Protesters Arrested For Blocking Entrance To Polish Theatre, Claim New Play Is Pornographic

The Independent reports that a dozen protesters were arrested in Wroclaw, Poland as they blocked the entrance to the Polski Theater, claiming the theatre's production of Nobel Prize winning Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek's DEATH AND THE MAIDEN to be pornographic.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (see poster image) is based on the first three plays from the collection "Princess Dramas: Death and the Maiden I-V: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Rosamunde. It is not the Ariel Dorfman play that ran on Broadway in 1992.

Click here for an English translation of the production's website, which contains the following description:

"DEATH AND THE MAIDEN is the production on how to torture the most efficiently. Where to hit and with what culture? Which story should our victim be tied to? What should be done to make a torturer and a victim feel deeper and more intensive? Let's imagine this situation. That we dab our hand into a body of other human being as if we touch some kind of instrument. And we play on him/her so long, and so hard till he/her ask us: encore. The production is suitable for REALLY adult audiences only and contains sex scenes."

The government's new culture minister, Piotr Glinski, called for the show to be canceled before its premiere on Saturday, noting the theater is sponsored by the state budget. Protesters object to the presence pornstars in the company performing sexually explicit scenes.

The theatre's website denies accusations of the protest being a marketing ploy, with a translation stating, "Events around the premiere of the play are beyond our control and we were not inspired. Our goal was and is the practice of art."

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