"Defying the Odds Far From Broadway"

by Michael Paulson 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series 

[This article ran in the New York Times of 16 December 2025, Section C (“Arts”), reported from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Naples, Florida.  It’s posted on the paper’s wsebsite as “As Regional Theaters Struggle, Some Defy the Odds,“ 16 December.

[Previous entries in the “Regional Theater” series, as well as some posts that are just relevant to the regional theater in America:

•  “‘Bigger Than Broadway!’" by Richard Zoglin (12 September 2024)

•  “Art Will Out” (3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 August 2024)

•  "Wish You Were Here" by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (6 July 2024)

•  "‘If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?’: Regional Theaters Struggle to Revive” by Rob Weinert-Kendt (11 May 2024)

•  "‘Audiences Are Back, More or Less’" (18 March 2024)

•  “‘Theater in rural Appalachian Virginia brings regional themes to the stage’" by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet (17 March 2023)

•  “A Crisis In America's Theaters” (13 September 2023)

•  “The Regional Theater: Change or Die” (3 October 2023)

•  “Regional Theater: History” (8 October 2023)

•  “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” (5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 30 November, 3, 13, 16, and 19 December 2023)

•  ‘‘‘In rural Oregon, regional theater sparks a creative revival’" by Jeffrey Brown (27 August 2018)

[In the article reposted below, there are several plays mentioned.  I’ll provide some background facts on the plays on the afterword to this post.]

Theaters in Naples, Fla., and Milwaukee are among a handful of regional companies that are thriving.

America’s regional theaters are facing difficult times: staging fewer shows, employing fewer workers, and running deficits more frequently than before the pandemic.

But not all of them are struggling. Some are booming.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee Repertory Theater has finished the first phase of an $80 million renovation of its three-theater complex in an old power plant along the Milwaukee River. In Naples, Fla., Gulfshore Playhouse has just begun its second season in a new $80 million complex with a curved facade meant to evoke the nearby sand and sea.

Both theaters are now breaking their own records. Milwaukee Rep’s staging of “Come From Away,” the first show on the theater’s renovated main stage, has just ended its run as the highest-grossing production in the company’s 71-year history. And Gulfshore Playhouse’s current production, “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,” is breaking every record for that company, with a nightly waiting list for people seeking seats.

Kristen Coury, the Playhouse’s chief executive and producing artistic director, described her programming mantra as “up and known.” Translation: When deciding which shows to produce, she selects ones that are upbeat and well-known.

“We’re at a moment now where there’s a lot of poke-you-in-the-eye theater, like, ‘I don’t care what you think — this is good for you, and I’m going to make you feel like a terrible person, and you better buy a ticket anyway,”’ Coury said.

“My first covenant is with the audience, and I care about what they think,” she added. “People don’t want to spend money on a show they don’t think they’re going to like.”

The Milwaukee theater’s leaders, though making different choices in all sorts of ways, make a similar point. “We actually like our people,” said Mark Clements, the artistic director in Milwaukee. “We’re not trying to be didactic and lecture people.”

For a struggling industry, these two theaters — and a handful of others — are models of success: They are producing a healthy menu of shows, drawing large audiences, running budget surpluses and raising money for capital projects. But they are definitely in the minority.

American theaters, after some initial signs of recovery postpandemic, have more recently taken a second dip, according to Jen Benoit-Bryan, the executive director of SMU DataArts, a national arts and culture research center at Southern Methodist University [Meadows School of the Arts, University Park, Texas].

The numbers are grim — from 2023 to 2024, theater attendance fell 19 percent and income fell 37 percent, according to SMU DataArts. “Everybody is hurting, but theaters are hurting at a different scale than other arts organizations,” she said.

Figuring out what thriving theaters have in common is complicated. They vary in location, size and degree of influence, and include companies like Pasadena Playhouse in California and the Guthrie Theater in [Minneapolis,] Minnesota.

A number of them (but not all) seem to share a few distinctive attributes: communities with less-competitive cultural landscapes, where the theaters have high visibility and civic standing; programming philosophies that prioritize what audiences might want to see over what artists believe audiences would benefit from seeing; and the lingering benefits of having minimized the duration of their Covid shutdowns, which helped audiences maintain the theatergoing habit.

At the start of the pandemic, Gulfshore laid off three-quarters of its staff, opting to safeguard its resources for reopening. “While we were doing that, other theaters were spending a truckload of money keeping people employed for a year who were doing nothing but sewing masks,” Coury said.

Milwaukee Rep, on the other hand, retained 95 percent of its staff, believing it would allow them to restart more quickly. The theater was worried about a talent drain, which many of its peer institutions experienced during the pandemic; it also arrived at the pandemic with sizable cash reserves, giving it options.

“We took a very different path than the rest of the field,” said Chad Bauman, the theater’s executive director. “We were doing performances when almost nobody else in the entire country was doing them.”

Milwaukee Rep, founded in 1954, is one of the nation’s oldest professional regional theaters. Gulfshore Playhouse, founded in 2004, is one of the newest — it was just admitted to the League of Resident Theaters [LORT], a national association of 81 leading regional theaters, in 2022. Both theaters have big dreams — they hope to attract pre-Broadway productions, which bring revenue and attention to regional theaters, but are hard to book, because expectations of audience, staff and facilities are high.

The two communities are quite different. Milwaukee is a sizable, historically blue-collar, overwhelmingly Democratic city, while Naples is small, packed with affluent retirees, and heavily Republican.

A commonality: The two areas have a lot of captains of industry. “We have the highest per capita amount of former C.E.O.s,” Coury said of Naples. She added that 90 percent of her fund-raising is from individuals, rather than corporations or foundations, and the biggest donors are Jay and Patty Baker, who gave $20 million. (He is the former president of Kohl’s.)

Milwaukee still has a robust corporate community, and the Rep has done better than many of its peers at attracting corporate contributions — the biggest donor to its renovation project is the largest Wisconsin-based bank, Associated Bank, which gave $10 million, and for which the theater center is now named. (By coincidence, the Bakers previously lived in Milwaukee and supported Milwaukee Rep.)

Both theaters’ capital projects faced significant damage from big storms. In Naples, Hurricane Ian knocked down several walls of the new Gulfshore Playhouse while it was under construction in 2022; in Milwaukee, intense flooding in August caused $7 million in damage to a production facility where the theater had been storing sets and costumes (including for its mainstay production of “A Christmas Carol”) while building its new home.

Gulfshore, which produces seven shows a season, has been growing fast; since the pandemic its annual budget has risen to $14.5 million from $3.6 million, and it now has 83 full-time employees. Its new main stage theater is nearly twice the size of the one in its former home — 368 seats now, compared to 200.

The theater opened its first season in its new home with “Anything Goes” and closed with “Sweet Charity.” It’s debatable if “Sweet Charity” is actually upbeat, because it ends unhappily for the protagonist, but both shows are indisputably classics, with songs that have become standards and big dance numbers. In between, Coury programmed two crowd-pleasing plays, the suspense drama “Dial M for Murder” and the farce “Noises Off.”

At the same time, in the new building’s 125-seat black box theater, Gulfshore staged three plays with sobering themes but a track record of success: “Every Brilliant Thing,” which deals with depression and suicide (and will have a Broadway production this season); “The Lehman Trilogy,” about the rise and fall of a financial empire; and “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” about Billie Holiday as she is grappling with addiction.

