Another Play Cancellation: This One Is Even Stupider Than the Others

There are a lot of really stupid reasons to cancel a scheduled theatre production. Just in the past couple of weeks, we’ve learned of examples in Florida and Ohio. Little did we know those stories were just the warm-up acts. The University of Groningen has just responded with a metaphorical “hold my beer.” At least the place is in the Netherlands, so the beer in question is likely to be Amstel, Grolsch, or Heineken: a step above Budweiser or Coors, to be sure. 

A scene from the original production of 
Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot)

The production in question was of Samuel Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot, scheduled to be staged at the university’s Usva student cultural center in March. It was cancelled because—get this—someone at the venue found out that the director had auditioned only men for the all-male cast. Yes, really. No, it wasn’t that he’d cast only men: that apparently would have been acceptable. 

Usva theatre programmer Bram Douwes, a serious contender for the dimmest light in the firmament, told the local Ukrant newspaper that “if it concerned a play with five white guys that they’d held open auditions for, everything would have been fine. But you can’t ban people right from the start.” In other words, The Idiot Douwes apparently has no objections to an all-male cast, only one which came from a process which did not involve wasting the time of everyone involved: the director, the women who auditioned (and who might have believed it was possible to be cast), and the men who auditioned (as auditions would have taken longer). 

By the way, the part about “white guys” was just a bit of gratuitous virtue-signaling, as Curmie seriously doubts that non-white males were excluded from the process. Curmie’s own experience as a director has included both casting BIPOC actors in roles obviously first played by whites and ending up with all white actors when he went into auditions thinking he’d almost certainly get a multi-racial cast. It works out how it works out. 

It’s important to call attention to the play in question. Samuel Beckett insisted that his scripts be followed to the letter: no line changes, no omissions, no changes, period. He got furious when he learned that Alan Schneider, who directed the American premiere of Endgame (and several other Beckett plays) had given Clov an additional prop to carry offstage at play’s end. So if he said Godot has an all-male cast, he meant it, even suing the producers of a different Dutch company in 1988 for casting women. Beckett’s estate has been conscientious about upholding his wishes; they control the production rights for another several decades. 

What passes for a brain trust at Groningen, of course, supports the suppression of the play. “Times have changed,” quoth university press officer Elies Kouwenhoven. Yes, they have. What hasn’t changed is the need to acquire the rights to perform an author’s work. We can speculate all we want about whether Beckett might have a different perspective were he still alive, but there is little that could be less relevant. Kouwenhoven proceeds to proclaim that “We as a university stand for an open inclusive community where it is not appropriate to exclude others, on any basis.” 

“On any basis”? Like, for example, it would be inappropriate to deny students the opportunity to perform one of the most influential plays of the 20th century because you hired a moron as your “theatre programmer” and you care about neither art nor your students, right? 

And it would be inappropriate to cancel a production already well into rehearsal because you and your minions failed to do their jobs by not bothering to read the audition notices which clearly stated that “unfortunately no leniency can be afforded in this casting”? And no, Ms. Kouwenhoven, it is not at all “outdated and even discriminatory” to cast only men in male roles. More to the point, it wouldn’t matter if it were. Obeying the law is generally considered a good thing. 

Nor are protestations that the play is better, or at worst unharmed, by casting women in any way relevant. Curmie has, in fact, seen a university production with a female Gogo (Estragon, one of the two leads); presumably either a waiver was acquired or the school got away with it because the rights-holders didn’t find out. He doesn’t think the play suffered at all. 

It doesn’t matter. It might be a little—only a little—too strong to say that if you want to do Beckett’s play, you must do Beckett’s play. But certainly obeying the wishes of the playwright, adhering to the dictates of the rights-holders, and avoiding the potential of a lawsuit ought to be at least acceptable behavior. Not in Groningen, apparently. 

Curmie has also seen the argument that Shakespeare gets changed all the time, as if that is a pertinent observation. It is not. For one thing, Shakespeare is in the public domain; Beckett is not. Obeying copyright law really does matter. 

