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2006-04-07 - 2:25 p.m.

A few days ago Nya got a call at work from a patron complaining about indecency. She works at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and they�re currently running a production of A Flea in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau. This is a play from like 1907. This production uses a script updated by playwright David Ives, but he really didn�t change any plot points.

It�s a so-called �bedroom farce�. There�s a convoluted plot that�s basically a ridiculous comedy of errors and provides innumerable chances for mistaken identities and various characters repeatedly popping in and out of different doors in the stage set. An upper-class woman fears her husband is having an affair (actually he just temporarily can�t get it up) and sets an elaborate scheme to trap him.

Fake love letters get picked up by the wrong people, one character looks just like another one, a young guy keeps losing the guard that blocks his cleft palette allowing him to speak comprehensibly, somehow a fiery Spanish nobleman is involved. You get the idea. Everyone runs around about supposed sexual affairs that aren�t actually happening. Comedy, see. Also a good reminder that people were having sex in the early 20th-century (and possibly earlier too) and got worked up about it even then.

However, the annoying caller didn�t get it. She demanded to know how dare such a refined institution as the Shakespeare Theater put on such trash! Trash! Shocking! Sex is alluded to (even if no adultery or sex of any kind happens on- or offstage and all the married couples end up happily back together at the end)! It reminded me of a similar incident that happened back when I was a DJ at WHRB.

The station had a largely tripartite format: jazz in the morning, classical music in the afternoon and evening, underground rock at night. This meant that all too often crotchety old classical listeners would remain tuned in when the rock show started at 10PM. Of course, it was always unclear why listeners who found rock objectionable didn�t just switch stations. But whatever.

Because of this overlap, rock DJs would generally try not to play songs with curse-words in the lyrics for the first half-hour or so of their show. But sometimes they�d forget. One night sometime in the late-1990s, a DJ played some street-punk song (I wish I could remember what band it was by) early in his set with a chorus of �Motherfucker, motherfucker!� Some classical fan was apparently listening intently and wrote us an irate letter.

How dare you play such profanity! I don�t care that it�s well after 10PM and the FCC merely asks that radio stations adhere to �community standards�, which in the People�s Republik of Cambridge could care less about late-night cursing! I don�t care that I can hear and see far more explicit material on many cable TV stations! I simply find it appalling that you�re broadcasting this smut! After all, you�re Harvard radio!

Ah. That was it. This man, like the lady who called Nya to complain, had seized on a magic word. �Harvard�. �Shakespeare�. There is sometimes the assumption that prestigious names must also represent whatever one�s own idea about �morality� are. But first of all, guess what? People curse at Harvard. People have sex in Shakespeare�s plays. Secondly, how dare you claim to speak for something that is not you (and an abstract entity at that � impersonal university or dead playwright)?

I think a far more pertinent question to ask might have been: why is a Shakespeare Theater doing a non-Shakespeare play?

� 2006 Geoff Gladstone

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