“My first question is always, ‘Is it good?”’ Coury said. “Not, ‘Do you feel like it will teach a good lesson?’ and not ‘Which agenda is attached to it?’ Just ‘Is it a good play?”’

Milwaukee Rep, with a $17 million annual budget and 125 employees, is a larger and more established company. It is producing 12 shows this season, including “The Lehman Trilogy” and “The Piano Lesson” [1987] (a Pulitzer Prize winner [1990] by August Wilson [1945-2005]) as well as two Agatha Christie-related shows, and expects to do 13 next year. It also does lots of new work, and, unlike many of its peers, has a 14,000-person subscriber base that has remained remarkably loyal.

[Milwaukee Rep has scheduled an Agatha Christie Festival for the 2025-26 season. It will consist of Mrs. Christie (2019; 14 April-10 May 2026), a play by Heidi Armbruster [b. 1976] that explores the real-life 11-day disappearance of Christie (1890-1976) in 1926 through the eyes of a modern-day superfan; and And Then There Were None (1943; 26 May-28 June 2026), a production of Christie’s own stage adaptation of her best-selling 1939 mystery novel. (Both the book and various adaptations are sometimes presented under the title Ten Little Indians.)]

“Obviously, theaters are struggling, and Milwaukee has bucked that trend,” said Ayad Akhtar [b. 1970], a [2013] Pulitzer-winning playwright (for “Disgraced” [2012]) who grew up in a Milwaukee suburb and serves on the Rep’s board. “There’s multigenerational industrial family support, and programming an artistic experience that is worthy of being thought about and at the same time can sell a lot of tickets.”

Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a play about artificial intelligence that debuted on Broadway last season, will reopen the Rep’s black box theater, with up to 220 seats, early next year.

The redone theater complex features some distinctive amenities — the main stage, with up to 670 seats, has different tiers, and the nicest seats (proving quite popular) are leather, with cup-holders and premium pricing. And the theater’s leadership can wine and dine donors in a backstage V.I.P. suite, with a window overlooking preshow warm-ups.

The theater’s leadership is proud of its status as an outlier, noting that not only is it defying downward trends on attendance and giving, but that it is also thriving in a state that has among the lowest levels of public arts funding in the nation.

The theater puts its three goals — to entertain, provoke and inspire — on banners.

“Where some have gotten into trouble is that they’ve over-rotated in one of these directions,” said Bauman, the executive director. “The secret sauce to programming is that if you’re an audience member, we have a really great, diverse mix of programming, and we never over-rotate in any one of those sides.”

[I found the practices of both the theaters about which Michael Paulson reports troubling, however successful they’ve been financially.  The "mantra" Paulson cites for Gulfshore, "up and known," sounds like the preference at an Off-Off-Broadway company where I interned as literary advisor for a graduate class in dramaturgy, the StageArts Theater Company. 

[I described that company in some posts on ROT, and their own criteria for plays they liked was "beautifully crafted plays that speak to the best in us."  They also said, "We believe that the qualities most absent on plays of the last few decades are a positive view of human beings and a respect for dramatic structure."  I said that this meant the "well-made play," with the added criterion of what I called "a happy ending" (I was being moderately sarcastic).

[The main difference with these companies is that StageArts produced new plays (because they thought that would attract reviewers, producers, and donors).  When I convinced the artistic directors to consider older plays and revivals, though I tried to steer them to less-well known scripts, they still applied their standard criteria—the well-made play with "positive" conclusions.

[What the two troupes in the Times article are producing are largely audience-pleasers with little depth.  When they say they're catering to their audiences by producing plays they'll like—what they're doing is pandering, mostly to the lowest common denominator of their potential audience.  Most of the plays mentioned in the piece strike me as theatrical pabulum.  (It doesn't surprise me that Milwaukee Rep is a little more dramatically interesting than Gulfshore.  Milwaukee is a legit theater town; I saw some interesting pieces when I was there.  Naples strikes me as a middle-brow retirement community.)

[No dramaturg or literary manager is mentioned in the article, much less interviewed.  I'm sure Milwaukee Rep has one on staff, though Gulfshore may not.  One of the dramaturg's second-tier responsibilities is to try to expand the taste of the theater's community a little each season.  At the two houses profiled, no one seems interested in trying that.  That's just sad.]

[The information on the plays Paulson names in his report is compiled here for readers who want to know a bit about them.  Milwaukee Rep presented Come from Away, which had its professional première in 2015 at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California, as a co-production with the Seattle Repertory Theatre.  It’s based on the true account of the town of Gander on the island of Newfoundland in Canada during the week following the 11 September 2001 attacks, when 38 planes, with nearly 6,700 passengers, were diverted unexpectedly to Gander International Airport in the town of about 11,000 because the airspace over the U.S. was closed.  The characters in the musical are based on actual Gander residents and the stranded travelers they housed and fed.

[The show was conceived by Michael Rubinoff, a Toronto lawyer, theater producer, and associate dean of visual and performing arts at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario.  He turned to Canadian husband-and-wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein.  The play’s title, Come from Away, is a traditional Newfoundland term for anyone—tourists, migrants from other parts of Canada, business travelers—who was not born on the island.

[The play transferred to Broadway, opening at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on 12 March 2017 and running until 2 October 2022, after playing 25 previews and 1,669 regular performances.  It was nominated for seven Tonys in 2017, winning for Best Direction of a Musical for Christopher Ashley, as well as Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Book of a Musical, and Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for Jenn Colella.

[Irving Berlin’s White Christmas was staged at the Gulfshore Playhouse from 14 November to 21 December 2025.  It’s a musical based on the Paramount Pictures 1954 film White Christmas with a book by David Ives and Paul Blake, and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.  The musical premièred in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2000 and then toured the U.S. in 2004 and the United Kingdom in 2007. 

[The stage musical played a limited engagement on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre from 23 November 2008 through 4 January 2009, for 53 performances and 12 previews.  It returned for another limited run from 22 November 2009 to 3 January 2010.  It was nominated for two Tonys in 2009 and six Drama Desk Awards, but won none; the return engagement wasn’t nominated.  Irving Berlin’s White Christmas played in London’s West End in 2014 and 2019, in Australia in 2009, elsewhere in England in December 2023 and January 2024, and toured the U.S. several times between 2007 and 2019.

[The Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s 50th-anniversary production of A Christmas Carol will run from 25 November to 24 December 2025.  It’s an adaptation by the Rep’s own artistic director, Mark Clements, who also directed the production.  The music for Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s current adaptation of A Christmas Carol was written and arranged by John Tanner, a Milwaukee Rep Associate Artist.

[Anything Goes (1934) at the Gulfshore Playhouse ran from 1 to 24 November 2025.  The classic musical has music and lyrics by Cole Porter and a new book, based on the adapted from the 1987 Broadway revival, by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman.  (The original book was by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, revised by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.)

[The Broadway début was at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on 21 November 1934, with Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney.  It ran for 420 performances, becoming the fourth longest-running musical of the 1930s when it closed on 16 November 1935.  It became a popular standard, including three Broadway revivals and at least one Off-Broadway staging, mostly for its Cole Porter score.]

[Sweet Charity (1965), based on 1957 Italian film Nights of Cabiria (Le Notti Di Cabiria) by Federico Fellini, will close out the Gulfshore 2025-26 season from 10 April to 4 May 2026.  Directed and choreographed for Broadway by Bob Fosse, who conceived the stage version, starring his wife and muse, Gwen Verdon, as a dancer-for-hire at a Times Square dance hall.  (Her name was Charity Hope Valentine!)