Equally importantly, it is also reasonable to do Shakespeare outdoors on a thrust stage with an all-male cast. (One of Curmie’s most treasured memories as a theatre-goer was seeing Peter Hall’s production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the National Theatre in London; it had (OMG!) an all-male cast, meaning that Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Electra, Athena, and two of the trilogy’s three choruses were, contrary the norm of modern productions, played by men, as would have happened in the original production.) 

Oisín Moyne, the young Irishman at the helm of the production, notes the absurdity of the acknowledged masterpiece of the Theatre of the Absurd being thus subject to the whims of irrational yet powerful forces. And now, seeking another venue for their work, the company are waiting for Godot.

When Will They Ever Learn?

Lesli Margherita as a middle-aged Cindy Lou Who

Generally speaking, Curmie is not a big fan of parodies. See, the thing is, either he likes the original (in which case he doesn’t like seeing it ridiculed) or he didn’t like the original (in which case, why would he want to see any kind of version of it?). Of course, there’s the possibility that he doesn’t know the original—in which case he’ll feel like a doofus that he doesn’t get all the jokes that everything else is laughing at.

Moreover, the writers and producers of many parodies seem to think that throwing a couple of sex jokes and some “adult language” into the mix automatically renders any material hilarious. Curmie, having left junior high some time ago, begs to differ, and therefore pretty much despises the faux cleverness of plays like Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird (Chekhov’s The Sea Gull) and Bert V. Royal Dog Sees God (the gang from the Peanuts cartoon strip). He suspects that he would be equally bored by Matthew Lombardo’s Who’s Holiday, a take-off on the Dr. Seuss classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

But here’s the thing. Curmie will express his disdain by (wait for it)… not buying a ticket. But if you, Gentle Reader, have different tastes, and choose to attend, well, then, go for it. Unfortunately, all too many rights-holders of the originals on which these parodies are based are indeed actively trying to prevent this material from ever reaching the public. The “Three’s Company” gang from a few years ago sued for copyright infringement by David Adjmi’s 3C. They lost, as it should have been obvious that they would. Parody has its own category and its own set of rules as respects copyright/trademark. The laws are complicated, with each case being weighed in terms of the amount of reference to the original work, the potential effect the parody might have to the value of the original work, etc. Basically, it comes down to this: if the parody does nothing more than re-create the original with a few minor adjustments, it’s an infringement of copyright law. If however, the original is evoked merely in order to establish a recognizable world of characters and expected actions—a world which is then skewed to tell a different story—then the parody is on safe legal ground.

Such is the case with Who’s Holiday, a one-woman show by Matthew Lombardo which riffs off the character of Cindy Lou Who in the Dr. Seuss classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas. New York Theatre Guide’s Tulis McCall describes the plot thusly:

Here is the deal: Turns out that after the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes on that long-ago Christmas Eve, he was befriended by the entire population of Who-ville. Of special importance was the friendship he developed with Cindy Lou. He was like a second father. Until he wanted to become a first husband. And of course a real father, because, thanks to the Grinch, Cindy Lou had a bun in the oven. She was not sorry for this because she was smitten with the Grinch and the wild sex they shared….

The tale spirals downward. Cindy Lou gave birth to a little green daughter, Patti, and the Grinch turned out to be the dud that he always was. Their dog Max met his demise, as did the Grinch, whose death was blamed on Cindy Lou. Into jail she sailed for over a decade, and her 7 year old Patti was put into a home until she reached the right age for being sprung. Patti and Cindy Lou did not see each other after that last day in court. When Cindy Lou was released from jail, Patti was otherwise occupied with her own life. No contact. The other Who citizens shunned Cindy Lou and tonight here she is, on Christmas Eve. Not singing around the famous tree with her fellow citizens, but here in her trailer, a-l-o-n-e.

If you really want to check out more about what the show is like, there’s this one-minute video of… erm… highlights. That’s enough to make Curmie want to save a few bucks and avoid this tripe, but, as Ms. McCall points out, “At the conclusion of the show, 97% of the rest of the audience stood up and cheered. I have no explanation for this other than the possibility of a parallel universe.” [If nothing else, Curmie seems to have found a kindred spirit.] If you’re part of that 97%, so be it.

