This is a truly phenomenal story. One for the memoirs!

The way I see it, you’re not a REAL critic until the Catholic League protests your opinions. Congratulations.

j

My impulse, which may not be helpful, is actually to draw some internal distinctions. I have divided feelings about every single issue here, but here goes:

although his thinking seems crude and prejudiced, unfounded by any real experience of the play, there is nevertheless a pattern of feeling in Donohoe’s response worth discerning, I think. I wonder if Donohoe is in part reacting to a) his own blurring of bomb threats with legal protests of the original production of Corpus Christi and b) Mark’s implicit linking of those bomb threats with the ideas that led to the killing of Matthew Shepherd. He misread Mark’s article as a comparison of the protesters to the murderers–and, understandably, he wants the right to protest a play whose ideas he finds offensive without being accused of being a murderer in his heart. Nobody said that he is–but that’s what he may have sensed as an implication, in a slippage of ideas that is his own, but also possibly an understandable confusion.

What. after all, is the appropriate way to reply to a play? To a form that has no room for audience response yet touches on core issues for you?

I mention this in part because, painfully, I find some of the same kind of odd slippage of issues in McNally’s writing of Corpus Christi, a play in which McNally’s personal history and that of the Jesus of the gospels and that of persecuted gay men everywhere are mixed–I admit to a degree of inchoate discomfort with that, with the claiming of the martyr’s mantle or the role of savior (the theological issues in McNally’s play are undeveloped, and that adds to the potential for misunderstanding); so I’m stuck defending in principle a play that I have never loved (although I’d be interested to see it, especially in a mixed-cast production), that, even if it has innocent intentions, seems at some level confused, if not as confused as its opponents.

More slippages surround this quarrel. Here are
two distinctions that nag at me:

first, is the objection to a portrayal of Christ as sexually active (a theme that has been surfacing in scholarship lately) homophobic or erotophobic? What if it’s more the latter? (Remember protests of the film of The Last Temptation of Christ?)

And second, although the historical and cultural importance of Matthew Shepherd’s death is that it awakened a nation to the horrors of gay-bashing, there is, however, reason to suspect that the actual murderers were not primarily motivated by homophobia so much as a drug-addled grab for money. How important is that? What is there to compare?

All of these distinctions wrinkle and compromise the easy comparisons here.

At the same time,Mark, it is almost impossible to write so as to forestall all options for misunderstanding. You were right to weigh in. But it’s great to have a space like this in which to continue the conversation.

The company wound up engaging with a local visual artist who made some stunning collages out of all the thousands of postcards we received. We left the death threats on there.

All in all, it was one of the most spiritually moving experiences of my life.

For my part, I appreciated Hoyt’s piece. As a liberal Christian who supports a secular society, I often feel like I encounter, in the arts, non-religious people claiming openness that falls short — not out of ugliness, but as a reaction to all the ugliness that comes along from those at the far, conservative end of the religious spectrum. I recently saw The Quality of Life at ACT, for example, and you had all those hundreds of agnostic Bay Area folk laughing and loving themselves for seeing a play about religious people, when I felt the father was a poor, two-dimensional attempt at treating conservative Christian feelings as possibly genuine. I don’t mean to attack the playwright, who seemed to be struggling honestly to get this guy to seem real. I take it more as evidence that many people in the arts and in secular, liberal America (a place I gladly inhabit) really have no idea how anyone could believe in these religious things, and it strains their imaginations. Much as I loved our production, the teeny bit of theology that McNally sticks in there is pretty darn elementary and doesn’t respond well to the “abomination” argument.

None of this is to say that Donahue is much more than a guy who really likes attention. I mean, the writing on the mass-produced postcards we received wasn’t even grammatical; he’s not doing it out of thoughtfulness or sincerity. However, I suspect that whatever he really is holding onto, at core, is sincerely meaningful to him.

At any rate, congrats at writing a piece that got his panties in a bunch! This makes me all the more proud to know you.

It IS a symbol of lingering homophobia. HE is a symbol of lingering homophobia. Also high blood pressure.