Diocese Warns N.Y. Troupe to Stop Play

An avant-garde theater company was ordered to quit performing its play called “The Cardinal Detoxes” or face eviction by the landlord: the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

The RAPP Theater Co., part of the RAPP Arts Center, agreed in its lease with the church not to present such works in the building, a former parochial school.

But R. Jeffrey Cohen, RAPP’s founder and artistic director, called the archdiocese’s threat an attempt at censorship and promised to fight it in court.

“We will not buckle under the pressure,” Cohen said. “My attorneys have been looking into it, and they are convinced that the church’s position is unconstitutional as well as being unconscionable.”

The play by Thomas M. Disch, drama critic of the Nation magazine, is a 35-minute monologue about an archbishop who has been placed in a church-run detoxification center because he has killed a pregnant woman in an auto accident while driving drunk.

The archbishop delivers a diatribe against church policies on abortion, women’s rights, homosexuality and other issues.

Cohen said the center received a letter Monday from the archdiocese demanding that the theater company “immediately terminate the performance” of the play because it violates the center’s lease.

An archdiocese spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said the letter did not amount to censorship.

The lease states that the center acknowledges that the church owns the land and that any activity offensive to the church’s principles “would be detrimental to the landlord’s reputation,” he said.

“This was agreed to by the tenant after extensive discussions,” Zwilling said. “We went over this very carefully. They said they would abide by these principles.”

The RAPP Arts Center is an experimental group that presents avant-garde theater, music, dance and film. Among those it has presented is performance artist Karen Finley, who recently lost a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts after officials said her work would not “enhance public understanding and appreciation of the arts.”

Cohen said he had not decided if he would defy the church’s order and present the play Friday and Saturday nights.