Short and Sweet Update X - the saga of "Faithless"

[jack_ryder]

I've been holding off a post on Short and Sweet until a situation has resolved itself.

Now, it's too late - my co-writer Brett (i.e. ferkster) has blown the gaffe - as has the festival director Alex Broun in today's SMH:

At the other end of the political spectrum is Iain Triffitt's Faithless, in which a young man confronts his hippie mother with the fact that he's become a Christian. "The original director actually resigned from that because he thought it was pro-Christian propaganda, but we think it's important to have all sides," says Broun.

"Other end of the political spectrum..."?

The whole situation has been one huge pain in the butt.

To give a potted version-

• "Faithless" is selected by theatre group for performance


• Brett gets cryptic e-mail from director asking about our religious beliefs. He (the director) wants to be assured we aren't Christian.


• Producer from theatre group approaches ferkster and I at Short and Sweet launch and lets us know that they've got a few problems with the end. We agree (as we weren't quite happy with the wording)


• We go to rehearsal and find that: there appears to be about five years difference between the actor playing the son, and the actor playing the mother, and about ten years difference between the actor playing the son and the actor playing his girlfriend - which of course greatly changes the nature of the play.


• Doesn't matter anyway as the director is unhappy with the ending


• We go away and change ending


• Director wants reassurance that Brett and I aren't secretly Christians using Short and Sweet to spread Christian propaganda, asks me to justify writing the play and demands I articulate our religious positions.


• I succumb to Stalinist tactics and assure him that I am an atheist, Brett is agnostic, and we wrote the play to redress what we thought was an imbalance in the depiction of Christians (but really most religious people) in Short and Sweet.


• Get barely coherent phone call from producer saying (I think) the play is great, the ending is shit and needs to be changed. I respond changing the ending changes the whole point of the play and effectively neuters it. The director's hostile response to the play only demonstrates that Brett and I have hit a nerve, that it is worth discussing knee-jerk prejudice against Christians. He talks me into changing the ending yet again to bring more of the theme out, I do so, but run it past Brett before I e-mail it out.


• Doesn't matter anyway as I get hostile e-mail from director which throws my words back in my face as proof that I'm trying to sneak a Christian message into Short and Sweet (which I guess we are - the Christians have a message of tolerance, don't they?) He resigns.


• Also get e-mail from actor with his ending, that he's thoughtfully written for us which will support the integrity of the play as a piece of credible theatre/art and save us from being dead in th ewater when it comes to performing the play before any intelligent audience


• I restrain myself from signing actor up to child porn distribution lists.


• I send the play to some atheist friends of mine to check it for ideological purity - i.e. is it Christian propaganda? Both reply in the negative regarding the propaganda and are very positive about the play.


• ferkster, who has been on holiday since the first rehearsal, advises me to wait until mid-week before contacting Alex (festival director) about the situation. I agree, hoping to cool off.


• Alex rings me first, letting me know he's on our side and appreciating the irony of a play about tolerance basically not being tolerated. He has found a new director.


• The dress rehearsal for "Faithless" is exactly one week away, and we still haven't heard from the new director.


• But I've heard from the actor who wants to know some background to the play - I take ferkster's advice and recommend that he go through the director with questions about the play, rather than acting on my first impulse and tellling him to go fuck himself committing a tactical error.

Comments

Or to put it another way

[jack-ryder.livejournal.com]

- Dropping all mention of Christianity for a moment:

- company takes on script with expectation of changing ending to suit themselves.
- writers waste time changing ending.
- company says that's not what we wanted and drop play
- writers wonder why play was selected in first play if company wasn't prepared to perform it as written.
- writers get pissed at having time wasted.

And I do take exception to your "disingenuous" comment as you're criticising something you haven't read. It's like the SMH's casual dropping of "From the other end of the political spectrum...". The play explicit criticises the Hillsong form of Christianity while stating that other forms exist and perhaps shouldn't be judged by the same criteria.

But maybe this is a message people are too close-minded to hear. No matter how open minded they prefer to think they are - which is one of the reasons for the play to exist in the first place.

Re: Or to put it another way

[(Anonymous)]

But you address my points and I address yours so quid pro quo. Yes I know you ran this past atheists who okayed it and yes I agree that it is frustrating having something accepted and then having all these conditions and exceptions placed on it.
I disagree with your contention that it is a waste of time since an exercise of this kind, with all the challenges it presents, must have some built-in expectation of being royally fucked around. Otherwise it would lack all the contention and controversy that is underwritten in the enterprise.

In short, agree that it is a worthwhile project to pursue and that it should have been accepted and presented as is. Stick to your guns and don't let the bastards (myself included) grind you down.

Disagree that there are 'different' forms of Christianity that are more or less tolerant and more or less acceptable. It's that old sawhorse of the problem with both Christianity and Marxism is that they've never actually been applied in practice. I tend to think that the essential difference between Christianity and Islam is that the latter brooks no dissent, the former used to be the same - as intolerant as it was possible to be - but had to adjust to the rationalist challenge and since then there's been 'green' forms of christianity, 'pacifist' forms of christianity, 'socialist' forms of christianity. But, at the end of the day, it's all there in the scriptures: the witchburning, the slavekeeping, the homobashing, the 'thou shalt have no other god before me'. It doesn't need Hillsong or George W Bush to help it along down that path.

- the pagan MoFo again