[The musical had music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and a book by Neil Simon.  After a tryout at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia starting on 6 December 1965, the priduction moved to Detroit for a month, and then premièred on Broadway at the Palace Theatre on 29 January 1966, and closed on 15 July 1967, for 608 performances and 10 previews.  The production was nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning for Fosse’s choreography.

[The play was revived on Broadway in 1986 and 2005, and Off-Broadway in 2016, picking up more awards each time.  Its West End première was in October 1967, starring Juliet Prowse and running for 476 performances.  It returned to London in 2009 and 2016, and played in Australia in 1967 and 2014, and toured the country in 2015.

[Dial M for Murder will be mounted by Gulfshore on 16 January-6 February 2026 in a double adaptation: first Alfred Hitchcock for his 1954 screenplay from Frederick Knott original 1952 play; then from Hitch to Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2022 version for the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California.  Hatcher made some changes, not the least of which is to switch out the unfaithful wife’s male lover (that would be Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings in the flick) for a woman—a change Gulfshore maintains.

[The Hatcher adaptation of the movie has never played Broadway, but Knott’s original play, called Dial “M” for Murder, was at the Plymouth and then Booth Theatre from 29 October 1952 to 27 February 1954.

[Gulfshore will present Michael Fayn’s 1982 farce, Noises Off, on 27 February-20 March 2026.  Derived from a one-act play called Exits Frayn wrote, which was performed in 1977, the backstage comedy was inspired when the playwright was in the wings in 1970, watching a performance of The Two of Us, a farce that he had written.  He decided the play was funnier from backstage than it was from out front and he was moved to write a play “from behind.”

[That play became Noises Off, which premièred in London in 1982.  It transferred to the Savoy Theatre in the West End, where it ran until 1987.  On 11 December 1983, a production opened on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre (now the Lena Horne), where it ran for 553 performances (11 December 1983-6 April 1985).  It was nominated for four 1984 Tony Awards including Best Play, but won none; and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards, winning for Director of a Play for Michael Blakemore and Outstanding Ensemble.

[Noises Off has become a staple of both professional theatre companies and community theatres on both sides of the Atlantic.  Since Frayn has rewritten the play many times over the years—the last revision was in 2000—there are many differences between the 1982 and 2000 scripts.  I couldn’t verify which version of the text Gulfshore is using, though I imagine it would be the latest revision, or some combination, perhaps, making sure that the latest updated references have been incorporated.

[Duncan MacMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing is a 2013 solo, immersive play written with Jonny Donahoe.  It’s a life-affirming exploration of mental health, depression, and resilience told through the lens of a narrator’s lifelong list of everything that makes life worth living.  Gulfshore staged it from 14 November to 15 December 2025.

[After selling out at three consecutive Edinburgh Festivals, Every Brilliant Thing is touring worldwide.  It ran at New York City’s Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village from 14 December 2014 to 29 March 2015.  The West End production of Every Brilliant Thing, featuring Daniel Radcliffe, is scheduled to open at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre in March 2026 for a two-month run.

[Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy (2013), adapted by Ben Power, will be produced at Gulfshore from 30 January to 2 March 2026.  The three-act play was originally written in Italian, but premièred in Saint-Étienne, France, in a French translation.  It’s been translated into two dozen languages and is one of the most produced plays in America.

[The play tells the story of the Jewish immigrant from Bavaria who arrives in America and founds the firm that becomes the Lehman Brothers. It eventually collapses in 2008 and brings the global economy down.  Three actors play the Lehman brothers and their descendants.  The Lehman Trilogy was produced in the U.K. at the National Theatre in 2018 under the direction of Sam Mendes.  That production transferred to the United States at the Park Avenue Armory, in New York City, from 22 March 2019 to 20 April 2019. 

[The production’s scheduled return to the U.S. was delayed by COVID, but the play did open on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre on 14 October 2021 and ran until 2 January 2022, for 82 performances and 21 previews.  It won 2022 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play (Simon Russell Beale), Best Direction of a Play (Sam Mendes), Best Scenic Design of a Play (Es Devlin), and Best Lighting Design of a Play (Jon Clark).

[The Lehman Trilogy has been criticized for playing down the role of the Lehman family in slavery and for the crude, caricatured way in which it portrays their Jewishness.

[Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a 1986 play with music by Lanie Robertson about Billie Holiday, premièred in Atlanta, Georgia, directed by Woodie King, Jr., and was then produced Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 1986.  When the production closed in 1987, it had run 281 performances and won the 1987 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Book (Robertson).

[The play was staged in theaters around the country, then opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Uptown) on 13 April 2014 and closed on 5 October.  It won the 2014 Tony Awards for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Audra McDonald) and Best Sound Design of a Play (Steve Canyon Kennedy); McDonald also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play.

[Gulfshore will produce Lady Day from 20 March through 27 April 2026, which already includes an extension.

[Milwaukee Rep will mount their production of The Lehman Trilogy from 13 January to 8 February 2026.  The cast includes the Washington, D.C.-based actor Edward Gero.

[1987’s The Piano Lesson by August Wilson is the fourth in his Pittsburgh Cycle, set in 1936.  (It was the fifth to be composed.)  It received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and will run at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater from 24 February to 22 March 2026.

[The first production of The Piano Lesson opened on 26 November 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and closed on 19 December.  The show played at several important regional theaters, then, on 16 April 1990, it opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where it ran until 27 January 1991, a total of 8 previews and 328 regular performances.  It was nominated for five Tonys in 1990, including Best Play, but won none; it received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play.

[The Piano Lesson was revived on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre from 13 October 2022 to 29 January 2023.  The production was nominated for the 2023 Best Revival of a Play Tony but didn’t win; it did win, however, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.  An acclaimed Off-Broadway revival opened at the Theatre Row home of the Signature Theatre on 18 November 2012 and, after many extensions, closed on 20 January 2013.  It received four 2013 Lucille Lortel Awards, including the Outstanding Revival Award, plus two Obies and the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play Revival.

[Ayad Akhtar’s 2012 one-act play Disgraced was his first stage play.  It premièred at the American Theater Company, Chicago, in 2012, and then was produced at Lincoln Center in New York City at the Claire Tow Theater in the fall of 2012, where it was extended several times.  It went to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, opening on 23 October 2014, receiving a nomination for the Best Play Tony for 2013 and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  Disgraced ran for 27 previews and 149 regular performances, closing on 1 March 2015.

[Akhtar’s McNeal ran from 30 September to 24 November 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, its Broadway house.  It will play the Milwaukee Rep from 10 February to 22 March 2026.  The play follows Jacob McNeal, a brilliant novelist obsessed with his own legacy and fascinated by artificial intelligence.  Set in the "not-too-distant future," the production explores the price of greatness and raises questions about art, truth, and originality. The Milwaukee Rep production features high-tech elements, including projections and special effects.]

The Tale of the Greatest Upset in Motorsports History

 

[Not long ago, I picked up a copy of the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday New York Times of 30 November 2025 which I’d laid aside to read later.  In “Metropolitan Diary,” a weekly column in the Times that features short, reader-submitted stories about life in New York City, I was intrigued by the very first offering:

Snappy Driver

dear diary:

As an ad man in the 1960s, I used to regularly go to a restaurant called Le Chanteclair on East 49th Street between Fifth and Madison.

