CNA Staff, Oct 23, 2024 / 16:15 pm (CNA).
An off-Broadway theater in Manhattan has closed down after its landlord — the Archdiocese of New York — began exercising greater scrutiny over the plays performed there to ensure they were in line with Catholic teaching.
The New York-based art group SheNYC said in a press release on Tuesday that the archdiocese had recently imposed “strict content guidelines” on the plays performed at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.
The Connelly Theater is housed within the Cornelia Connelly Center, a Catholic girls school. SheNYC said in its release that the archdiocese “has directed the theater to deny the space to any shows or companies that would be seen as inappropriate by the Catholic Church,” including shows about abortion and transgenderism.
“The priest in charge of the jurisdiction is personally screening scripts to ensure they fit within strictly Catholic doctrines,” the group said.
The New York Times on Wednesday reported that theater manager Josh Luxenberg resigned from his post last week amid the dispute. The Connelly Center, meanwhile, reportedly announced on Tuesday that it was “suspending all operations of its theater.”
New York Archdiocese spokesman Joe Zwilling told CNA in a statement on Wednesday: “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 applies to plays, television shows or movies being shot, music videos being recorded, or other performances,” Zwilling said.
Neither the Catholic school nor the theater responded to queries from CNA regarding the dispute and the shutdown.
But Brianne Wetzel, the school’s executive director, told the New York Times that the archdiocese “has sole control over the approval process of the productions that are performed there.” Income from the theater has been used to offset operating costs at the school, Wetzel told the paper.
School officials did not know when the theater would reopen, Wetzel said.
Asked via email if the archdiocese had mandated the theater’s closure, meanwhile, Zwilling on Wednesday said: “We did not order it to be closed.”
The theater was recently scheduled to host a performance of “Becoming Eve,” a play based on the eponymous memoir by Abby Stein, a man who was ordained a Hasidic rabbi before he began to identify as a woman.
SheNYC, meanwhile, said the archdiocese “specifically [called] out shows we’ve done in the past at the theater.” The art group has previously performed plays featuring lesbian romances and “transgender” characters.
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Excellent. Hopefully they will reopen soon with a manager that can find moral performances.
For the record, Cornelia Connelly Center is a *Middle* school.
Good for them!! No doubt the excrement will hit the air circulator in great profusion in all the right-thinking circles, aka what else is new, but they are right doing what they are doing.
This reminds me of the late 20h century early 21st tradition of the play ‘The Vagina Monologues’ being a winter fixture @ Notre Dame, especially the year that opening night was Ash Wednesday – THAT went on. Perhaps it is still a fixture there, I wouldn’t know.
This piece of news combined with Kamala Harris’ stating that abortion is absolutely a NON-negotiable issue if she is elected (God help us!!) makes things pretty plain, as in CLEAR AS A BELL.
Satan and his imps can be quite the whiners when confronted with pushback.
That ought to tell people what the “arts” community is mostly about these days. Creativity and beauty are not all that high on the list.
Well shake my boots! The Catholic Church actually standing up for what the Catholic Church stands for! Could you imagine that!
There are so many plays and musicals that are wholesome that could be presented. There are also plays and musicals that raise questions, but still present religion (including Catholicism) in a truthful way. And of course, there are always cabarets (big bands, niche musicians; e.g., Cajun musicians, musical revues (always fun!), light operas, one-act-plays, one-person plays (Actor Jonathan Frid, R.I.P. wrote and performed marvelous one-act shows like “Fools and Fiends,” featuring depictions and commentary on various famous fools and fiends throughout history, and of course staple like Christmas Carol, or get the rights to do Duke Ellington’s Jazz Nutcracker (a play, not a ballet). I hope they re-group and start over.
Good show Cdl Dolan [pun intended].