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When you attend a play at one of the smaller theaters in Philadelphia, what you get before Act One is something called a ‘Land Acknowledgment’ speech. This is a statement reminding you that the ground the theater was built on was once “owned” by Native Americans before it was stolen by the evil colonists and settlers.
What that statement never explains is that when the same land was “owned” by Native Americans centuries ago, it was often stolen by other Native tribes in violent ways.
In other words, Native American society was just as warlike as any other in human history.
Jeff Flynn Paul in ‘The Spectator,’ explains:
“In North America, most Natives were primitive farmers. This means that (with some exceptions) they had no permanent settlements: they farmed in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired, before moving on to greener pastures where the hunting was better and the lands more fertile. This meant that tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes.“
Real history, of course, doesn’t matter, since most of the subscribers at these little theaters are committed leftists.
Thankfully, there are no ‘land acknowledgment’ speeches in the city’s larger, commercial theaters. Yet even here on opening night you’ll hear a sprinkling of words like “equity” and “diversity” in the welcoming remarks—a little woke salt to keep pace with the more radical thespians on the other side of town.
Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the city’s commercial venues fill opening night with stories about how Native Americans built wigwam settlements and campfires where the theater’s bar is located.
When Daniel Fish’s rehabbed “Oklahoma” came to the city’s Forrest Theater in 2022 (in 2009, the rights to the original show were sold to a Netherlands-based pension fund), audiences were in for a shock. Suddenly, middle class season ticket holders were face to face with a didactic, virtue-signaling Bolveshik rape of a beloved American classic.
The stage walls were hung with guns (sending the message that America has a gun problem), and the characters in the show– black cowboys, Chinese immigrants and Native Americans– were shown being kicked around by evil white miners. The closing scene, as someone in the theater the night I attended remarked, looked like it had been choreographed by the Democratic National Convention.
A review in the left-leaning ‘Atlantic’ even stated,
“…That after intermission, there were empty seats where some of those smiling faces had been, and as the second act wore on, still other theatergoers walked out, evidently repelled by the director Daniel Fish’s dark and daring reinterpretation of this enduring classic from Broadway’s golden age.”
The show was a commercial flop; the reviews merciless.
The big commercial theaters in Philadelphia, like the Walnut Street Theater, please audiences with mainstream fare like Elvis: A Musical Revolution, The Importance of Being Earnest and Saturday Night Fever. Audiences at the Walnut just want to be entertained and are likely to give a standing ovation to almost any production that has a lot of musical numbers.
The Forrest Theater, where the rape (or rewriting) of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic was staged, has followed the Walnut in this regard—until ‘Woke-Lahoma’ came along. In the bat of an eyelash, the Forrest seemed to align itself with the city’s radical leftist theaters like The Wilma, the Lantern, and the four-theater complex in located in the Drake building.
These theaters specialize in works that deal with racism, sexism, transgender issues, and so-called queer interplay between science and psychology.
The shift from “best-selling” theater hits and classics to plays that push leftist political propaganda has been building in the city for a long time.
Much of it began with the founding of the Wilma Theater (whose honest motto is “Art has no answers at all”) in 1973.
I admit that some of Philadelphia’s progressive theater trends were somewhat welcoming at first. It was refreshing to see a black woman play Hamlet, or an androgynous-looking actress cast as a page boy, or to see love stories with interracial couples.
Regarding these innovations, the Wilma became known as the theater where rigid orthodoxies were smashed.
In many ways, it was the theater equivalent of Pope John XXIII calling for a Second Vatican Council in order to bring fresh air into the Catholic Church. (Most astute Catholics in 2023 will tell you that that “fresh air” has proven to be toxic and corrupting.)
The problem with fresh air, however, is that weather changes. A breeze can easily morph into a strong wind that disrupts, distorts and corrupts. This describes what has happened to the city’s theater community.
Does every Hamlet produced on stage have to be black or trans just to prove a point about racism and gender?
Does every heterosexual couple presented on stage have to be interracial, even when it seems to work against the editorial soul of a play?
Does every young boy in an Elizabethan play have to be played by a girl, as if to “instruct” the public on some esoteric point about feminism or trans issues? Are real boy actors really so rare?
One city theater’s production of The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens & Count Leo Tolstoy, told the story of these men as they futilely attempted to rewrite the Bible.
Jefferson is condemned at the end of the play for his having had slaves while simultaneously writing about human equality, even though in Jefferson’s time, slaves were considered subhuman except by the most forward-thinking abolitionists.
Month after month, sophisticated Philadelphia audiences are being catechized about immigration, racism, and trans issues as if the Philadelphia theater world had been taken over by Amy Schumer and the women on The View.
The craziness has spilled over into many of the city’s private clubs and cultural institutions, like the once-venerable Athenaeum of Philadelphia, where the programs and events have been “Woke-Lahoma-ized.”
The sports world has also been affected.
In 1987, the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers erected a statue of Kate Smith near the Wells Fargo stadium. The team made it a point to play the singer’s rendition of ‘God Bless America’ before home games for decades.
Smith, who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1982, became closely associated with the Flyers, especially when the team won two Stanley Cup championships in 1974 and 1975.
But then something happened. In April of 2019, the Flyers removed the statue stating that they had discovered that some of Smith’s songs contained “racist lyrics and sentiments” that were “incompatible” with the organization’s values.
“The NHL principle ‘Hockey is for Everyone’ is at the heart of everything the Flyers stand for,” then Flyers President Paul Holmgren said. “As a result, we cannot stand idle while material from another era gets in the way of who we are today.”
Were the Flyers not aware that race-sensitive songs were very popular at the turn of the 20th Century, and Kate Smith only recorded what her bosses at Columbia Records told her to record?
