In Dan Fisher's Oklahoma, Free Speech Is Not Permitted

♫ ♪ Oklahoma! Where the corn is as eye as a homophobe’s eye. ♪ ♫

In Oklahoma City, Rachel Irick, the artistic director of Oklahoma City Theatre Company decided to mix things up a bit and have the company perform The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, a play written by openly gay Paul Rudnick. What’s it about you say? Glad you asked:

A stage manager, headset and prompt book at hand, brings the house lights to half, then dark, and cues the creation of the world. Throughout the play, she's in control of everything. In other words, she's either God, or she thinks she is.

Act One recounts the major episodes of the Old Testament, only with a twist: Instead of Adam and Eve, our lead characters are Adam and Steve, and Jane and Mabel, a lesbian couple with whom they decide to start civilization (procreation proves to be a provocative challenge). Act One covers the Garden of Eden, an ark, a visit with a highly rambunctious Pharaoh and finally even the Nativity. Along the way, Mabel and Adam invent God, but Jane and Steve are skeptical. This brings about the Flood, during which Steve has a brief affair with a rhinoceros and invents infidelity. No longer blissful, Adam and Steve break up only to be reunited as two of the wise men at the Nativity.

Act Two jumps to modern day Manhattan. Adam and Steve are together again, and Steve is HIV positive. It's Christmas Eve, and Jane is nine months pregnant even though she always thought of herself as the butch one. The two women want to marry and want Adam and Steve to join them in the ceremony. A wheelchair-bound, Jewish lesbian Rabbi from cable access TV arrives to officiate. The ceremony is interrupted as Jane gives birth, and Steve confides to Adam that his medication isn't working and that he'll probably not survive much longer. Bound by their long life together, and the miracle of birth they've just witnessed, the two men comfort each other even though they know their remaining time together will be short. She really didn’t think it would create the controversial firestorm that is now surrounding the production.

Sounds interesting, and since it’s written by Rudnick I know it’d be witty and fun and thought-provoking, all the things one would want in a play, unless ….

Dan Fisher, one of those rightwingnuts in Oklahoma, and a member of something called “Patriot Pastors” — which may, or may not, be a terrorist organization ... I kid, like Rudnick — is attempting to stop the play from being performed because he deems it pornographic.

It matters not what anyone else thinks, Dan Fisher thinks what he thinks should matter most. And, sadly, in bassackwards Oklahoma, that might be the case; since his tirade, the theatre company has lost their grant funding from the Oklahoma Arts Council for this show to the tune of $5,000.

No such thing as Free Speech in Dan Fisher’s Oklahoma, unless it’s Dan Fisher doing the talking. But here’s a bit more on Danny Boy; his little group of, ahem, pastors[?] are defying the Federal law that prohibits 501(c)3 organizations — like charities and churches — from engaging in political campaign activities. Another member of “Patriot Pastors” is one Steve Kern, the husband of the notorious homophobe and complete moron, Oklahoma Representative Sally “The Gays Are Worse Than Terrorists” Kern.

Yeah, Oklahoma, where the winds come sweeping down the plains and taking Free Speech with them.

But, and I love a good but  — and take that any which way you like  — the play will be performed and I hope it's a huge hit and I hope people in Oklahoma wake up and realize that they don't need people like Dan Fisher, in politics or the pulpit.

I mean, if you really don't think this play is a good thing, then stay home, no?

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