Curmie is reminded of the old George Carlin routine about Muhammed Ali:

For about three and a half years, they didn’t let him work. ‘Course he had an unusual job, beating people up. It’s a strange calling, y’know? But it’s one you’re entitled to. Government didn’t see it that way. Government wanted him to change jobs. Government wanted him to kill people. He said, “No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ‘em up, but I don't wanna kill ‘em.”

Curmie has little else in common with Mr. Ali, but we do agree on this: Curmie will beat up the likes of Who’s Holiday, but he doesn’t want to kill it.

Not so the Ted Geisel estate (Curmie can’t imagine “Dr. Seuss” himself having any objection). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which apparently is long on money for lawyers and short on sense, sued playwright Lombardo and the show’s producers, cancelling the planned 2016 Off-Broadway opening which was to have featured Jennifer Simard. The cease-and-desist order was ultimately overturned by US District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who ruled, quite reasonably, that:

The Play recontextualizes Grinch‘s easily-recognizable plot and rhyming style by placing Cindy-Lou Who—a symbol of childhood innocence and naiveté—in outlandish, profanity-laden, adult-themed scenarios involving topics such as poverty, teen-age pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, prison culture, and murder. In so doing, the Play subverts the expectations of the Seussian genre, and lampoons the Grinch by making Cindy-Lou's naiveté, Who-Ville's endlessly-smiling, problem-free citizens, and Dr. Seuss’ rhyming innocence, all appear ridiculous.

Well, duh. So the play premiered last November with Lesli Margherita as 40-year-old Cindy. And the Seuss estate appealed. Of course, they did. After all, they might be able to squeeze a few bucks out of the production. This, however, would be if they won, and they had about as much chance of doing that as Curmie’s doctoral alma mater has of capturing the Big 12 title in football this year. (The pre-season poll shows that 52 of 52 voters pick Curmie’s beloved Jayhawks to finish dead last.) Legal precedent was against them; a lower court ruling was against them; common sense was against them. Still, they forged ahead. In one of the easiest rulings in history, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals last week voted unanimously to uphold the lower-court ruling:

… the district court properly granted judgment on the pleadings on the trademark counterclaims. Applying the balancing test set forth in Rogers v. Grimaldi (Lanham Act “should be construed to apply to artistic works only where the public interest in avoiding consumer confusion outweighs the public interest in free expression”), it concluded that the public’s interest in free speech here outweighs DSE’s interest in protecting its trademarks. We agree. “A parody must convey two simultaneous—and contradictory—messages: that it is the original, but also that it is not the original and is instead a parody” and, in this case, Lombardo evokes elements of the original work to serve his parodic purpose. [internal citations omitted]

Indeed, the only surprise here is that the Appeals Court agreed to hear the case at all.

So here we are. Mr. Lombardo won his suit (surely even DSE isn’t stupid enough to appeal further… right?), and now a Broadway run is being contemplated. At least the former is good news.

And so ends the court case of Cindy Lou Who,

Of Matthew Lombardo, and of course, you-know-who.

It isn’t a play Curmie wants to go see,

But if you do, Dear Reader, you ought to be free.

3C and The Right to Parody

Playbill reports that an Off-Broadway production of 3C, a new play by David Adjmi, ran afoul of lawyers for DLT Entertainment, the company that owns the long-defunct television series “Three’s Company.”

Really, all you have to do to see what has DLT’s communal skivvies in a twist is to look at the publicity shots by Joan Marcus on the Playbill website (one of them shown here). I doubt that I ever watched an entire episode of “Three’s Company,” but anyone who was around in the ‘70s and had even the slightest interest in popular culture knew the premise, the central characters, and the style simply by social osmosis. And what we see in the 3C photos looks pretty familiar.

The “cease and desist” order enumerated some 17 similarities between the old TV series and Adjmi’s play, including such high-tone observations as “Connie is sexy and jiggles just like Chrissy.” Yes, really, at least according to an open letter from the theatre community penned by playwright/screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz.

