City Theatre-1, Protesters-0

City Theatre Company's production of "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told" has been running for ten days already, and the protesters finally showed up yesterday. Of course, they wrote ahead...the theater has received mounds of generic postcards proclaiming that the play is blasphemous, irreligious, and just generally in bad taste.

Actually, it's just freaking hilarious!

Act One explores the Old Testament from a non-traditional perspective...what if it were Adam and Steve instead of Adam and Eve? The resulting take on the Creation, the Expulsion, the Flood, and the Birth of Christ will tickle the funnybone of your inner middle-schooler. Mine is still chuckling.... Act Two moves the same characters into the present day and hits the audience with some serious dilemmas. We see the characters rounded out into three dimensions; real people dealing with real life. Families, religion, commitment and health are just some of the issues presented and explored with wit and grace.

I don't want to give out any spoilers, and the show is running until July 4th, so get your buns down there and see it. Oh...there is language and nudity. Just so you know. This play is not for the little ones.

City Theatre Company is where you go for tickets and information.

As for the protesters...well...they were a pretty pathetic lot. The bunch on the 19th came up from The Valley on a bus...I guess they had to cross the desert and part the Red Sea, or something. Either that, or they got lost. The small group there today supplied us, as you can see above, with a dictionary definition of blasphemy. Which, in my humble opinion, does not apply to this play. For some reason they seem to have got the idea that the Virgin Mary is being depicted as a Lesbian. Who knew?

I guess they just don't like the whole "Adam and Steve" thing.

As a person who did her share of protesting this and that, back in the 1960s, I have to say that these bible-thumpers could learn a thing or two from Ghandi, or Martin Luther King, Jr. Andy Brown did much better with his huge banner and his nun's habit.

Free Speech, Baby!

Edited to Add: a link from the Fort Worth Examiner about the protest. A quote from the article:

Donations solicited by ANF [America Needs Fatima], which the group specifically states are collected to fund the mission to stop The City Theatre’s production of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. The goal is “to send tens of thousands of protest messages to the City Theatre in Austin Texas.” (Per the confirmation/”Thank You” page generated once you’ve filled out and sent the form to scold CTC.) The note, signed by ANF Director, Robert E. Ritchie, then goes on to ask you to “Send a generous gift to help [him] recruit 250,000 Catholics to protest this blasphemy."

A quarter of a million Catholics. That's a far cry from the half a dozen or so who were there yesterday, or even the 30 or 40 who came on a bus on Saturday. Saturday, apparently, there were a few citations issued as the protesters tried to block parking places so patrons had nowhere to put their cars...