Censorship of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Jo-Yeol Park: A comparative study

Throughout history, theater has been revered by authorities as a powerful means of instructing the general public. Yet at the same time, it has often become one of the most subversive weapons used against sociopolitical and religious authorities. The result is that theatre has often been subject to stricter censorship than other literary genres.; This study examines the censorship applied to the plays of Eugene O'Neill, Federico García Lorca, and the South Korean playwright Jo-Yeol Park, and analyzes its relation to cultural hegemony. As Gramsci's concept of hegemony perceives, moral and intellectual leadership, assuming a guardianship role in society, has been pivotal in the practice of censorship, which often focuses more on justifying its cause and generating public consensus than on the punitive action itself. Cultural elements such as established traditional codes, religion, and national ideology have been identified as key foundations of social structure. Several works of these playwrights have been censored for allegedly posing a serious threat to such social foundations.; In this study, I have analyzed how censorship operates not only in a totalitarian context, but also in ostensibly democratic or free societies, with these three playwrights as examples of dramatists who lived under various political regimes. The issue of perceived moral decadence has been manipulated and emphasized, with an appeal to the emotional dimensions of the general public, to dilute the sociocultural implications of the writings of O'Neill and Lorca. O'Neill's plays attacked the distorted religious ideals of Puritanism, a dominant cultural ideology in early American society that left a significant residue in his own time. Lorca's acute awareness of social and cultural injustice and his homosexuality led to his criticism of the conservative bourgeois tradition and dominant cultural codes of Spanish society. Similarly, Park's personalized discourse of longing for his family, separated from him in North Korea, provides a critical perspective on the sociopolitical reality of the Korean peninsula, where the prevailing anti-communism in the South, in conjunction with Confucianism, became transformed into a national ideology of culture and morality, generating a corresponding public consensus.; The history of theater censorship is the history of power relationships among human beings. Accordingly, this study has interpreted theater censorship as a byproduct of the manipulative exercise of hegemonic hierarchy in the process of establishing intellectual, social, religious, or cultural authorities.