Open Letter to City Center Board - Please scroll down a little. [and threw in a City Center Protest YouTube at the end]

-----Original Message-----

From: Fred Landau <fjl1960@aol.com

Sent: Tue, Sep 11, 2018 9:21 am

Subject: How can City Center Board look at Jack Viertel's email & not see it's abusing disabled so viciously?

To Ms. Stacey Mindich and Ms. Arlene Shuler, and the whole NY City Center Board:    (open letter)

I've tried getting the Board to investigate this in May 2013 to no response.  I was told then the only thing that would move City Center is a final court judgment, even mentioned by Jack Viertel in the attached;  recent events have shown that has never been an acceptable standard, even back when City Center was insisting on a final judgment and only that.  I have appealed the last few weeks to the new composition of the Board, but incredibly even in 2018, again to zero response.  Total silence. 

How can the City Center Board look at the one page attached, Jack Vertel's email of May 16 2013 (in his position as Artistic Director of City Center's famed Encores series) even on its face and not realize Jack Viertel was oppressive and threatening the disabled?  A wealthy powerful person wildly out of control, trying to squash a weak, powerless disabled person.   That he wrote it to my male now-spouse/partner does not make it any less clearly and disgracefully intended as a threat directed at me, the disabled person.

Seriously - One phone call and six emails he was cc'd on that same day leads to a diagnosis recasting my harmless Tourette symptoms as a mental illness needing immediate treatment against my will?  And City Center still doesn't think any investigation of the  motivation is needed? (even putting aside that the email is direct retaliation for small-dollar government filings among those six emails he was cc'd on that same afternoon, and the fabrications in the account of the phone call with Jack's wife Linda Viertel)

Jack Viertel also ignores being told (in the email he responds to, there in that same PDF) that the disabled person's non-disabled gay partner/spouse has been excluded by the event City Center is sponsoring, as if that's not enough even by itself to make the event City Center was sponsoring discriminatory?

I've been asking City Center to look into this as far back as 2013, and have gotten no response at all, as you know.  I'm cc-ing the Mayor's Office on People with Disabilities with a prayer to them for help in the face of endless silence from New York City Center.  

Mayor de Blasio's name is on the City Center site.  What a shame the Board is bringing to the support City Center gets from the City by its cruel indefensible silence, not even any acknowledgement.  My father who was 98 last week went through the concentration camps, and he could tell you what Silence causes when the rich and powerful who never faced any bias use their power against the protected classes without feeling.

Believe it or not, with all you both have accomplished as powerful women even in the face of discrimination, a disabled gay man faces even greater obstacles.  I graduated from Harvard Law School and still now find myself with the City Center Board, as a neurologically disabled person, having to beg and plead to the Board of a place like City Center to pay attention to my rights, which I've supposedly had since the 1990s.  

A non-disabled rich white powerful straight male felt free to threaten me with the police by calling my Tourettes symptoms a mental illness, based on one phone call and six emails, saying "Let the chips fall where they may!"  It is clear that if there were a race issue, religion issue, orientation issue, wheelchair issue, anything but a neurological issue like Tourettes, this brick wall would not be facing me all these years I've pleaded for the Board to look into this.

Please be part of making things right, not supporting the oppression and abuse of position in the industry by someone who has never had to face discrimination in his life.    This is not just a play - this is real life.  Justice is not just for fictional characters you producers put onstage.

Sincerely,

Fred Landau

212-244-0494 FJL1960@aol.com

Encores head Jack Viertel shows the same chips-fall-where-they-may behavior against a powerless protected classes he's shown elsewhere [examples: disabled, or women]. It is [Note:  Only reaction I could discern from City Center since Aug. 12 is that the  biased Talkin Broadway website that City Center sided with (while saying it would not take sides until a judgment rendered) suddenly began carrying paid-for banner ads for Ms. Mindich's "Dear Evan Hansen" first time in that brilliant  show's hit Bway run. Another coincidence!]  :). 

Also City Center Mktg Director Christopher Williams who was sympathetic at first Oct. 2012, there since May 2005, suddenly switched jobs in March 2013 per his linked-in, the same month as the "Superman" show that got City Center's large firm lawyer coming at me. Rich gorilla with a cannon against a poor puppy, standard procedure,  Wild to try to make sense of, because it doesn't make sense!   A pattern seems clear:  He decides who he has use for and who he feels he just doesn't need; if anyone he sees as disposable gets in the way of what he wants, they don't matter and the chips may fall where they may.

ADDED SEPT. 13: I’m told it's likely the Encores head (or City Center lawyer??) thought by calling it mental illness needing immediate treatment, that could justify the entity he was protecting not having to accommodate or deal with it.  Tourettes symptoms are almost always very easy to accommodate, but most companies  just don’t feel like it; looks likely he was trying to misrepresent it as something severe that a public accommodation should not have to accommodate.  I can't see any other logic to the flat-out ridiculous, oppressive lying.

I think I see, here, the problem with the perception of protected classes. It was in my 2013 in box.
Jack Viertel wrote April 2 2013: "I don't keep track of Talkin' Broadway, and, given that you've asked City Center to boycott, I'm surprised you're not doing the same."
From: Jack Viertel
To: Fred Landau
Sent: Tue, Apr 2, 2013 12:22 am
Fred,
These two things are unrelated, and trying to make a case that they might be is walking down a blind alley for no reason.
I got your messages. I don't keep track of Talkin' Broadway, and, given that you've asked City Center to boycott, I'm surprised you're not doing the same. But whatever Bruce Kimmel may or may not have written doesn't actually interest me -- that's inside baseball stuff, and I don't actually care, though I certainly appreciate your concern.
Best,
Jack
No clue that the idea of protesting discrimination and Human Rights abuse is:
-That they were not letting me in, and I wanted to be allowed in. To all they offer anyone else in the public, any artists. Their networking events. Their discussions.
- That they were not allowing coverage or press of my work, and I wanted them to allow coverage of my work.
- That when I was in a festival with 25 shows (MITF), & they embargoed any press releases that included my work, they left out the whole festival of 25 shows just that period, letting the festival know about choosing my work again.
So many years, all those Wilson plays, plus Hairpsray, Dear Evan Hansen - if I could just have made him get it then. Could so much damage have been averted, human and financial?

To try to draw attention & even try to laugh a little thru very serious, damaging abuse by powerful of the weak member of a protected class, someone Encores seems to have decided was expendable:

"You Got Disabilities" - parody Encores Superman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGOX4ygvozY

"You've Got Disabilities" is a parody of "You've Got Possibilities" from Encores' ...SUPERMAN

(I can’t see real sense or logic either; the Nonprofit Encores retaliating for smallish govt. filings,  lying re disability, seemingly just really to help For-profit Talkin Broadway Corporation = ZERO sense, other than abuse of industry power, as if at its root was:  Who are you, powerless dispensible nobody, to tell powerful us who we should pay to put a banner ad, I guess???)