Robert Rosen had it about right."I knew some people wouldn't like it, but I didn't see this level of protest," said the director of "The Pope and the Witch" shortly before the play opened Friday night at the University of Minnesota.
As Rosen spoke, about 70 representatives of the St. John Vianney College Seminary sang hymns and recited the rosary and Lord's Prayer in the falling snow outside the Rarig Center.
That solemn demonstration reflected a season of dissent from Catholic leaders over the university's decision to stage playwright Dario Fo's farce, in which a fictional pope is depicted as a stressed-out bumbler who seeks relief from a faux witch. Once relaxed, he issues a radical encyclical.
It was, on the one hand, easy to sympathize with the seminarians who had studied Fo's script and taken offense at scenes in which the pope is injected with heroin (against his will, and only to save another person from death) and has him advocating the legalization of drugs and the abolition of birth control.
But the absurd theatricality, directed with the flair of commedia that has distinguished Rosen's work with Theatre de la Jeune Lune, made Fo's work easy to understand as a metaphor in the service of a broader goal.
"Woe to the man of power who takes the side of those who have no power," said an actor portraying a nun, quoting St. Augustine. Indeed, once we cut through the thicket of farce, the pope emerges a martyr for his embrace of the poor and dispossessed.
Fo's 1989 play lays out a scenario in which the pontiff panics in the face of 100,000 starving orphans descending on St. Peter's Square in the Vatican. A homeopathic healer induces a trance to ease the pope's angst and thereby gains some credibility with him.
In the second act, a bizarre scene occurs in which the pope is injected with heroin and after witnessing the despair of addicts, undergoes an epiphany that results in his encyclical.
The seminarians outside were the only demonstrators evident Friday night.
Inside Rarig Center, about 250 people attended the show in the 460-seat thrust theater.
Signs in the lobby indicated bags would be searched, but Justin Christy, marketing manager for the university's theater department, said he had heard of no actual searches taking place.
"The Pope and the Witch" was to open Thursday, but an act of God -- the winter storm -- forced a postponement.
Speaking of Thursday's cancellation, Dennis McGrath, spokesman for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, quipped, "We're so glad that God decided to show his reaction to the play. God has spoken."
Bill Donohue, president of the New York-based Catholic League, issued a statement this week calling the show "state-sponsored hate speech."
Last October, Archbishop Harry Flynn of the Twin Cities archdiocese met with university President Robert Bruininks to express concerns. The meeting was said to be cordial, but the university did not change its plans.
R.J. Houck, a board member of the Catholic Defense League's Minnesota branch, said the play is "not a legitimate source of discussion."Its choice was just outrageous," Houck said.
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