WORDS THAT ANGER AND INJURE

Words have sharp edges. Calendar ran a letter last week from a playgoer who was so turned off by the boiler-room talk in “Glengarry Glen Ross” that she couldn’t understand how The Times’ reviewer could find any meaning or value whatsoever in David Mamet’s drama. Literally, she hadn’t heard the play for the words.

It’s easy to feel superior to such complaints. One can point out that vulgarity is a sliding scale--that in 1914 audiences blanched when Eliza Doolittle came out with “Not bloody likely.” The sophisticated theatergoer prides himself on not being shocked by “shocking” language. Words will never hurt him.

But what if the word is Jew or Jap or nigger ? What if it keeps coming up in a play, in passages that suggest not only that the speaker is a racist, but that the playwright is as well? Then, the sophisticated playgoer suddenly feels less sophisticated. Maybe Justice Holmes had something when he said that there was no right to cry “fire” in a public theater.

It may be hard for Americans to imagine such a play, but one has recently surfaced in Germany. The late Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Garbage, the City and Death” had been around as a script since 1975--there had even been a movie version of it, “Shadow of Angels.” But the script hadn’t been performed on the stage until the Frankfurt municipal theater tried to do it this fall in its small downstairs house.

“Garbage” is a scabrous allegory along the lines of “Threepenny Opera.” One of its nefarious characters is called the Rich Jew--a builder who is bleeding the city to death by “developing” it into superblocks. Another character is the former commander of a Nazi death camp, now a transvestite nightclub entertainer. Not only does the ex-Nazi not regret his wartime activities, he can’t wait to resume them--and is quite confident that Germany will shortly give him the chance to do so.

“Garbage” was scheduled for eight performances at the Kammerspiel. The first became a sit-in, with leaders of Frankfurt’s small Jewish community (some 5,000 people in a city of 950,000) unfurling a banner on the stage and protesting the play as anti-Semitic. The second performance was for the critics, who didn’t acclaim it. Then the theater yanked the play.

The affair made headlines in Europe, but only landed on the inside pages here, and I’ve not seen any discussion of it in American theater journals. There should be, for it raises questions that American resident theaters need to think about. Is a playwright allowed to say absolutely anything under the name of art? How far would they go in backing a playwright if a group decided it was being maligned by him?

Because it can happen here. In fact, a couple of weeks after the Fassbinder affair, we were reading about the pressure being brought by the Los Angeles Archdiocese against the exhibitor of Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Hail Mary,” which the Church had found an affront to Catholics.

Apples and oranges? Not really. The Frankfurt case was far more grave, but the dynamic was the same. In each case, an aggrieved minority was able to have a work of art removed from public display. And that’s disturbing.

It is not illegal. The picketers praying to St. Hilary at the Nuart Theatre and the sitters-in unrolling their banners at the Kammerspiel demonstrated the same freedom of speech as the works they were protesting. What was disturbing was that neither group could see the piece in question as a work of art rather than as a diatribe against them, and that neither group trusted the public to make the same distinction.

Now the Jews of Frankfurt have more reason to fear a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany than the Catholics of Los Angeles have to fear an outbreak of blasphemy against the Virgin Mary. I was reminded of this by Mark Wurm, who keeps track of the German press for the local Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, and who kindly volunteered to translate the Fassbinder play for me.

“Jews have been dying of stories for years,” Wurm said, citing such classic medieval scare-tales as the Death of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, supposedly done in by blood-drinking Jewish cutthroats.

Wurm saw Fassbinder’s play as a conscious update of these sinister cautionary tales, which Christians had once found extremely convenient in explaining the latest sacking of a ghetto. Further, Wurm saw the anti-Jewish fulminations of the Nazi in the play as indicating pretty much where Fassbinder himself stood. Hadn’t he once been quoted as saying that he was sick of having to be polite to Jews all the time?

That Fassbinder had portrayed everyone in his play as a monster of one sort or another; that the play was as concerned with the bashing of gays as with urban profiteering; that the Nazi character’s anti-Jewish tirades were meant to warn that Nazism was indeed on the rise again in Germany; that what Fassbinder was “tired” of was the superficial affability that prevents German non-Jews and Jews from truly dealing with their differences--all these struck me as highly defensible propositions, once Wurm had read me the play in English.

Wurm found these arguments far-fetched. Even granting good intent on Fassbinder’s part, the words were there, the ones that get scrawled on synagogue walls, presented much as Dr. Goebbels presented them. To utter them in a state-supported theater was to legitimize them. Wurm conceded that the ammerspiel production had prefaced each of the Nazi’s speeches with an air-raid siren, as if to underline where this kind of racism could lead a country. But a thin coat of whitewash couldn’t erase the real message of this play.

Similarly, the Catholics picketing “Hail Mary” at the Nuart saw Godard’s film only in terms of the Church--as an attack on the story of Mary and the Virgin Birth. But a disinterested viewer would have found surprisingly few references to the New Testament story and no sense that anything was being attacked. The film struck me as a meditation, not at all easy to follow, on women and birth. Had Godard chosen another title, the Church might not have noticed the picture at all.

Words again! And what a torrent of words get unleashed in these public protests, bringing more attention to the offending work than it ever would have merited if it had been allowed to come and go without resistance. The Fassbinder fallout has been particularly unfortunate, with every article broadcasting the very words to which the Frankfurt protesters had taken exception. Dr. Goebbels couldn’t have done it more effectively.

I’ve learned only enough about the Fassbinder affair to know that it can’t be decided from over here. One would need to find out more, for example, about the discussions that the Frankfurt theater had with the Jewish leaders before putting on the play--not just the substance of the discussions, but their tone. Again, it is not a side issue that one of those leaders is the very builder that Fassbinder caricatures in the play.

But what if the play were put on in Los Angeles? I’d defend the theater’s right to perform it, even if it were a publicly supported theater. (We do not keep “controversial” books out of the public library.) I’d say that the theater had a duty to present it in context--for instance, by following each performance with an audience discussion on anti-Semitism led by someone as informed as Mark Wurm.

Equally, I’d defend the right to picket the show. But not to disrupt the performance. And not to make people walk through a gauntlet of insults to get to the box office, as happened a few years ago when a coalition of anti-apartheid groups bannered “Ipi-Tombi” at the Huntington Hartford Theatre. That kind of confrontation hardens attitudes rather than changing minds.

Theater is about confrontation--intellectual confrontation. In the American theater, that means letting the playwright make his case, even when it is disturbingly worded. Then, we argue. If our society can hear a Farrakhan without coming unglued, then we can afford to hear a Fassbinder.

At the same time, playwrights need to be aware that certain words do make it difficult for certain listeners to realize that a case is being made--the flag simply goes up. If the playwright’s intention is to goad the listener, then these words are exactly what’s required. But a good painter doesn’t use more red than he needs.

Playwrights should also be aware that theater audiences tend to follow the old legal maxim “Silence gives consent.” From reports, Wallace Shawn’s new play, “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” provides a disturbingly effective argument for Fascism without countering it. Shawn is within his rights to leave this task to the listener. But some listeners may conclude either that Shawn himself can’t answer the Fascist argument, or that he actually espouses it. The words that aren’t there have edges too.