Curbed.com: Pay Attention

Curbed.com has been doing a lot of coverage of the Provincetown Playhouse crisis, and its most recent posting highlights the fight that NYU has on its hands. I've been posting comments on a daily basis on this site, but you can only do so much in a short period, so I have crafted the following statement, which will go on the website as soon as permitted:

NYU -- my alma mater -- is addicted to demolition. It is also addicted to prevarication. On the one hand, it publicly promises to exhaust all methods and means of considering structual reuse before hauling out its precious wrecking ball, but here's evidence, as if anyone needed it, that NYU's words yet again stand naked and exposed, meaningless and empty, its promises fatuous and dismissive and blithe and superficial, its ethics and morals gathering dust on a shelf.

Full disclosure: I am Leonard Jacobs, national theatre editor of Back Stage, the entertainment industry trade paper, and first-string critic for both Back Stage and the alt-weekly New York Press. I am serving as one a primary liaison to the working, active professional theatre community, both locally and nationally, and we have enlisted several hundred people, including many names everyday citizens will recognize and who are working in ways public and private, overt and covert, and subtle and unsubtle in this fight. You can view just some of those names on the list of signatures on the letter to President Sexton available on GVSHP's website,
http://gvshp.org/documents/PTownSextonLtr04-30-08.pdf.

In advance of the community board meeting on May 28, we promise to spend the next four weeks building our coalition. We further promise that our approach to a satisfactory resolution of this crisis will be wide-ranging, legal and memorable.

Final note: I understand there are those who believe NYU's plan is a good and great thing, a big mountain of justification disguised as beautification. We do respect those who disagree with us. But we assure you that our disagreement will be louder, longer, more passionate and, if need be, unrelenting.

Sphere: Related Content