New World Law and Order

“The greatest truths can be told in a whisper.” That’s the advice the papal legate gives to the impassioned Bartolomé de las Casas in Jean-Claude Carrière’s new play The Controversy of Valladolid. It’s a lesson Carrière has learned well over his distinguished career, which includes screenplays for directors Luis Buñuel, Milos Forman, and Peter Brook, four Academy Award nominations, a book written with the Dalai Lama, and several acclaimed plays. His incisive observations, whether on politics, religion, or society, are carefully blended with humor to create almost an organic sense of farce.

With Manhattan’s theaters saturated with polemics, there’s never been a time when Carrière’s whispers were needed more.

The Controversy of Valladolid, which opens this Sunday at the Public Theater, tells the story of the secret debate convened by the pope in 1550 to determine whether Native Americans have souls.

Las Casas, a Spanish priest and chaplain to the conquistadors, argues that the Spanish and Indians are brothers, while Juan Gines de Sepulveda, an Aristotelian philosopher, insists that the Indians are natural-born slaves. The parallel between Sepulveda’s arguments and those of certain American politicians is unmistakable: “barbarian” peoples must be conquered and civilized; heathens must be converted to the “true faith”; and of course, “you’re either wid us or agin us.”

Carrière notes that this is neither the first nor the last era in which the Sepulveda-las Casas debate resonates. “When I wrote the TV film in 1992,” he says, referring to his screenplay for French television on which he based the play, “everyone compared it with our intervention in Serbia. Today, it’s Iraq. Tomorrow, who knows?”

French television producers originally approached Carrière in 1990 to ask if he would create a feature film to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. “I said to myself, ‘French TV equals no money, no location filming,’” he remembers. He turned to the story of Sepulveda and las Casas, which allowed him to avoid the lavish special effects and battle scenes of a Hollywood movie. “The controversy takes place after 1492,” he says, “but everything about the conquest could be explored through it.”

As a writer, Carrière says, “I want to go as deep as possible into our roots.” The debate between Sepulveda and las Casas, held at a monastery in Valladolid, Spain, “was the first time in our history these questions were raised: who is human? Who is the Other?”

Carrière pushes aside his coffee, and reaches for a copy of The New York Times. “Look at this,” he says, pointing to a headline on the first page. “‘More Africans Enter U.S. Than in Days of Slavery.’ Now American blacks and African blacks are having the same problems as the Spanish and the Indians had. I can imagine las Casas reading a story like this.”

Of course, the immediate context of the Spanish-Indian conflict was different. “At that time, the idea of a human species didn’t exist,” Carrière notes. “European doctors wrote about women giving birth to snakes—they were making the same mistake Herodotus was making 2,000 years before. So if we penetrate their mind, it’s difficult for them to tell the difference between a monkey, an Indian, and an African.”

Carrière emphasizes the importance of recognizing the different mind-set of the era, particularly when confronted with the prejudiced opinions of Sepulveda. “I said to Steven Skybell”—who plays Sepulveda in Controversy—“every word you utter, you must first convince yourself. If you’re not convinced, you won’t convince anyone.”

Carrière explains that writing about the Sepulveda-las Casas debate was far more interesting than writing about contemporary debates. “It was the only way to know truth” at that time, he says. “People believed that whoever won had been guided by God. Today, we have some debates between the Republicans and the Democrats, but we know they won’t change any of their opinions and they won’t reach the truth. It’s like a circus.”

Writing Controversy also led him to explore the role of religion, specifically the Roman Catholic Church, in the discussions of the time. The Church continually tried to reconcile the Gospels with the science and philosophy of ancient Greece. And when the Gospels’ message of universal equality conflicted with Aristotle’s concept of natural slaves, the Church invariably sided with Aristotle.

“The theology of liberation has always been condemned by Rome,” Carrière says. “In France, whenever men and women have tried to make their lives better, the church has been against them.” He uses his fingers to count the initiatives opposed by the Church: “Voting rights, education for girls, the right to strike, paid vacation, allowing two men to live together.” He laughs. “No wonder today people will believe in anything, any extravaganza.” Carrière says he “doesn’t believe in God,” but he still has a “utopian dream of a modern, active, intelligent Church.”

The current state of world affairs is alarming to Carrière, especially in the United States. “We’re seeing the return of ‘God,’” he says, indicating quotation marks around the word, “at least in official speech. As far as I know, George W. Bush is the first president to say that God speaks to him directly, which is of course very strange. He’s another Sepulveda,” Carrière concludes.

Fundamentalism “always leads to the same types of conflicts,” he says. “It’s unbelievable, the people who say, ‘We are the only ones to be saved.’ These people believe that absurdity. How can people look at you and say that?” That “absurdity” is at the heart of The Controversy of Valladolid. To cap his arguments, Sepulveda asks if the supreme good is the salvation of the soul. “Tell me: is there anyone here who does not know the answer?” he demands. “Sepulveda almost wins with that,” Carrière says, indicating the importance of salvation to the Catholic Church at the time. “There’s nothing las Casas can say. His only way to win is through emotion and passion.”

Today, he says, “The Catholic Church doesn’t play a role” in politics ... It’s silent because the pope is like a zombie—there’s a dead body at the head of the Church. Absolute conservatism has led the Church into a decline, which is a pity, because today a strong Church could say things no one else could say ... The Dalai Lama is the only religious leader who speaks out on world affairs with credibility because there is no church in Buddhism, no dogma.”

Eventually, he continues, “we can hope that ‘God’—in quotes—surrenders to man, that man will stop seeking an invisible god, and that men and women will take into their own hands their own destinies.”

“My goal is not to change the world,” Carrière says. “When we ask people to spend two hours in a theater, it’s because we believe that those two hours will be more interesting, more intense, more surprising than if they spent those two hours outside the theater. It’s like a bet.” It certainly seems as though he’ll win his bet this time.