Campaign Outsider

In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, theater critic Terry Teachout whacked Elie Wiesel for “trampl[ing] on a playwright’s freedom of speech.”

Back story:

Deb Margolin recently wrote a play called “Imagining Madoff” that purported to offer audiences a fictional version of the relationship between Mr. Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor, and Bernie Madoff, the arch-swindler who purloined vast amounts of money from Mr. Wiesel, his wife and the couple’s charitable foundation . . . Then Ms. Margolin sent a copy of the script to Mr. Wiesel, who promptly replied that he found it “defamatory” and “obscene” and threatened to sue in order to prevent it from being performed at “any time in any venue.”

Theater J in Washington had signed on to produce “Imagining Madoff,” but signed off as soon as Wiesel threatened legal action. So Deb Margolin “rewrote the play, replacing the fictional ‘Elie Wiesel’ with a completely made-up character.” But Theater J wouldn’t produce even the revised version without Wiesel’s “explicit approval.”

Which was not forthcoming.

Teachout’s money quote:

Nobody likes to be publicly embarrassed—but it’s not illegal. As long as you steer clear of the rocky shoals of libel, you are perfectly free to create an unflattering fictional version of a real-life person. If he’s a public figure, you can even use his real name and get away with it. (Editorial cartoonists do it every day.) To prevail in court, your “victim” has to prove malice on your part, which is exceedingly difficult to do. But you don’t necessarily have to win a libel suit to get what you want: Sometimes all you have to do is threaten to sue. When a world-famous plaintiff decides to stare down a not-so-rich defendant who can’t afford to fight back, the defendant usually blinks.

But strong-arming a serious artist and a well-regarded theater company from making art as they see fit, Teachout says, is “unworthy of a great man who ought to know better.”

Bravo, Terry Teachout.

UPDATE

Ari Roth,  artistic director of Theater J in D.C., provided this response:

I sent Terry Teachout a letter yesterday correcting one of  his assertions:

“You accurately describe the institutional pause that descended upon us when we were threatened with a lawsuit by Elie Wiesel and his attorney.  Since you are coming to the controversy later and we did not speak in advance of your publishing the piece, let me just point to one inaccuracy in your essay.  “Alas, Mr. Roth declined to produce the revised version without Mr. Wiesel’s explicit approval, and Ms. Margolin responded by withdrawing her script.”

We’re on record everywhere (the Washington City Paper, Washington Jewish Week, our blog) as saying we never asked for Wiesel’s approval of a revised script and never expected one.  We wanted to
a) demonstrate to Wiesel and his attorney that we were removing Wiesel’s name from the script
and b) seek assurance that there was nothing “legally actionable” in the script.

For our purposes, there’s a distinction between that demonstration and rhetorical seeking of assurance, and a request for “explicit approval.”  We believed we were doing due diligence in showing the complainant respect, while never asking for explicit approval.

The play was withdrawn by the playwright 8 days after receiving the letter from Wiesel when she was still contemplating whether she should do a rewrite or not.  Ultimately, she did do the rewrite we jointly discussed, and the play has continued to be revised while in rehearsal.  I was in Hudson on Friday night, and enjoyed seeing the fine production.  I’m sure there will be others.  Hopefully in DC as well.

– Ari Roth, Artistic Director, Theater J, Washington, DC

So there you have it.