She was doing her job and being a good employee because she didn’t want to be fired. Nobody in that knucklehead team seemed to be aware that Paul Robeson also recorded some of the songs Kate Smith was being criticized for recording.
Kate Smith also did a lot for civil rights, including bringing Josephine Baker back to the United States and giving her air time on her TV show, “The Kate Smith Hour.’
What bothered me most about the Kate Smith cancellation was the apathy I found among Philadelphians: There were no protests against the statue’s removal, although one could find an occasional Op Ed piece decrying PC culture. Privately, there was hand-wringing and comments like, “Isn’t it awful!” – but beyond that, nothing.
Shortly after Smith’s statue was removed, the city’s ‘Che Guevara’ activists set their sights on removing the Frank Rizzo statue near City Hall.
Curiously enough, the Flyers have never won a Stanley Cup championship since they put Kate Smith in storage. Some have attributed this to a curse.
I might add that the little radical theaters with their land acknowledgment mantras at the beginning of each play have also fallen into hard times.
Lethal says
It is currently trendy in Australia to have a ‘welcome to country’ wherein the ‘supposed’ original owners of the land, the aboriginals, are acknowledged as the ‘traditional owners’, and respect is paid to the past, present and future elders who ‘supposedly owned’ the land. Seeing as the aboriginals had no written language, the ‘ownership’ is hard to prove. As for paying them ‘respect’ these tribal elders were brutal to their own people. The death penalty was applied for ‘trivial offenses’, the guilty party was determined by witchcraft. They treated their women disgracefully. Young girls were ‘married’ off to old men after first being ‘pack-raped’ – known as ‘Pathways ceremony’ – by a number of males.
The ‘traditional’ owners are trying to stop valuable mining and farming projects because they supposedly disturb ‘songlines’ which are imaginary lines across the country where spirits roam. Our dopey leftist activists and politicians give way to all this nonsense even though it cannot be proved.
Intrepid says
The answer should be obvious. Don’t go to these theatric “abortions”, especially the ones that “re-imagine” the classics. It’s simply the writers, the producers and the actors working on their mommy/daddy issues.
Why would you waste your money on this garbage?
Chris Cloutier says
Very good question!
Rob Crawford says
Why was it “refreshing” to see a black woman play Hamlet — a Danish man?
SPURWING PLOVER says
Are they just going to carry the water for Ben & Jerry and their THIS IS STOELN LAND load of total malarkey? Look to see lots of empty seats at their Theater
Vtg says
Well, Thom! Here is a little history for these woke illiterates(note to them: this is not a complete history, either):
1.) Penn created a town at the mouth of the Delaware River to promote commerce and government; he named the town, Philadelphia, which was Greek for “city of brotherly love.” To ensure his colony would remain peaceful, Penn purchased the land from the local Native Americans before settlement took place.
2.) William Penn believed strongly that Indians should be treated fairly. He traveled to the interior of the colony and befriended different Native American tribes. He insisted that the Native Americans be paid a fair price for any land that was purchased from them.
I’m from Philly, as well, and did a paper on Billy Penn as part of Irish History, believe it or not! His father had been there during the Cromwellian period(not a favorite time for the Irish); William Penn as a young man, was there on his father’s business.
Vtg says
Ooops! I forgot to finish!
This is the beginning of Penn becoming a landowner in the US colonies(of Britain/England, for the uneducated). His father was paid for military service by England; Pennsylvania was a result of that!
Incomplete Stranger says
That the Maoist re-imagining of Oklahoma flopped is only surprising to it’s author and their fellow travelers.
I’m with the other commenter in wondering why race and gender swapping a classic character was ‘refreshing’? If the production was a new work ‘based’ on Hamlet I would be more lenient, but I’m quite tired of the changes being made to classics.
Would recasting the tyrannical Captain Ahab from Moby Dick as a black man or Muslim be as refreshing?
What about the titular demonic barber from Sweeney Todd?
How about a Norther European ‘Black Panther’?
Isn’t it curious how all the recasting/re-imagining only flows in one direction and how white villains are never recast.
Given the historic tribal warfare across the African continent, are there similar efforts around ‘stolen land’?
JosieC says
This “land acknowledge” BS is ubiquitous in Canada (in theatres, performing arts centers and various other places), and has been for some time now. Maybe somebody in Philly got the idea from some Canadians.
Abel DePlore says
The good news is that people will not pay to see this woke nonsense
Let them go broke.
George says
The Indians (who are not native to the Americas, because they came from Asia), were living in the Stone Age in 1492, with a life expectancy of 30 years. And now they have the gall to complain about civilization?
Vtg says
Most of us, including the wokesters are not native to the Americas, either! Lets all go back to where we WERE native and piss off those there who think they were the original natives. Wokesters can go first, so we can see the reactions.
JEFF says
I like to think of it as Filthydelphia.
TRex says
Whenever I see this “stolen land” BS I immediately think how many of these people are ready and willing to deed back the land they now “own” to the “original” owners? I have never heard of anyone giving up their comfy McMansion in the suburbs or their penthouse high atop “sacred” land or the valuable real estate where woke theatres now reside. As usual these bleeding hearts cherry pick history for things on which they can hang their virtuous hats. All this crap isn’t about the injustices heaped on “natives”, it’s about a bunch of self-aggrandizing hypocrites that do the talk but never the walk. At best, they donate to some charity or foundation where 98% of the money goes to administrative costs and the rest for advertisements asking for more donations. As Lou Grant used to say; these people are a bunch of “fake, phony, frauds”.
J. Matthew Wolfe says
Those “Land Acknowledgment” people are going to give the land back to the Indians, aren’t they?