Adjmi estimates that he made a total of perhaps $2500 from the five-week run of his show, which according to the producers “received some wonderful reviews and played to sold-out houses.” He didn’t think he could afford legal representation, so although he never signed anything or returned the information demanded by Kenyon & Kenyon (the DLT lawyers), he also didn’t think it possible to extend the run of the show past its scheduled closing date.

But here’s the thing. Similarities or no, DLT has no case. None. Zero. Bupkes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they’re developing a stage version of the series (God help us) and 3C “damages” their property. Blah-de-blah-de-blah-blah-blah. First thought: what really damages the property (the Three’s Company stageplay) is the fact that it’s based on the “Three’s Company” series which, let’s face it, sucked.

Secondly, whereas there are clearly overlaps between the two shows, they go in totally different directions. Here’s Baitz:

Yes, David's play satirically invokes the sitcom in question as a template upon which to de-construct the mores and tropes of that time. It is clearly and patently and unremittingly parody, to the extent that it depends on Three's Company’s 1970s attitudes towards sexual relations, etc., in order to slyly examine the underlying brutality and bigotry attendant to American popular culture of that era. (And since then). The critical response to the play has generally acknowledged 3-C's exploration of the essential aloneness of the characters, and the toxic suffering they endure. Mr Adjmi's intentions are not to replicate Three's Company, but clearly and patently to mutate it into something dark and frightening, savage even.

More significantly still, parody is protected speech. That’s why there are shows like Dog Sees God or Forbidden Broadway. This fundamental interpretation of the 1st Amendment runs through the entire history of American jurisprudence. If Hustler can get away with their vicious attack on Jerry Falwell (a fake ad of the televangelist apparently having a drunken sexual affair with his mother in an outhouse), David Adjmi can put a big-breasted bubblehead in his play. (Does DLT really think that character was original with “Three’s Company”?)

The Dramatists Guild also points out that:

…the right of authors to make fair comment on pre-existing work (whether through parody or other forms of fair use) is a First Amendment safety valve in the copyright law, and one we wholeheartedly support, as do the courts. If the author contacts us, we will discuss the issue with him and see how we can help.

Note what Adjmi is doing isn’t like, say, the Wooster Group’s wholesale appropriation of the actual playscript of The Crucible for their production of L.S.D. (Just the High Points). It would be disingenuous to suggest that audiences for 3C aren’t supposed to make the connection to the television series. That said, the aesthetic intentions involved are radically different.

Remember, too, that a work need not even be specifically determined as parody to be protected. Such was the case, for example, in a copyright infringement case regarding Alice Randall’s novel The Wind Done Gone which uses Gone with the Wind in much the same way as 3C uses “Three’s Company”: to problematize attitudes once taken for granted. As Kyonzte Hughes writes on the First Amendment Center’s webpage:

Applying the elements of fair use, the appeals court recognized that Randall’s work was made for a commercial purpose. However, the court said that this factor was “strongly overshadowed and outweighed in view of its highly transformative use” of Gone With the Wind.

“Randall’s literary goal is to explode the romantic, idealized portrait of the antebellum South during and after the Civil War,” the appeals court wrote.

The appeals court also determined that the Mitchell estate had failed to show evidence that Randall’s book would harm the market value of Gone With the Wind’s derivative works or take away market demand for Mitchell’s book.

A concurring judge even pointed out that Randall’s book may “act as complement to, rather than a substitute for Gone With the Wind and its potential derivatives. The judge reasoned that readers of The Wind Done Gone “may want to refresh their recollections of the original.”

Kenyon & Kenyon is, pure and simple, engaging in legalistic bullying. This might not technically be a SLAPP suit (which would be illegal in New York), but it’s certainly a first cousin. DLT is doing this because they can, not because they are really stupid enough to think they could win if the case ever went to trial. “No one has ever heard of David Adjmi; let’s push him around a little.”