The place was adorned with car racing trophies and memorabilia, and the man who ran the front of the house was from France and always elegantly dressed.

Not long ago, I picked up a book at the library called “Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best.”

Turns out the elegant Frenchman at Le Chanteclair was René Dreyfus, the driver who beat Hitler’s best.

neil fox

[What attracted me was the reference to the Jewish race car driver who beat Hitler.  I had to look that up and find out more about René Dreyfus and what race or races he won against Nazi drivers.  (The online version is entitled “Metropolitan Diary: ‘It Was the Start of a Frosty Relationship.’”)  Here’s what I learned:]

In the book Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best by Neal Bascomb (Mariner Books, 2020), the author recounts how French driver René Dreyfus and American heiress Lucy Schell's team (Écurie Bleue), driving a French-made Delahaye 145, beat the Nazi-backed German Silver Arrows (Silberpfeile) teams, whose drivers included the legendary Rudolf Caracciola, driving Mercedes-Benzes, in the 1938 Pau Grand Prix in a town of 78,600 in southern France, 31 miles (50 kilometers) from Spain.

(Écurie literally means ‘stable,’ referring to horses, and it can also refer to a ‘team’ of horses.  In motorsport, however, it can mean ‘team’; Écurie Bleue would be Team Blue.  In other instances of a sports or work team, the correct French word would be équipe.)

This victory was a significant morale boost for the French and a symbolic blow to the Nazis’ claims of Aryan supremacy, reportedly leading Hitler’s regime to attempt to erase all records of the race after their invasion of France in 1940.

René Albert Dreyfus (1905-93), according to Rodney Walkerley, a British reporter who covered motor sports, had “The Look—a stare of searing intensity and undying affection that lets you know, without a doubt, Dreyfus was put on Earth to drive cars fast” (exact source unknown).  Nick Donofrio, the New York Times researcher for Special Projects who reviewed Bascomb’s book, called him “a Max Baer of the asphalt, Jesse Owens on wheels” (“The Need for Speed,” New York Times Book Review 31 May 2020).  

(Walkerley (1905-82) wrote for Motor Sport from 1927 and The Light Car from 1930.  He also wrote several books, including Grand Prix 1934-1939 [1950] and Moments That Made Racing History [1959].)

A nearly fatal accident, and the loss of several friends on the circuit, destroyed Dreyfus’s confidence.  The crash, often cited as nearly ending his career, occurred on 14 April during the 1932 Grand Prix of Comminges in a privately-owned Bugatti.  Dreyfus hit a patch of road where another driver had just crashed in a downpour.  His car skidded, hit a tree, became airborne, and flipped, throwing him onto the road.  He was hospitalized with a severely injured shoulder and various cuts, but recovered to eventually join the Bugatti factory team.

Then, with the rise of fascism in Europe—Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce of the Fascist Party, was appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922; António Salazar (1889-1970) became prime minister of Portugal, a quasi-fascist dictatorship, in 1932; Hitler (1889-1945), Führer of the Nazi Party, was elected chancellor [prime minister] of Germany in 1933; Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Caudillo of the Falangist Party, became prime minister of Spain in 1936—he was banned from competing with the best teams and the fastest cars—Maserati, Alfa Romeo, and Mercedes—because he was Jewish.  An unlikely partnership with an American race enthusiast and a floundering French auto manufacturer would see his faith in himself return. To beat the Hitler-supported Silver Arrows, however, Dreyfus would have to find reason, and purpose, to risk everything.  It’s a story of faith and redemption, set on the perilous stage of motorsport with a backdrop of Nazi arrogance.

Born in Paris, the only child of an American industrialist, Lucy O’Reilly Schell (1896-1952) could have spent her life in the luxury which the wealth of her family made possible.  Instead, she volunteered to be a nurse during World War I, and when peace broke, she turned to racing cars.  A skilled driver, she broke with convention to become a top Monte Carlo Rally driver.  

Hitler’s Silver Arrows (so-named for their burnished-aluminum bodies) on the rise, she sought a new challenge, namely toppling the Nazis from their perch atop motor racing.  She started her own Grand Prix team—the first, and only, woman to do so—then financed with her inherited millions the construction of a formula car from scratch.  She chose a down-on-its-luck French firm named Delahaye to build her car and selected René Dreyfus to be her champion.

After ascending to power, Adolf Hitler declared that Germany would soon reign supreme in Grand Prix motor racing.  Success there would prove the might and prowess of the Third Reich—and help spur the “cavalry of the future” (Kavallerie der Zukunft).  This Third Reich propaganda phrase was a reference to the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, or NSKK). 

The NSKK was a paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party, conceived to train a host of men in driving and motoring skills, establishing the foundation of a mechanized army.  The organization was very effective in providing manpower for the Wehrmacht’s motorized infantry divisions.  

Hitler envisioned the NSKK units, mounted on motorcycles and in motor vehicles, as a highly mobile, spearhead force, ideal for reconnaissance and fast deployment, fulfilling the traditional light cavalry missions of scouting and quickly positioning troops, but with the speed and technology of motorization rather than horses.  Tanks and other armored vehicles were already fulfilling the traditional heavy cavalry role of shock troops.

Toward this end, the German war machine spurred—and subsidized—the German automotive industry to develop and manufacture the highest quality vehicles possible, and domination of motorsport was the first test of that capacity.  Also integral in Hitler’s plan for a “motorized Germany” was building a nationwide highway system (the Autobahns) and putting every German family in its own automobile (the Volkswagen, or “People’s Car”).

To accomplish this scheme, the Führer funneled millions to Daimler-Benz and Auto Union, the two lead auto manufacturers, who then recruited their country’s best drivers to the task of victory.  Foremost among them was Remagen-born Otto Wilhelm Rudolf Caracciola (1901-59).  

Although an unflappable race driver, Caracciola had a killer instinct that had made him the top racer in the world.  Matched with the Silver Arrow race cars built by Mercedes, he was all but unstoppable year after year, winning three European championships between 1935 and 1938.  He became the standard-bearer of Nazi dominance of the Grand Prix, raising his arm in a Nazi salute after each win and featuring in Reich propaganda that labeled its drivers, “swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, strong as Krupp steel.”  He was the perfect rival for René Dreyfus.

They were the unlikeliest of heroes. René Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teams—and fastest cars—by the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage.  Charles Weiffenbach (1870-1959), head of the down-on-its-luck automaker Delahaye (1894-1954), was desperately trying to save his company as the world teetered toward the brink.  And Lucy Schell, the adventurous daughter of an American multi-millionaire, whose fortune came from the construction business and subsequent industrial investments, yearned to reclaim the glory of her rally-driving days.  ($1 million in 1938 would be worth $23 million today.

As Nazi Germany, with its obsession with fast cars and Hitler’s plans to motorize Germany’s civilian population as well as its Wehrmacht, launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, these three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix.  Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day—but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, Faster chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during one of history’s darkest hours.  In the opening race of the 1938 season on 10 April—the Anschluß, the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, had been just 25 days earlier, on 12 March—Dreyfus drove the Delahaye to a shocking upset of Caracciola and Mercedes in the Pau Grand Prix. 

