 |
| VP Schone displayed his fashion sense at the national WELS coven. |
http://m.mankatofreepress.com/MFP/db_264901/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=z06x7JPi&full=true#display
NEW ULM — A community theater’s plans to stage a play based loosely on a trial that pit evolution against creationism have been derailed after its student director and all but one of the actors were persuaded to drop out.
The play’s former director, Martin Luther College student Zak Stowe, said that he left the production of “Inherit the Wind” on Sept. 3 because of numerous emails and letters objecting to his association with the play. The New Ulm Journal first reported the story Friday.
“Even more than having to deal with public pressure, I didn’t want to have to deal with professors coming up to me and saying ‘Are you still doing this?’” Stowe said.
The New Ulm Actors Community Theatre board voted Sept. 16 to indefinitely postpone the performance because there wasn’t enough time to replace the cast before the Oct. 4 premiere. The group still expects to put on the play but hasn’t picked a date.
But they want to continue the discussion about the play’s message, so they’ve scheduled a reading of “Inherit the Wind,” for 7 p.m. Oct. 8 at the John Lind House in New Ulm. The group does a non-dramatic play reading every month.
The group decided last year to include “Inherit the Wind,” a fictionalized version of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in its 2013 lineup. Executive Director Paul Warshauer figured the choice would raise eyebrows, but he didn’t anticipate it would be so controversial.
“We looked at it as a matter of freedom of thought,” he said, and about the value of reasonable discourse.
So he finds what happened next to be “tremendously ironic.”
College cancels audition
Martin Luther College canceled an on-campus audition for the play that had been scheduled for Aug. 30.
The college’s vice president for mission advancement, the Rev. Michael Otterstatter, said in an email that the administration thought this would be a minor change for the theater group, but the short notice left them in an awkward situation. He acknowledged the administration “could have possibly timed its action better.”
He also wrote that the college did not tell the students in the play that they should withdraw and there would have been no consequences had they performed it. Instead, some faculty members told students they were concerned about “perceptions that could be formed by some constituents due to the material portrayed in the play.”
[GJ - This is a lie from Ottersbladder. Stowe has to attend weekly meetings with Schone now. MLC is even worse than NWC was in their pin-headed Stalinism. This is not what I would call higher education - more like abusive sect stupefaction.]
[GJ - This is a lie from Ottersbladder. Stowe has to attend weekly meetings with Schone now. MLC is even worse than NWC was in their pin-headed Stalinism. This is not what I would call higher education - more like abusive sect stupefaction.]
The college’s vice president of student life, Jeffrey Schone, told the Journal that “this is a ministerial school. People employing our students need confidence about their views.”
Stowe, who is planning to become a teacher, said he understands it’s part of Schone’s job to preserve students’ reputations.
But he said he should have been trusted to form his own views.
“I’m also an adult, and my opinion isn’t necessarily the same as his,” Stowe said.
Besides, directing a play off-campus seemed innocuous.
“I’m trying to direct a play. I’m not telling people to sacrifice goats in front of the Hermann statue.”
College owned by church
Martin Luther College is owned and operated by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, a conservative denomination that believes creation happened in the course of six consecutive days of normal length.
“We believe that the Bible presents a true, factual and historical account of creation,” the church’s website reads. The church also rejects attempts to harmonize the scriptural account of creation with the theory of evolution.
Play seen differently
Though the play is set in a small Tennessee town in 1925, it is a metaphor for the McCarthy trials of the 1950s. One of the play’s authors, Jerome Lawrence, told Newsday in 1996 that the play is “not about science versus religion; it’s about the right to think.”
Christianity, though, is occasionally described as a stand-in for the forces of intolerance, as when the play’s preacher turns on his own daughter, who pleads with her father not to damn the teacher to hell. In the play, as in real life, the teacher was on trial for teaching evolution.
“If it’s a metaphor for McCarthy, why is there a focus on mocking Christians?” said Mark Santelman, a Winthrop man and actor with the community theater.
He refused to audition for the play and counseled Stowe similarly.
“I shared with him, at length, why I felt it was not a good thing for him to be involved in,” Santelman said.
He said he first heard about the selection last year and figured the theater’s board would change their minds early on. When that didn’t happen, he said he didn’t decide to fight it, at least not for his own sake.
“I made a decision that if my Lord and Savior is going to be mocked and ridiculed, I’m going to stand up … and try to defend him,” he said. “And defend him on every act of Scripture. If they throw that part of the Bible out, when are they going to throw the Gospels out?”
Santelman said he would not have objected to a fair-minded debate about creationism and evolution but said the play has an anti-Christian hidden agenda.
Warshauer, though, sees the play entirely differently. He says it is less about faith than about the perils of telling other people how to think.
In one scene, the defense attorney calls the prosecutor to the stand as an expert on the Bible and asks if he’s ever read Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”
The prosecutor says he hasn’t and never would, to which the attorney replies: “Then how in perdition to you have the gall to whoop up a holy war against a book you’ve never even read?”
The play ends on a note of reconciliation, or at least impartiality, as Henry Drummond, the play’s version of defense attorney Clarence Darrow, picks up a Bible and a copy of Darwin’s “The Descent of Man.”
“He looks from one volume to the other, balancing them thoughtfully, as if his hands were scales. He half-smiles, half-shrugs. Then Drummond slaps the two books together and jams them in his brief case, side by side.”
Stowe, the student director, said the scene with the reverend condemning his daughter is clearly hyperbole to prove a point. And while he said Christians are sometimes portrayed negatively, he said the play is a commentary on intolerance, not on Christianity.
“They’re making fun of the idea that the fundamentalist right, if you will, won’t even listen to the other side,” Stowe said.
“Inherit the Wind,” incidentally, was initially a replacement for another proposed play, “Doubt: A Parable,” which was deemed far too controversial. “Doubt,” the subject of a 2008 film, is about a Catholic priest suspected of molesting an altar boy.
“It’s a great play,” Warshauer said of “Doubt,” but the board decided that it would’ve prompted outrage in New Ulm. So they went with the safer choice, “Inherit the Wind.”
Santelman said the controversy has been good because everyone has learned something, including the community theater’s board, of which Stowe is a member.
“I think they heard from their public that this might be the wrong thing to do,” he said.
The play’s advocates, though, have clearly learned something else.
“We feel we were shut down by religious forces,” Warshauer said.
This is what Schone approved and allowed on YouTube for a long, long time.
 |
| "Me evolve into a human? Do I look that stupid?" |
