Right-wing institutions are really feeling themselves ahead of the election. Or at least one in particular.
For the past few weeks, the conservative-leaning Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York has been scrutinizing the programming of one of its long-term tenants, the Connelly Theater, an acclaimed venue known for controversial productions in downtown Manhattan. The church has nixed multiple shows, including any that deal with reproductive rights, trans issues, or sexuality. This came as a surprise to the nonprofit.
In response, the theater’s general manager, Josh Luxenberg, resigned last Friday, leading to a suspension of operations.
Conservatives are coming for the theater kids — a group not known for deep pockets or political connections. America will shrug over the news that the church is gagging the Connelly, and that will embolden conservatives. Election Day is still a week away, and the church is already triumphant. Their champion’s fortunes are rising. Who’s next? Journalists? Teachers? Poets? Filmmakers? Activists?
Say what you will about show people, but they’re always on the front lines of social oppression. Theatre kids intuitively understand the spiritual power of ritual but are born heretics, which is why the Church is targeting them and has for centuries.
In a statement to The New York Times, Joseph Zwilling, the church’s communications director, defended the actions: “It is the standard practice of the archdiocese that nothing should take place on church-owned property that is contrary to the teaching of the church.” That standard could apply to most plays and musicals that have won Tony Awards and Pulitzers over the past, oh, century or so. But I guess that depends on what the church thinks it can get away with. And in a Trump administration, they’ll have sympathetic partners. The MAGA movement has spent years attempting to — and succeeding in — banning books in school libraries that offend their beliefs or confront their prejudices.
Up next: shutting down entire organizations that tell stories the right hates, and they’re starting with theaters.
It should come as no surprise that conservatives will happily abandon their relatively recent free-speech principles the moment power allows them to bully others without consequence — we’re supposed to instantly forget the popular Republican opinion from a few years ago that a private company like Twitter deleting hate speech was an affront to the First Amendment.
This isn’t some abstract local drama either. Anyone who dreams of having a voice should care about what’s happening to the Connelly’s two East Village theaters: a 200-seat “jewel box playhouse” and a smaller 50-seater upstairs. The Connelly has been producing trailblazing theater since mid-century alongside other neighborhood venues like Performance Space New York, New York Theater Workshop, and La MaMa ETC, all of which have reputations for nurturing offbeat plays and musicals that push the proverbial envelope.
These spaces are vital to New York City’s cultural ecosystem — they are arguably the only thing keeping the city from becoming one massive luxury shopping complex for billionaires and one haughty archbishop.
The Connelly has had a successful recent run, including the satirical 2021 Pulitzer finalist Circle Jerk and Job, a psychological thriller about the tech industry, which is currently wrapping up a brief run on Broadway. A new play, Becoming Eve, about a rabbi who comes out as a trans woman, was supposed to premiere at the Connelly next year, but the church rejected the production. SheNYC Festival will also have to find a new venue for plays and musicals exploring gender identity after years at the Connelly.
It’s hard enough to produce groundbreaking theater on hot-button issues in downtown Manhattan without the city’s largest landlord telling you what you can and can’t produce. The church has a contractual right to shut down anything it deems obscene — there’s no argument there. But sometimes, there’s the law and what’s right. Two different things. What the church is doing is unjust. Their sudden exercise of power is both a political statement and a rehearsal of things to come if Trump wins the election.
The church seems to be jumping the gun on his victory: last week, Archbishop Timothy Dolan was seen doting on Donald Trump at the annual Al Smith Dinner — an event in Midtown Manhattan that gathers local and national powerbrokers. This public canoodle with a man whose entire life has been lived “contrary to the teaching of the church” happened the same day the second-largest diocese in the country, LA County, spent $1.5 billion to settle hundreds of claims of sexual abuse. This is hubris, of course. The archbishop should know better. Imagine being a man of the cloth and forgetting Proverbs 16:18.
The church shouldn’t be able to wear two faces at once, and yet that’s exactly what it’s doing. Cardinal Dolan wants to wield earthly and heavenly powers. He fawns over a defiant adulterer one day, and the next, his organization is dictating morals. This is rank hypocrisy, but the modern conservative project has inured itself to such accusations. It just doesn’t matter; all that matters is power.
The church’s crackdown on the Connelly is another battle in conservatism’s ever-widening culture war on free expression — from drag show bans in Tennessee to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws — and this authoritarian project will only intensify if the Catholic Church is allowed to determine who can tell their stories on stage. If the church is comfortable bullying a downtown New York theater, then they’re going to feel emboldened, and so will their allies across the country who see marginalized people as threats to their way of life, including artists intent on telling the stories of trans people, women, and anyone who doesn’t conform to conservatism’s rigid social norms.
I am but a humble theatre kid, so far be it from me to criticize Archbishop Dolan and the Roman Catholic Church, but this organization should focus its efforts on more traditional pursuits, like feeding the hungry or covering up sex abuse scandals.
Does that sound melodramatic? Well, yes, of course it does. I wrote a memoir called Theatre Kids, all about the magic and madness of New York’s downtown experimental theater scene. I spent years writing and performing sweaty, outrageous theater pieces designed to provoke in black box theaters for one or two people in the audience — it was glorious. There were also productions I saw that blew my mind — directors like Richard Foreman staging hallucinogenic, avant-garde work at St. Mark’s Place, for instance. Even farther downtown, on Ludlow past Houston, I’d watch bizarre reinterpretations of Shakespeare in damp basements.
Legendary musical hits like Little Shop of Horrors, Rent, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch all got their start in small theaters far from the glare of the Great White Way. New York’s once-thriving Off-Off-Broadway and avant-garde were safe spaces for pioneering queer actors and writers. These cramped, ramshackle stages were for you if you were an artist of color or were persecuted because of your political or religious beliefs. They’re threatened once again.
I am also a lapsed Catholic who has, on rare occasions, defended the church. The Catholic-to-theater-kid pipeline is strong. I grew up loving the theatricality of Mass — and the gospel’s core message of forgiveness — but it’s hard to reconcile the church of my youth, troubled but inspired by the liberal changes of Vatican II, with New York’s archdiocese, which has a long history of hostility toward artists who aren’t sufficiently Catholic, or white, straight, cis, and male. While the church owns billions in property, it’s also a tax-exempt charity, making its fear-mongering and witch-hunting even more insufferable.
This is about more than real estate. Or money. This is about an artistic tradition that is being threatened by fast-rising rents, soul-numbing cultural apathy, and, now, bullying from a church that believes it’s on a mission from God to silence those who would speak from their hearts.
New York City, like the rest of the country, rarely considers its struggling artists, but it’s those same artists — the weirdos, the outcasts, the original thinkers — who breathe life into countless small theaters, galleries, and art spaces in downtowns and riverfronts and warehouse districts. There is an arts crisis throughout the country, and no one cares about art until, one weekend, they wonder why nothing is interesting or exciting to see besides going to Target and eating at Chipotle. Or attending Mass.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of John DeVore's work on Medium.