John Otte at Tarleton State University might have started a new college trend. For a class project he prepared an excerpt from the Terrence McNally play “Corpus Christi,” which presents Jesus as gay.
Now Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. is presenting the play with some additional twists to rankle the radical right who protested the Texas production into cancellation for safety reasons. (A presentation of Otte’s class production in the Metroplex in a larger venue is still pending).
The show was just recently added to the theater department’s schedule.
While Otte’s production was simply a class project and presentation was not open to the public, the Gallaudet presentation is theater department presentation. The D.C. production will be performed three times. At Tarleton, the play was slated for one performance.
Gallaudet University is a school for the deaf. So in this production Jesus will be deaf and gay. And that added “imperfection” of hearing impairment in this presentation is sure to rile the homophobes who don’t believe that Jesus embraced anyone other than married, suburban heterosexuals.
The protesters in D.C. are at work again but the university is standing by its production.
So by threatening violence against a student in a directing class in a small school 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, the right-wing haters in Stephenville have turned this relatively unknown and rarely performed play into a must-produce phenomenon for any theater company or college group that wants to prove its independence and avant garde credentials.
A story on Christian Newswire says, ” The lewd production was recently canceled at Tarleton State University in Texas due to peaceful protest.”
By peaceful, I assume they mean the threats of violence that were phoned or emailed to everyone from the president of the school for not knowing every student’s homework assignment to Dallas Voice for reporting on the play.
I’m looking forward even more to bringing Otte and company to Dallas.
6 Comments
Hi. Jesus is not a character in the play. The play is not about Jesus. It’s about a man named Joshua living in the 1950s. I know we’re on the same side, but you might want to read it…?
Tell that to the protesters threatening violence against anyone who produces this play. I don’t think you’ll get very far with your argument, Marcy.
As a student at Gallaudet, I just wanted to say that the production has been in the works for several months. The school did not see the backlash at other schools and decide to put on the show to boost its “avant-garde credentials,” but rather had been planning the show for awhile and apparently only recently added it to the website.
In general, the show seems to have widespread support here. There are a few people who are against it, for sure, but the community as a whole seems to support the idea of free speech and of opening the pathway for a mature dialogue about controversial issues. Kudos to Gallaudet for continuing the production… I look forward to seeing it this weekend.
I believe in Jesus. He was gay and hung with hookers.
He was not, however, the son of God, anymore than I am. Mary, his mother, lied about what what inserted into her person.
You want to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, go ahead.
I choose science and recorded, documented HISTORY. Not fairy tales.
Good for John Otte at Tarleton State University !
These young kids are really making our so called LGBT establishment leaders and LGBT elected officials look really bad. They are accomplishing more than all these big LGBT rights organizations with multi million dollar budgets are able to accomplish.
Hopefully he has started a national trend. It’s a great litmus test for any theatre department or theatre company to see if they really are open or not to real art that challenges the status quo like the arts are supposed to do.
On a similar note, in this weekend’s Dallas Morning News, they ran a story about why we suddenly have two theatre companies in Dallas. Apparently the Dallas Summer Musicals wasn’t willing to run any plays with any controversy such as Spring Awakening, so a group of progressives split and founded the Lexus Broadway Series that is playing at the new Winspear while the Dallas Summer Musicals is staying behind (physically and intellectually) at Fair Park Music Hall.
It’s good news as we will now start to see more of progressive broadway shows that had to bypass Dallas and Fort Worth in years past. Needless to say these progressive shows will generate contraversary and get the Bible thumpers out in full force.
Progressive is just another way of saying anything goes and that is a relative term depending on who is speaking. I don’t think it’s progressive, but that’s just my opinion.
I think it’s a matter of respect. That’s why people put up such a fuss over this. To portray Jesus as gay is disrespectful. It is trampling on someone’s beliefs. I wouldn’t do such a thing to another religion and I don’t expect someone to do it to mine.
It occurs to me that as adults we try to teach our children to respect others and their beliefs, but at the same time we do things like this that show disregard and disrespect for others.