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STAGE

<i> Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation's press</i>

A Dry Run: An avant-garde theater company was ordered to stop performing “The Cardinal Detoxes” or face eviction by the landlord: the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The play by Thomas M. Disch, drama critic of The Nation, 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. According to the church, the RAPP Theater Co. agreed in its lease not to present such works in the building, a former parochial school. But R. Jeffrey Cohen, the theater company’s founder and artistic director, called the archdiocese’s threat an attempt at censorship and promised to fight it in court.

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