether the other usual suspects of the Pharisees (that is, the Rabbis) and the crowd that chose amnesty for Barabbas were brought up.

And of course, as I mentioned, Pilate and his government are absolved simply because he says he's a Saint in the Ethiopian Church. So it turns into a situation of seeking amnesty for one Jew by finding an alternative Jewish scapegoat.

Now, had there been that meta-textual/meta-mythical turn after the intermission that brought Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and their sectarian agendas to task (as many "left-leaning" Catholics like James Carroll do,) then much of my criticism would have been invalid. However that leap was never made, and since the motion to simply grant Judas divine forgiveness was denied, the mechanics of the play demanded that the deicide charge be pinned on someone else: either a different Jew or Jews in general. So I found that it brought everything back to the bad old days before Nostra Aetate opened up lines of interfaith dialogue.

Again, maybe you feel that you had subtly done just what I suggest, in which case, it was completely lost in Company One's production which seemed more interested in finding "the real culprit."

Now the question is: is this an aporeia or an opening for further dialogue?

Letter in the Literary Review of Canada

The Literary Review of Canada printed my letter to the editor regarding last month's publication of The Explanation We Never Heard an apologia by Shriaz Dossa, a professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada who has come under criticism for being the sole Canadian scholar to have attended the "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust" in Tehran, Iran, a conference that included a great many holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and non-academics.

I found Professor Dossa's defense of the conference and his attendance so sophistic, and so intellectually dishonest that I felt compelled to write the following letter (also available on the LRC's website):

To The Editor:

Professor Dossa’s excuses regarding his attendance of the December 2006 “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust” demonstrate poor scholarship and faulty logic. Even if we accept his claim that only 6 out of 33 presenters were Holocaust deniers, then that means that at a supposedly academic conference, roughly 19 percent of the presenters were deniers. It would be unacceptable for a major academic conference on Darwin to have 19 percent of the presenters advocate creationism—were this the case, the conference organizers’ commitment to science itself would be questioned.

Dossa also misuses the word “anti-Semitism”—the word was specifically coined by 19th-century Germans who wanted to describe their hatred of Jews in racial (or pseudoscientific) terms as opposed to theological terms. It was never used to describe hatred of Muslims. Indeed, the Nazi regime even openly recruited aid from the Muslim world in its final solution.

Dossa also claims that anti-Semitism is an exclusively western problem. Policies of humiliating and subjugating Jews had been common in many (though not all) nations and eras of the Islamic world. These humiliations were, for the most part, not as severe as what occurred in Christian Europe, and at some points—notably in al-Andalus—Jews had great liberty. Nevertheless, Muslim countries (most significantly in the Arab world) adopted many elements of western anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries—first from Christian missionaries and later through Nazis and neo-Nazis.

Furthermore, a “spiritual wish” by a head of state for the elimination of the Jewish state is hardly without significance. It is the practice of Holocaust deniers to claim that Hitler did not intend to murder Jews because his public statements regarding the fate of the Jews were always in terms of prophecy and not policy.

I suppose Dossa has learnt something from the conference.

Ian Thal
Somerville, Massachusetts

Visit the LRC website for other letters discussing Professor Dossa's statements.

[As a note, this is the second time this year I have had a letter to the editor published-- last time was to criticize a production of playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.]