The race (as recorded on The Golden Era of Grand Prix Racing):

[Rudi] Caracciola took the lead of the race followed by [René] Dreyfus, [Maurice] Trintignant [French; 1917-2005], [Dioscoride] Lanza [Italian; 1898-1977], [Gianfranco] Comotti [Italian; 1906-63], “Raph” [Georges Raphaël Béthenod de Montbressieux (Argentinian-born French; 1910-94)] and Matra [Yves “Yves-Marie” Martin (French; 1911-84)].  On the twisty Pau street track Dreyfus was able to keep pace with the leader and actually pass.  Caracciola re-passed but by now the Mercedes team must have known what would happen.  The fuel consumption of the Delahaye was about half of that of the supercharged Mercedes cars and the track had become slippery from oil and rubber making it impossible for Caracciola to use the power advantage of the Mercedes-Benz.  With half of the race gone Caracciola came into the pits for fuel.  The braking and gear changing on the Pau track had got Caracciola's old leg injury to make itself known and he gave over the car to [Hermann] Lang [German; 1909-87].  Dreyfus took over the lead never to be challenged again as he was running on a nonstop strategy.  Lang’s car developed plug trouble but it is unlikely that the Mercedes team would have won that day even with a healthy car.  The team had to admit that they had been beaten squarely and fairly.  So Dreyfus went on to a sensational victory, taking the flag almost 2 minutes in front of Lang.  Comotti was third in the other Delahaye followed by “Raph”’s Maserati.

(Caracciola had suffered a life-altering leg injury during a practice run for the 1933 Monaco Grand Prix.  Driving an Alfa Romeo for his own privately owned team and car [i.e., not an official, factory-backed team], a brake failure caused him to crash violently into a stone wall at a turn.  The crash resulted in multiple fractures to his right thigh and hip, and he spent six months in a plaster cast from the waist down and was confined to a wheelchair.  His doctors initially told him he’d never race again. 

(Despite the disability, Caracciola returned to win three European Championships [1935, 1937, 1938].  However, the old injury continued to plague him.  His right leg healed roughly two inches (five centimeters) shorter than his left, leaving him with a lifelong limp.  At Pau, the physical toll on his weakened leg of braking and changing gears forced him to hand over his car to a teammate.)

That year, Dreyfus was named the Race Champion of France.

Dreyfus had won the Grand Prix of Monaco in 1930; from 1925 to 1950, he’d become an international race driver of such excellence that he was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of the French Republic: 1959-69) in the early 1960’s. 

In 1940, Dreyfus came to the United States on special leave from the French Army, which he’d joined as a truck driver when the war started, to drive for France in the Indianapolis 500.  He placed 10th in the race.  He didn’t return to France after the race, but joined the U.S. Army in 1942, after Germany invaded France two years earlier, serving as an interrogator in the Italian campaign.  He later brought his family to the United States and became a citizen in 1945, after World War II.

He founded Le Chanteclair at 18 East 49th Street off Madison Avenue (Manhattan’s Midtown East) in 1952 and for 25 years was one of the more popular dining locales for international auto racers.  The restaurant had the ambience of urban sophistication combined with the warmth of a French country inn.  

Dreyfus and his brother Maurice (1904-94), who ran the front of the house, were known for greeting patrons warmly and remembering their names, making everyone feel like an old friend.  The restaurant served classic and haute French cuisine and was well-regarded for its traditional French repertoire and extensive wine cellar. 

Le Chanteclair closed in the mid-1970s.  René Dreyfus, who was born in Nice, died at 88 of an aortic aneurysm at New York Hospital in Manhattan.  In 1983, he published a memoir, My Two Lives: Race Driver to Restaurateur by René Dreyfus and Beverly R. Kimes (Aztex Corp).

More on Censorship of School Theater

[In “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023), I wrote:

The First Amendment to our Constitution—Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . .—is supposed to protect artistic expression.  It’s significant, though, that the First Amendment constrains only government action—federal, state, and local—not private conduct.  State-supported (that is, ‘public’) schools, whether primary and secondary schools or state colleges and universities, are arms of the government, however. . . .

As I declared on Rick On Theater back in 2010 in ”The First Amendment & The Arts,” I’m fundamentally a First Amendment absolutist.  In that post, I quoted one of my favorite theater lines, from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s Tony-winning (Best Musical) 1969 Broadway musical, 1776.  

The character Stephen Hopkins (1707-85), delegate from Rhode Island to the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence, declares, when asked for his vote for or against an open debate on independence:

Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.  Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . .!

That’s exactly how I feel about free speech.  In this democracy, we shouldn’t be constrained from talking about anything.  That includes ideas other people don’t like.  

The only proper response to speech we don’t like is more speech.  Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941; Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: 1916-39) wrote that in 1927 (Whitney v. California).  You don’t cut people off when you don’t like what they’re saying; you debate them.  (It’s known as “The Counterspeech Doctrine.”)

[These words couldn’t be more appropriate to preface the post below, two-and-a-half years later.  In the time since I first blogged on this topic, I reiterated my support for freedom of speech and artistic expression in posts including:

   •   “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009)•
•   “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010)
•   “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010)
•   “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy [Allegro] (22 May 2011)
•   “Culture War” (6 February 2014)
•   “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)
•   “‘How to Free Speech’” by Lee C. Bollinger (23 November 2015)
•   “Fighting for Free Expression” (5 February 2016)
•   “‘Arts and the State’” [1990] by Paul Mattick, Jr. (14 November 2021)
•   “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023)
•   “‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship’” by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith (21 April 2024)
•   “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024)
•   “‘The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization’” by Dr. Indira Etwaroo (4 May 2025)
•   “Degrading the Arts (Redux)” (14 May 2025)
•   “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025).   

[In The Life of the Theatre, Judith Malina (1926-2015) of the Living Theatre asserted that her husband and partner Julian Beck defined an artist as “a maker of maps” who “will draw up the map for the liberation of dreams: the transformation of ideas into working acts.”

[“The work of the artist,” Beck (1925-85) wrote, is “as the creative of solutions thru [sic] the exercise of the imagination.”  He further declared, “An actor who brings back from his adventures a moment of communicable penetration is a hero, the light of our lives.”

[Artists see the future long before any scientist or engineer can invent it.  Da Vinci saw flying machines half a millennium before the bothers Wright made history at Kitty Hawk; Cyrano de Bergerac envisioned men on the moon three centuries before any Apollo spacecraft was launched; Jules Verne put Captain Nemo in a submarine decades before a real one was built.  As Shakespeare’s Duke Theseus of Athens put it:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i)

[“Things unknown” are often also “things uncomprehended.” “Things uncomprehended” are often “things unwelcome.” It is the artist who is usually at the forefront of efforts to acquaint us with and explain these “things,” often whether we want to hear about them or not.  Silencing artists is an act of willful blindness.  We do it at our own peril.]

“[REDACTED] ROUNDTABLE”
by Robert Schenkkan 

[Playwright Robert Schenkkan’s transcript of this roundtable appeared in The Dramatist Vol. 27 No. 4 (Autumn 2025): “Courage.”  The Dramatist is the quarterly journal of the Dramatists Guild of America.  The discussion transcribed below was posted on the website of the Dramatists Guild on 1 September 2025.]

This roundtable discussion with Jereme Anglin, Brent Lindsay, Dean Jahnsen, and Leila Paine was moderated by Robert Schenkkan.