What DLT doesn’t understand—because they’re in this only for financial gain and perhaps a little self-importance—is that no matter how much we theatre types are inevitably in competition with each other, it’s rare indeed when we don’t take care of our own. David Adjmi, they might be able to take on. But not Jon Robin Baitz, Andre Bishop (Lincoln Center Artistic Director), Tony Kushner, Stephen Sondheim, Terrence McNally, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, Jose Rivera, Craig Lucas, Jim Nicola (Artistic Director, NY Theatre Workshop), Terry Kinney (co-founder, Steppenwolf Theatre Company), Stephen Adley Guirgis, and nearly three dozen other signatories to Baitz’s letter: and that was before it really went “public” to the rest of us in the profession. Curmie has already added his name—for what little good it might do—to the quickly-growing list.

Would I like Mr. Adjmi’s play? Perhaps not. But Baitz answers that argument, too:

Whether one appreciates the work or not is immaterial; the principle at stake here is a basic one. Specious and spurious legal bullying of artists should be vigorously opposed, and that opposition must begin first and foremost with all of us in the New York Theatre community.

Preach it, JRB.

I like artists more than bean-counters. Go figure.

I’ve been thinking a lot about copyright of late, especially as it applies to people other than the ones who actually created something.

I’m doing my own translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias for next year for a slightly different reason than I adapted Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck for this year. In the latter case, I wanted to look at the structure of the play, especially given the manifold possibilities for ordering of scenes, etc. A new version seemed a logical approach, and gave me the opportunity to work with the student dramaturg and assistant director in what I hope was a unique experience for them. For Breasts, however, I think the standard translation in the Benedikt/Wellwarth Modern French Theatre anthology is just fine, but tracking down the rights to that translation is likely to be as difficult as doing my own. Plus, not only can I now say exactly what I think Apollinaire is up to, there’s no royalty to be paid, as he has been dead longer than the requisite 70 years. (We’d still have to pay a royalty on the translation if I didn’t use my own.)

The other day I happened to be wearing the show t-shirt from my production of Six Characters in Search of an Author a few years ago. Here’s a link to: the image we used for the show logo. One of my current students asked about it. I won’t go into the whole story here, but here’s the essence: the painting is by a very well-established artist named George Underwood. How well-established? Well, one indication is that he designed the album covers for David Bowie’s “The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust,” Procol Harum’s “Shine On Brightly” and Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes,” and the inner sleeve for T. Rex’s “Electric Warrior.” (Trust me, younger readers, that’s a big deal.)

Anyway, I really liked the image, and I was able to convince the powers-that-be to at least check out how much it would cost to get the rights to use the painting, “Boccioni,” in our publicity. So our director of arts information e-mailed him, and within 24 hours she’d received a reply: it would cost us one copy of the poster, one copy of the program, and one show t-shirt. We quickly asked the most important question: what size t-shirt? This is a man who doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone, and he was flattered that a theatre department at a school I’m sure he’s never heard of liked his work enough to use it. As a result, his work was seen by hundreds of people who might not have seen it otherwise: or at least who wouldn’t have known who the artist was. We also made sure to plug his website every chance we got, even though we weren’t required to do so. Maybe somebody with the money to do so buys something there. Everybody wins.

Of course, intellectual property isn’t the only way artists help out those with a legitimate interest. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, for example, every playwright but one (plus a director and two scholars) whom I asked for an interview not only obliged, but re-arranged their schedules as necessary to accommodate my whirlwind research trip to Dublin (with a quick side trip to Oxford). Two of them bought me a pint; one made coffee in his rooms. The sole exception was Seamus Heaney, who had already won the Nobel Prize, and quite justifiably didn’t grant interviews to mere grad students.

I mentioned scholars… the same trends apply to them. When I was writing my dissertation my university invited a major scholar—someone whose name would be recognized by anyone in my business, regardless of specialization—to campus for a series of seminars. I somewhat hesitantly asked him if he might spare a few minutes to talk about a point of intersection between his research and mine. “Of course,” he said, and proceeded to sit down with me for over an hour and a half.

