MCLC: Have they run out of provinces yet (2)

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Have they run out of provinces yet (2)
There is a recent cause celebre in New York city when the Gilbert and Sullivan performance of the Mikado was cancelled by the company and replaced with the lesser known play Pirates of Penzance. While many have understood the Mikado as a satire of England in Japanese disguise -- and no-one in Japan seem to have been ever offended by it as far as I know even when it is taken to be about Japan? -- as I understand it, in 2015 it was local criticism that brought it down, including accusations of the play as a racist yellowface mockery of "Asians." Here are a few links about it:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/18/mikado-production-canceled-over-racial-concerns/?_r=0
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-york-city-production-mikado-draws-criticism-accusations-racism-n429546
http://blog.angryasianman.com/2015/09/new-york-city-production-of-mikado.html
http://adobochronicles.com/2015/09/18/the-mikado-cancelled-no-more-filipinos-in-miss-saigon-only-french-actors-in-les-miz/
I don't know, but it may be less about a failure to understand satire, than part of a trend towards a situation where no-one can pretend to be anyone else, and only act as representatives of their respective groups/races/ethnicities/identities. So by logical extension, it would be the end of theatre as we know it, and satire.
The saddest, and perhaps most illuminating example in the US may be the play by an Asian American playwright that was being set up in a drama class at a Pennsylvania college but cancelled by the playwright himself, when he realised they were not casting Asian-origin students in the Asian roles he had conceived:
How Concerns Over Race and Casting Brought Down a Campus Play. By Kate Stoltzfus. Chronicle of Higher Education, NOVEMBER 16, 2015.
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Concerns-Over-Race-and/234210
The students, having practiced for months, were shocked into "stunned silence, immediate tears, and anger." I think that atmosphere of bitterness isn't conducive to creative satire. It breeds a vicious kind of guarded seriousness and self-censorship which seems to be spreading all over. The end of satire ahead?
In comparison, in China, satire is difficult, or outright forbidden if it tries to touch the powerful. I still remember how in the 1980s, when I was working in Beijing, the press began to carry cartoons satirizing top leaders, fairly innocent by our standards, but then suddenly, that came to an abrupt end, invisible orders from above: No more making fun of the Leaders.
 yrs,
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 16, 2016
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