Underground theater could trigger diplomatic and police suppression across international borders

Evidence

When in early 1967 Indira Gandhi was presented at two local colleges, Rutgers and Columbia, outraged Indian students protested with a force sufficient to trigger complaints from both the Indian Consulate General in New York, who told the Voice the play was “grossly obscene,” and the Indian Embassy in Washington, which warned that further performances would greatly damage Indo-American relations. The affront was widely publicized in India. Tavel blamed Vaccaro, who pointed out that the play was no longer being presented. Nonetheless, the police visited the Play-House five times and issued three summonses, charging that the theater lacked a license, a certificate of occupancy, and a permit of assembly. The mailing list was confiscated, the theater shut down and its manager was hauled into court. Dotson Rader, the Columbia student who arranged for the performance (and who a year later would be a leader in the Columbia strike) lost his position as head of the student entertainment organization Humanitas. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1968

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s shelf-thesis about illegality as a material condition of avant-garde production — this is a concrete instance of state repression shaping how the scene operated.
• SEED: The 1967 Indira Gandhi play, which nearly ruptured US–India relations, offers an article angle on how a single Off-Off-Broadway performance could trigger diplomatic crisis and police raids — a measure of how high the stakes of the underground actually were.