The DLDF [Dramatists Legal Defense Fund] Defender Award, presented annually at the Dramatists Guild Awards [6 May 2024, presented at Sony Hall in New York City (West 46th Street, near Times Square)], is given in recognition of an individual, group, or organization’s efforts in support of free expression in the dramatic arts. For its 2024 award, the DLDF board named the students at Santa Rosa High School’s ArtQuest Theatre, who led a fight against the school’s attempt to shut down their production of Dog Sees God and then helped create a new theatrical work, [REDACTED], to comment on their experience; their drama teacher, Jereme Anglin; Brent Lindsay, artistic director of The Imaginists, who helped the students create [REDACTED]; and the Mercury Theater of Petaluma [22 miles south of Santa Rosa], for providing a new home for Dog Sees God after performances were suspended at the high school. On July 20, DLDF board member and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Robert Schenkkan met with students Leila Paine and Dean Jahnsen, as well as Jereme and Brent, to discuss their experience.

[Santa Rosa High is in Santa Rosa, California. With a population as of the 2020 census of a little under 180,000, Santa Rosa’s the seat of Sonoma County, in the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. SRHS, founded in 1874, has a student body of just over 1,600.

[The ArtQuest program at SRHS was launched in 1994 to “provide an above and beyond experience for students who wish to concentrate on the [visual and performing] arts during their high school years and for whom creativity and artistic expression is of paramount importance.” It provides students with the skills to pursue conservatory, college, and professional paths.

[The Imaginists, a theater collective that has been part of Santa Rosa’s culture scene since 2002, is, according to its website, “an artist-run performing arts organization that explores the intersection of art and community, honoring the power of live performance as a vital space for questioning, dialogue, and invention. From original new works to community-based projects, education initiatives, site-specific works, and international collaborations, the Imaginists up-end convention, re-imagine public space, and cultivate radical inclusion as they continually re-think theater: who participates, where it happens, and what it is.”

[Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead is a 2004 written by Bert V. Royal. It’s an “unauthorized continuation” play that reimagines characters from the Charles M. Schulz comic strip Peanuts as degenerate teenagers. (It’s unauthorized and unapproved by the Schulz estate or United Features Syndicate.) Substance abuse, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion, sexual relations and identity are among the issues covered in this parody.

[Dog Sees God was first presented in a reading on 3 May 2004 at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It had its world premiere at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival (13-29 August 2024). It was presented Off-Off-Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse (in the Hudson Square section on western SoHo) from 13 August to 19 September 2004, produced by Sorrel Tomilinson/File 14 Productions.

[The play received its Off-Broadway premiere at the Century Center for the Performing Arts, running from 15 December 2005-20 February 2006. The production was directed by Trip Cullman; the set design was by David Korins; the costume design was by Jenny Mannis; the lighting design was by Brian MacDevitt; the sound design was by Darron L. West.

[Later productions were mounted in Los Angeles (2008 and 2024 for the play’s 20th anniversary); Manchester, U.K. (2009); and Toronto, Canada (2009), among other places.]

Jereme Anglin: My name is Jereme Anglin. I’m the theatre teacher at ArtQuest at Santa Rosa High School. Dean and Leila are my students, and Brent is a guest artist that we bring in every year to work with our students.

Brent Lindsay: I’m Brent Lindsay, and I work with the local theatre company here called The Imaginists. Every year, I go to ArtQuest, and we devise an original work together. 

Leila Paine: I’m Leila Paine. I just graduated from ArtQuest, and I was the vice president last year. 

Dean Jahnsen: I’m Dean Jahnsen. I just graduated from ArtQuest Theatre, and I was the president last year.

Robert Schenkkan: I’m Robert Schenkkan, Council member of the Dramatists Guild Council and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund. I’d like you to set the stage for this story. November 2024. ArtQuest theatre program at Santa Rosa High School is performing a play and there is some controversy.

Dean Jahnsen: Yes. The play is called Dog Sees God [by Bert V. Royal]. It’s a spinoff to the Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, and it’s basically about them growing up and going through life as teenagers. The play was written in 2004, so it had a lot of pop culture moments from then, and it has a lot of drug use in it, and it uses certain slurs that are not accepted today.

Leila Paine: There are a lot of difficult topics that happen during high school. A lot of stuff with mental health, including suicide, drug use, alcohol abuse, things like that, and just overall bullying.

Robert Schenkkan: Leila, Dean, how was it you came to be doing this play?

Dean Jahnsen: At the beginning of last school year, Mr. Anglin brought four plays for us to choose from, and we gravitated toward two plays. Both of them had very real topics—the other one talked about sexual assault. Our entire class decided on Dog Sees God together. 

Leila Paine: We read the scripts for all four plays, and I think it was a week that we took discussing which one we wanted to do.

Robert Schenkkan: Sounds like the students are super involved at this theatre program.

Jereme Anglin: When the students began as freshmen, the content that they’re given is really selected by the teachers. Same thing as their sophomore year. They’re required to do some Shakespeare, some comedy of manners, and different topics that the teachers choose. But in their advanced years, I like to treat them like they’re a burgeoning theatre company. Students then take on leadership roles and have a say in what content they want to do. When they’re producing their shows, they oversee the budget and all that, so they really learn how to work as a theatre company.

Robert Schenkkan: Fantastic. Would you say there was anything unusual about the selection of this particular play for ArtsQuest?

Leila Paine: I feel like it was the usual. Honestly, it was more entertaining than other shows that we’ve done there.

Dean Jahnsen: Yeah. It just felt like another play.

Leila Paine: In level three, it’s a lot more college level material, but it’s also stuff that we enjoy and find important. That was why we chose Dog Sees God over the other shows, because we really connected with the topics that were in it, and we thought it was important to do, especially in a high school.

Dean Jahnsen: It really felt relevant to the times, and it was true to the high school experience.

Jereme Anglin: We’ve done The Laramie Project [(2000 verbatim play – blog ed.) by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project] in that class. The Wolves [(2016 play – blog ed.) by Sarah DeLappe], She Kills Monsters [(2011 comedy-drama – blog ed.) by Qui Nguyen] . . . so Dog Sees God didn’t stand out to anyone as particularly provocative. [A different instance of the suppression of Nguyen’s play is recounted in “Censorship on School Stages,” referenced above.]

Robert Schenkkan: Which brings us to this rather extraordinary moment where suddenly the play is canceled. Were you informed whose decision this was, and what were the reasons given for the cancellation?

Jereme Anglin: We did our first performance on Thursday night [14 November 2024], and then Friday, before I had a chance to meet with the students again, I was pulled into the principal’s office, and there was someone from the superintendent’s office there who said that there had been one anonymous complaint from someone who was in the audience the night before, and that we were gonna need to cancel the play. 

Robert Schenkkan: Had this ever happened before in the history of your program?

Jereme Anglin: Not in recent times. I heard that in the ’80s they were performing Cabaret, and Cabaret was forced to close because of antisemitism, but it’s really unusual, I think. 

[Cabaret, the 1966 musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Joe Masteroff, was set in 1929-30, on the eve of the declaration of the Third Reich. (Adolf Hitler [1889-1945; Führer (leader) of the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party] was elected Chancellor [prime minister] of Germany on 30 January 1933.) The antisemitism in the musical was confined to the characters who were Nazis or Nazi-sympathizers—which was part of the point of the play and it sources, the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.

[The play has garnered numerous awards, including the 1967 Tony for Best Musical, 1967 New York Drama Critics’ Circle and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Besst Musical, 1998 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical, 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, 1998 Drama League Award for Distinguished Production of a Revival, 1998 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, 2022 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival, and many nominations.]

