Oh, oh - here we go. Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, a play some critics allege is antisemitic, is finally igniting a proper furor in Canada.
At first it seemed as if the acclaimed British playwright's 10-minute "Play for Gaza" was going to pass through our country with little of the intense controversy that dogged it in England.
The political play had three sold-out performances in Montreal last Sunday, but while Adam Atlas, the Quebec Jewish Congress' president-elect, denounced the play in advance, he also said there would be no attempt to stop the play from going on.
Seven Jewish Children was also read in full and followed by a discussion on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition this weekend. (In the UK, the BBC had declined to broadcast a radio version, citing a need to remain impartial.)
But now that Seven Jewish Children is set to get a series of star-studded Toronto readings as part of Crow's Theatre and National Theatre School's Directors' Showcase and Exchange next week, the you-know-what is hitting the fan.
B'nai Brith Canada have taken outrage at the play to a whole new level and are actually trying to stop the readings from taking place.
In a press release sent out earlier today, Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of the Jewish advocacy organisation, called upon Toronto mayor David Miller to prevent the show from being performed at Theatre Passe Muraille, a theatre the city saved from closing two years ago.
Said Dimant: "The City of Toronto should not allow a venue that it funds to be the staging ground for a divisive play that promotes anti-Jewish hatred. As its name denotes, 'Seven Jewish Children' does not even pretend to target Israel exclusively. It is clearly aimed at maligning Jews, depicting them as oppressors of Palestinians, blood-thirsty aggressors and child killers. It disturbingly inverts history, using Holocaust imagery to allege that the Jews, once the victims, are actively teaching their own children callous disregard for the suffering of others."
"We call on Mayor Miller to ensure that our tax dollars are not inadvertently being used for the promotion of a play whose thrust is antisemitic. It is unthinkable that the City would allow this communal theatre to be used as a venue for promoting hatred and discord amongst its citizens, as this play threatens to do."
I guess we'll see how the mayor responds. (I've just asked him on Twitter.) I can only imagine that he'll decline to intervene. No one wants the City of Toronto to start second-guessing artistic decisions at the arts venues it supports.
I could, of course, see the City withdrawing its support from a theatre that presented hate speech. But it will be exceeding hard to argue that a play that has been performed in the UK, the US and Montreal, was read in full on the national broadcaster and is being acted by such esteemed artists as RH Thomson, Ann-Marie MacDonald and Rosemary Dunsmore is hate speech in the legal sense.
I'd say B'nai Brith has misplayed this one - all they're doing is attracting more attention to the production.
As I've blogged before, you can read Seven Jewish Children online and decide for yourself what to think of it. I'm going to keep mum about my thoughts until I attend the reading at Theatre Passe Muraille next week. Assuming the Mayor doesn't shut it down...
