In the three and a half months since Douglas Post horrified attorney Jeanne Bishop with the news that he’d written a play inspired by the worst experience of her life, Post has overhauled the play and City Lit Theater has opened it. The changes failed to placate Bishop, who remains adamantly opposed to the production. Since I wrote about this story January 27 the play, Somebody Foreign, has gotten mixed reviews–and worse from the Sun-Times’s Hedy Weiss. And the entire City Lit board has resigned.
Post wanted to do right by her. Artistic director Terry McCabe made it clear to him in a letter that withdrawing the play at this late date was out of the question: the results “would be fairly catastrophic. We would suffer irreparable harm.” Post set out to rewrite it. His protagonist, who’d been a lawyer, became a professor of Middle Eastern studies. Her interest in Northern Ireland became an interest in the Gaza Strip. The IRA became Hamas. The changes made his play so much more timely one might wish they’d occurred to him years ago.
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Post did, Bishop did, and it wasn’t. Actually, says Bishop, she never believed a rewrite would satisfy her: “It took him 12 years and nine drafts to get to where he was, and he couldn’t possibly rewrite it in three months.” But McCabe offered these two letters as evidence that amity had, in fact, been established and that City Lit had acted in good faith throughout, even though “Hot Type portrayed Post and McCabe as men caught doing something reprehensible and trying to weasel their way out of it.” Hot Type might have told the story more accurately, McCabe noted, if he and Post could have returned my calls, but he said everyone had agreed not to talk.
“We were surprised to learn that our funding was being used to support this story,” says McCue, “and even though we learned that the author had changed the story so it was not so immediately about Jeanne Bishop, we simply didn’t want to be identified with it. So we asked City Lit, to the extent they were able, to remove our name from the production.”
McCabe says he left the meeting, went upstairs, got on the phone, and in 24 minutes rounded up three new board members, enough under City Lit’s bylaws for the theater to continue. One new member is his wife, Nancy Flowers, who works with the Evanston Commission on Aging. Another is Paula McGuire, a lecturer at Northwestern University. The new president is Michael Monar, a business consultant.
Monar wrote Bishop to say that on the advice of counsel the disclaimer idea was dead. Yet a lawsuit, the fear of which prompted this advice, is something Bishop says she’s never considered. So Bishop moved on. Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights drafted a statement expressing “our moral condemnation” of Somebody Foreign’s “appalling insensitivity.” Cosigned by four other organizations, it was released on Monday.