Robert Schenkkan: The complaint was anonymous.

Jereme Anglin: Yeah.

Robert Schenkkan: Were you ever given any more explanation of who voiced this complaint or what specifically they were upset about?

Dean Jahnsen: I believe the first time it was because of the language that was used, and then the other time it was sexual innuendos onstage.

Leila Paine: They kept changing it in every email or talk that we had with them. It was always something different. It’s like they couldn’t agree on one reason why it was canceled.

Jereme Anglin: I have a suspicion that the initial reaction was the vocabulary, the language, the slurs, and some of that content. But after the backlash from the community and all the support we got, I think the district then consulted with their legal team and found that the reasons they canceled the play were not actually something they could do. I think they slowly pivoted toward “protecting the audience members” versus, “is this something appropriate for our students to present?” Someone in the audience could sue the school because they were exposed to something they were not prepared for. And that could pose a legal threat somehow to the school district, if a student could say that they learned about something or were forced to confront something that they weren’t ready to do. 

Robert Schenkkan: Do you typically have content warnings on your play programs and on the publicity surrounding your productions?

Dean Jahnsen: In our morning announcements, we do content warnings. We have one outside the theatre and inside the theatre, and then also in our [preshow] speech. We started doing it on social media as well. 

Robert Schenkkan: So, suddenly, they’ve shut you down. How did you all respond?

Jereme Anglin: When I first found out, I was a little stunned and not sure what to do, but I just sat the class down in a circle and let them know what I had been informed of. At first, they thought I was joking, and then when they realized I was serious, they got upset. People were angry. Some were crying, but they quickly became motivated, and I’ll let them tell you what they did. They’re the ones who did it. 

Dean Jahnsen: I sat there, and I was like, “You’re lying,” and then I cried a little bit, and then I went outside, and I talked to my mom, just because I needed comfort. I noticed that, everywhere I looked, they were sad or they were angry. A group of students left the classroom and went around the school to talk to other teachers on what to do. I thought to contact our local newspaper, The Press Democrat [daily paper of Santa Rosa]. One of our fellow classmates contacted one of the editors. 

Robert Schenkkan: So, you went right to the press! That’s fascinating. And Leila, I gather that pretty quickly, you also pivoted to another production venue. Can you talk me through that?

Leila Paine: Right after it happened, we realized that we still wanted to try and find a way to put [the show] on. The class had all agreed—especially because the show was double cast, and because there was only one performance, only half of the class got to do the show. 

Dean Jahnsen: The cast was split up—the level three class is juniors and seniors, and the cast that went was mostly juniors, so the senior class didn’t get to perform at all. So, that was also devastating, because there isn’t a next year.

Leila Paine: My mom is involved in the theatre community in our town, and I was working at a theatre, so I was messaging her and my boss at the theatre company I work at. Mr. Anglin and the other theatre teacher at our school, Miss Cain, were contacting everyone we knew that had venues. Our treasurer has a connection at another theatre company and was contacting them, so we were all reaching out to find what place was available as soon as possible.

Jereme Anglin: A lot of theatre companies had something already built on their stage, so we were looking for an empty space that we could just jump into, and [we] finally found one in the neighboring town, Petaluma. A little theatre company called Mercury Theater said that they had space, and we could go down there and set up. So, the next morning, we all met at the high school, loaded up our vehicles, and spent the entire day at the theatre. I was rebuilding the set and setting things up while the students took over restaging it themselves on the stage. We were multitasking to try to and get it open that same night.

Robert Schenkkan: The students restaged the play themselves. Is that an unusual activity for them? Typically, would you be doing the staging?

Dean Jahnsen: The students will stage it, and then Mr. Anglin will review it and make sure it works for every perspective in the audience. But at that point, we didn’t have time [for that]. But we did it, and honestly, I think the staging was better than it was before.

Robert Schenkkan: It’s so interesting how you took this moment for grief, and rage, and confusion, and then you very, very quickly pivoted to action. So, you have found another theatre, the Mercury Theater. You moved in. You’ve restaged the play, and you did a single performance there, two performances?

Dean Jahnsen: We did two: one earlier in the evening and one later. It was, like, an eighteen-hour day, nonstop. It was crazy.

[The SRHS students did their two Petaluma performances on Saturday, 16 November 2024. The small Mercury Theatre, provided by the resident troupe free of charge, was sold out for both shows, totaling an audience of 240 theatergoers and raising $3,500 for the ArtQuest program. All box-office receipts went to ArtQuest. Outside the theater was a hand-lettered sign that read: “censorship kills creativity.”]

Leila Paine: Then we got together at one of our classmates’ houses to relax and talk about what was going on, and we all made signs about censorship, and we hung them outside of the theatre where we performed.

Dean Jahnsen: That was the night the article got posted, and our entire community really got involved. We were just reflecting on everyone’s support, and that was the big moment where our class bonded. 

Jereme Anglin: The students were also very active on social media, posting on various platforms, and contacted the playwright, Bert V. Royal. He got on board to support us, so there was a huge avalanche of support and positive things that came out. 

Dean Jahnsen: [There were] theatre departments from all over the Bay Area contacting us, [asking] if we wanted to come to them. It was so overwhelming, but it was so cool to see.

Leila Paine: It felt like it came out of nowhere. Initially, when we got shut down, our entire class felt alone in what had happened. We were like, “There’s nothing we can do about this,” but we found, as we kept pushing and trying harder instead of giving up, that there are lots of people in our community and outside of our community that actually care about what happened. It was strange to see that happen, that it’s not just something small that’s happening to us.

Robert Schenkkan: You were surprised by the response?

Leila Paine:  Yeah.

Dean Jahnsen: Yes.

Robert Schenkkan: This is really extraordinary. And there are lessons here, for artists everywhere, professional and nonprofessional. You did not allow yourselves to be shut down. You did not shrink away in shame. In fact, you stepped up and embraced the issue, embraced the controversy. Publicity became your friend.

As a result, there’s a greater sense of ownership by the students. You have expanded a play which already dealt with serious and potent topics into an examination of censorship and the importance of speaking out against censorship. Extraordinary. But my understanding is you didn’t stop there. After Dog Sees God closed, you traditionally begin a new project with another local theatre company, The Imaginists. What have you previously done with The Imaginists, and how was this collaboration different?

Leila Paine: Well, initially, the process started the same. Every year, Brent comes in, and we usually start [brainstorming] around the same time that we’re rehearsing our fall show. 

We did that in about September/October, and then we’d take a break for a little bit when we’re doing our fall show, but then as soon as the show closes, we jump right into rehearsals for what we’re bringing to Lenaea [High School Theatre Festival]. This year, I think we started a little bit earlier, and we started talking about censorship before everything even happened, how the arts seemed to be almost dying a little bit. That was an idea that we were playing with going into it, and we had a rough draft of the script that Brent had created. After everything with Dog Sees God happened, we jumped straight into making [REDACTED]. 

[According to its own website:

“The Lenaea High School Theatre Festival is an annual three-day celebration of creativity and talent, bringing together high school theatre students from across the West Coast. This dynamic event invites students to perform, receive personalized feedback from professional theatre artists, and explore their craft through hands-on workshops in every corner of the theatre world. 

