Banned Theatre in Boston

It is so easy to criticize Scandal on the Stage: Banned Theatre in Boston that it is difficult to know where to start. Described by its director as a "documentary-style original performance" that explores the long history of censored and prohibited theatrical entertainment in Boston, Banned, itself, should perhaps be banned due to its extreme banality, its masquerading an adolescently condescending attitude as cogent content, and its over all suckiness.

Presented by the Old South Meeting House and the Massachusetts Historical Society, Banned is largely the product of the Emerson College Theatre Department, or rather people associated with Emerson's Theatre Dept. That said, one would have assumed the production to be a little better grounded in the history of theatre, of which there is nearly no evidence in this "documentary-style" dramatic presentation. And it is this utter lack of historical context, both in and out of the theatre, that simply makes Banned utterly worthless in regards to understanding its presumed subject matter, theatrical censorship in Boston.

Stated simply, this "play" is nothing more than dialogue culled from popular accounts of speeches, testimony, and letters-to-the-editor presented in the most mocking and disrespectful manner possible with no attempt whatsoever to understand or even explore the ideas of the words being expropriated. Juvenile is the word that continually springs to the mind here. How dressing up in "silly" wigs and hats and chomping on foot long plastic cigars and speaking in vocal tones that are almost always comically overwrought, uneducated, venomous, and even frothing makes for a "documentary-style" performance can only be answered by the better minds at Emerson, I suppose.

Just one example: four-time Boston mayor and ardent supporter of Boston's Watch and Ward Society (Boston's version of the Hays Committee in Hollywood), James Michael Curley is portrayed as an illiterate, inarticulate slob of a pol. When nothing could be further from the truth. Any research into the recorded radio speeches (and later television appearances) of Curley show him to be anything but. His diction is flawless and his reputation for knowing Shakespeare as well as any Baptist minister knows his Bible is very well founded. Banned makes no attempt to understand Curley's point of view or even much of an attempt to dispute the validity (or the lack thereof) of Curley's point of view. No, this production, whose own POV is obviously "anti-censorship," is more than dismissive of countering views, it distorts those views and personally attacks the holders of those views.

Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly!), Banned does have one nice thing to say about the Watch and Ward Society. It celebrates the Society's censoring of Birth of a Nation, quite hypocritically asserting that censorship does have a valid role in society, just so long as those charged with doing the censoring completely agree with you and your very own POV.

Boston's attitude towards the theatre has always been filled with curious and nearly unexplainable contradictions. Federal Bostonians loved their art, fashion, drink, and music, but for some reason that was perhaps sub-consciously connected to their ancestors' disapprobation of Roman Catholicism and its connections to early Modern Drama (I'm speaking of the "Mystery" and "Morality" plays sponsored, produced, and approved of by the Medieval Church.) and their ancestral suspicions of later Elizabethan and Jacobin theatre, Boston's Federalists could not bring themselves to accept the theatre as anything more than "house of vice." Victorian Bostonians, open to more things "European," opened themselves to the opera and Shakespeare and allowed that dramatic performances could be both educational and entertaining. (What better way to teach the populace how to be "good" citizens!) Come the 20th Century, when both Boston politics and the Watch and Ward Society had been taken over by the nascent majority Irish, the policy of censorship, itself, had become theatrical, a high drama on the most public of stages. The more the world seemed to struggle with democracy, the more it seemed to struggle with the issues of free speech and censorship. By the 1950s & 60s, the phrase "Banned in Boston," had become a nationally popular running gag that many Bostonians seemed to embrace, if only with its collective tongue firmly planted in cheek.

One would be hard pressed to find a meatier and more provocative subject matter than the largely unexplored theatrical and social history of censorship in Boston. Unfortunately, this particular effort, Banned Theatre in Boston, does little to nothing in regards to illuminating the reasons behind and the social and artistic consequences of Boston's quixotic history of theatrical censorship.