I was asked to teach an acting course a few years ago, and the (award-winning) book I had hoped to use as the primary textbook had gone out of print. While I could, and did, substitute another book, there was one chapter I really didn’t want to lose. So I e-mailed the author to see if I could get permission to photocopy those few pages. His response, paraphrased: “The book is out of print and will apparently stay that way. Photocopy whatever you want; I’m just glad you like it enough to use it.”

Ah, but the people I’ve been describing: they’re the artists, and scholars, and people who create things themselves. Artists’ agents, estates, etc.: another matter. A couple of years after Six Characters, I directed As You Like It and I wanted to use this painting by Maxfield Parrish for our logo. So we dutifully contacted the agent for the estate (Parrish died in 1966)… and they wanted $1500. I suggested that they perform an activity for which both physical dexterity and hermaphroditic tendencies would contribute to the success of the exercise. As it happens, I know something about the condition of the Parrish estate—his hometown is only a few miles from the family homestead—and the $250 or $300 we could have afforded and would willingly have paid would have helped them out a fair amount. I even thought about bypassing the agent and talking to the estate directly, but deadlines loomed and I wasn’t able to pursue that avenue. The result was that everyone lost: the Parrish estate got nothing instead of something, a great artist’s work wasn’t circulated the way it might have been, and, although I was happy with our ultimate logo, we didn’t get to use an image that actually inspired a lot of the concept and the look of the production.

So… now I’m in correspondence with a woman at Music Theatre International. One of my colleagues is directing the classic musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in the fall. For several years our program has assigned students in the non-major Theatre Appreciation class to read the plays they will see as a course requirement. Whether or not this is good pedagogy, the practice has always worked well logistically. Musicals are likely to be harder to work with in this respect (scripts have traditionally been rented instead of sold—don’t ask me why), but of the four musicals in the time we’ve had this policy, three of the libretti were available directly in published versions, and the other had been included in an anthology, so we were able to secure rights to “publish” it in a coursepack.

But How to Succeed has, as far as I can figure out, never been published in the traditional sense of that term. That complicates things considerably, because for whatever reason MTI seems really interested in keeping these scripts out of the hands of the public. And, of course, we can’t go to the artists themselves: lyricist Frank Loesser died in 1969; the book is by Abe Burrows (d. 1985), Jack Weinstock (d. 1969) and Willie Gilbert (d. 1980), based on a book by Shepherd Mead (d. 1994). All we want to do is have a bunch of people who don’t necessarily know a lot about theatre be able to comprehend what they’re seeing a little better in the hopes that they might ultimately like it more: the course is called Theatre Appreciation, after all. And, of course, we’d pay (or have the students pay) a royalty fee to include the text in a coursepack. But MTI, who must surely have had requests like this in the past, is reluctant. Of course, the fact that I can’t figure out a reasonable rationale for their behavior doesn’t mean they don’t have one. And I understand the need to protect the reputation of the product, but I bet they still grant production rights to Millard Fillmore Junior High in Spider Breath, Montana.

The headline-maker this week about copyright was, once again, about the estate of the person involved, not the person himself. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which (inexplicably to me) controls the rights to Albert Einstein’s name and image, is suing General Motors for over $75,000 for using the great physicist’s face superimposed onto the body of an underwear model in a promotional campaign for the GMC Terrain: “Ideas are sexy too.” Get it? The ad ran precisely once, in the “Sexiest Man Alive” issue of People magazine last September. I personally think GM ought to be sued for having such a stupid ad, but in strictly legal terms it appears the car company may have acted in good faith, believing they had bought the rights from “a reputable agency.” Apparently not. Anyway, HUJ, which apparently doesn’t have problems with the famous tongue-out photograph of Einstein, which appears virtually everywhere, believes the half-Einstein/half-hunk image is “not consummate with and causes injury to” the university’s “carefully guarded rights in the image and likeness of the famous scientist, political activist and humanitarian.” Sure they do. It’s really hard to side with a multi-national corporation against a university, but give me a damned break. They don’t give a crap about Einstein’s reputation, only what they can make out of the deal—and ol’ Al still apparently ranks in the top ten earners among dead celebrities.

And finally, I look forward to being, barely over a fortnight from now, in Ireland, one of the most litigious places on the planet. Early in the course which includes a 16-day trip to the Emerald Isle, we read The Colleen Bawn by Dion Boucicault, a champion of copyright law as well as being one of the premiere playwrights of the mid-19th century; he was also, ironically, one of the greatest plagiarists in history. But when we think of Ireland’s contributions to world culture, we think first of 20th-century writers: four Nobel laureates in literature in barely over 70 years a from a country with a population roughly the size of Houston’s. And what do the likes of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett have in common? [N.B., yes, I know Joyce didn’t win the Nobel Prize: go with me, here.] Well, for one thing, their heirs, many of whom have done little if anything with their lives except bask in the steady income generated by their forebears, are positively hemorrhoidal when it comes to anything to do with rights.

The Beckett estate is notorious for shutting down productions that allow theatre artists to do their jobs (God forbid that the scenic designer be given any authority, or that one of the tramps in Waiting for Godot be played by a woman). But at least our boy Sammy himself was equally persnickety.

W.B. Yeats’s heirs are a little difficult to deal with, too, making the current exhibition at the National Library in Dublin all the more impressive. Yeats’s heirs, for example, have refused to allow publication of the version of The Countess Cathleen that was actually performed as one of the premiere productions of the Irish Literary Theatre. We know exactly what that version said (I’ve actually read the hand-edited script of Florence Farr, who played the supporting role of Aleel: it’s in the O’Hegarty Collection in the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas), but the play was revised both before and after production, and the actual performance script has never been published. (Well, technically it was, sort of, but not in a form any casual reader might find useful or enjoyable.) I was asked several years ago to write the introduction to a collection of Irish Renaissance plays. The editor had a contract with a very reputable publisher; he’d chosen the plays to include, including a couple by Yeats (for which he thought he had arranged for publication rights, and he got (understandably) a little grumpy with me that I didn’t finish my 30-page essay until spring break of 2001 when he had wanted it by February. A couple weeks after receiving my introduction, he e-mailed me to say that he liked what I’d done; he’d made a couple of minor stylistic changes and sent the entire manuscript along to the publisher. It still isn’t out. Guess why.

But the High Exalted Executive Omnipotent Poobah of literary estate jackassery is Stephen Joyce, grandson of James. A few of his many adventures in assholitude are chronicled in a now nearly four-year-old article from the New Yorker: he has granted and then withdrawn copyright permissions to letters, for example, threatening lawsuits like a grumpy old man chasing the kids off his lawn. He has thus left scholars with the choice of leaving out entire sections of their work or going ahead without the supporting documentation, making their work seem speculative when in fact it isn’t. Both results are detailed in that rather lengthy article, which, Gentle Reader, you needn’t read in its entirety. He has threatened lawsuits against anyone holding free Bloomsday readings of Ulysses, as if he weren’t going to make pots of money off people buying books because they heard enough to pique their interest. He has whinged that an actor who memorized lengthy portions of Ulysses had probably already violated copyright. Really. He is apparently quite proud of his constipation: “What other literary estate stands up the way I do? It’s a whole way of looking at things and looking at life.” It certainly is. Dubliners’ slang term for the statue of James Joyce leaning jauntily against his cane just off O’Connell Street is “the prick with the stick.” Stephen, apparently, doesn’t use a cane.

So, as I prepare for a third Bloomsday in Dublin, I note with a wry pleasure that next time, 2012, will be over 70 years after James Joyce’s death in 1941. Next year will also mark the figurative demise of Stephen as a major force in Joyceana, although presumably he will still control access to letters and papers which are literally in his possession—he claims to have destroyed some, and threatens to do so to others.

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story. When They Make Me Tsar, work will enter the public domain faster, but my Tsar-ship still seems well into the future. In the present, we play by the rules. People, even business-people, are allowed to do things that aren’t necessarily in their own best interest. Exercising one’s legal rights is, after all, doing precisely that: doing what one has an explicit legal right to do. But the reason I would never succeed in either business or law is that there’s a difference between being a curmudgeon and just being an ass. At least I hope so. Give me the artist ten times out of ten.