“Founded in 1956 and inspired by the ancient Greek Lenaea festivals, Lenaea began as an initiative of Sacramento State College (now [California State University,] Sacramento) to nurture and elevate high school theatre programs. Since becoming an independent nonprofit in 2012, Lenaea has found its home at the Harris Center for the Arts at Folsom Lake College.”

[Folsom Lake College (FLC) is a public community college in Folsom, California. It’s part of the California Community Colleges system.

[The Lenaia (preferred spelling; cf. ancient Greek: Λήναια) was an annual Athenian festival with a dramatic competition. It was one of the lesser festivals of Athens and Ionia in ancient Greece. The Lenaia took place in Athens in Gamelion, roughly corresponding to January. Beginning in the second half of the 5th century BCE, plays were performed at the Lenaia festival, whose origins reach back into the pre-classical era, and contests of some sort continued into the 2nd century BCE, though it’s unknown when the festival was finally abandoned.

[The Lenaia festival was in honor of Dionysus Lenaios (“Dionysus of the Wine-Press”; the sobriquet “Lenaios” likely derives from the Greek word lenos, meaning ‘wine-press,’ though another possible origin is from lenai, another name for the Maenads, the female worshippers of Dionysus). Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, theater, and revelry, among other things, was known to the Romans as Bacchus.]

Dean Jahnsen: Every year, it’s a relevant theme of what’s going on in the world, and every year, it always has a message. The year before, when we were juniors, it discussed the toxicities of social media [Dreamletting, 25-26 January 2024], but then this year, I remember talking about Moms for Liberty [political organization founded in 2021 that advocates against school curricula that mention LGBTQ rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination], their censorship and their influence. And this seeped into when we were writing [REDACTED], how people have influence on the school board, how the school board affects our every day.

Brent Lindsay: At one of the first meetings, someone brought up theatre and how it is basically either under attack, or it is not finding its enrollment. The COVID blip is real. We see theatre and other art forms struggling. I think this came up early in the conversation, so it wasn’t necessarily about censorship, but censorship, of course, became a very convenient way for us to “find our villain.”

The early drafts, I was playing with One Thousand and One Nights [presumably the collection of Middle Eastern folktales, often known in English as The Arabian Nights, compiled in the Arabic language from as early as the 8th century CE]. We present this show at the Lenaea Festival [6-8 February 2025], so this was a way for us to take something that was going to celebrate the art form, theatre, but also be a little bit cheeky—a satire about a theatre company going to a festival and the antagonist being Mommies Against the Arts. So, we were taking those components, and it was rather messy in the beginning. Then Dog Sees God happened in the middle of this process, and I must say it wasn’t just the cancellation; it was then these meetings that came thereafter in the next two months where I had to be in the room—from the principal to the district to the superintendent. Every one of these meetings, I was taking mad notes, and the show was changing and evolving. Between Jereme and the students and me, it was like, “We could write all this into the material.” 

So, it wasn’t just becoming satire. It was very close to home, and quite dangerous.

Robert Schenkkan: When you say, “Quite dangerous,” what do you mean?

Brent Lindsay: Well, I mean, because the other side of this story that, as soon as Dog Sees God was canceled and they moved it to the Mercury Theater, I think it was the next day that the school board had received enough pressure that they allowed the play to continue, and at that point, it was already too late. Am I getting that right? 

[The board reversed the cancellation on 16 November 2024, the day the ArtQuest troupe had scheduled and prepared for their off-campus performances.  The reversal of the decision to terminate the production was accompanied by the imposition of new restrictions, including script approval for future presentations and age limits for shows with “adult themes.”]

Dean Jahnsen: Yeah. 

Brent Lindsay: The students and [their] social media blasts, they were ferocious. The testimonials were beautiful. I mean, every screen in our community, especially the theatre community, was just blasted, so it was very easy for us to turn to our school board, the superintendent, the principal, everybody, and say, “What the hell’s going on?” 

I think that that kind of community support created a situation where they found themselves in a place where it was very uncomfortable. They step back, and then they have these meetings with the students, which I gotta say all seemed ridiculous. They wanted to save face. They wanted to play the victim, and they were putting it on these guys as if they were the antagonists, that they were actually on the offense. 

So, what I mean by “dangerous” is we got to take all that information in quite some detail and write it into the script. So, if school board members or superintendents came to see the play, they saw themselves. There was no question, not by name, but they knew exactly who we were talking about. 

Robert Schenkkan: I wish I could say I felt adept at social media. Could you school me for a minute here, Leila and Dean, on your social media work throughout the experience? What was your focus? How was it organized? 

Dean Jahnsen: It started with us calling The Press Democrat, our local paper, and that story being written, and everyone started reposting. And there would be updates on the article because we kept in contact with the writer. People were constantly refreshing and reading what’s happening, and it was just repost after repost. I remember looking at that post and looking at the other ones that The Press Democrat put out, and it had like, 5,000 likes, 20,000 views, where the other ones were like, 30 and twenty. 

Leila Paine: And then some of our classmates posted the email addresses of the administrators who were in charge of what had happened, explaining what the actual issue was from our point of view—like, if you’re against this, please contact these people.

Dean Jahnsen: We used our company’s Instagram and Facebook, and also word of mouth. It just spread like wildfire. 

Robert Schenkkan: Fantastic. So, I gather the new play you created with the Imaginists was kind of a story within a story that reflected what you had actually just lived through. Could you give our audience a quick explanation of the plot of this new play?

Brent Lindsay: I think that it boils down to a class bringing scenes and monologues to a festival, and you’re always doing your pieces for a group of respondents. It can be one respondent looking at the playwright’s submissions, two respondents or three looking at scenes or monologues. So, this play starts with one student before a group of respondents, and all of a sudden, it becomes apparent that one of the respondents is one of these Mommies Against the Arts. 

It’s all about, then, how do we kill the arts by way of killing, literally killing these students? So, it becomes this high satire of the students being at risk of death from Mommies Against the Arts. And, à la One Thousand and One Nights, one student steps forward and says, “I wanna do my scene,” and that becomes a scene within a scene within a scene and keeps them all living until she can get to the final scene, basically surrounding all the Mommies for the Arts and threatening to tear them all apart and beheading them and all that. 

Then all the lights come on. That same student steps forward and says, “Hey, relax. It’s just theatre,” and then it’s a blackout. 

Robert Schenkkan: Wonderful. And I understand you went on to win a bucketload of awards at this statewide festival?

Jereme Anglin: Yeah. That came as a shock. We always bring original work there, because of the nature of our ArtQuest program. Our students have a lot of training, and we tend to do pretty well at the festival. We have, I think, a bit of a reputation and respect from other schools and other programs, but this year, we really were surprised at how much they had heard about what we have been going through and how much they liked the [REDACTED] script. The big award that they gave at the end is called the Bob Smart Award. He’s a theatre teacher who created the Lenaea Festival many, many years ago, and they created this award in his honor, to go to an individual or individuals who have undergone some significant struggle in bringing pieces of theatre to the festival, and so last year, we were given that award.

[Bob Smart (life dates unknown) was a professor at Sacramento State College (now CSU Sacramento) who guided many students into professional theater careers. The original idea for a high school drama festival at Sacramento State was initiated in 1955, but by the next year, Smart became a central figure in its operation and enduring legacy.

[Smart retired from Sacramento State College in 1998 and it’s likely his active participation in the Lenaea High School Theatre Festival ended then. The festival probably initiated the prestigious Bob Smart Spirit of Lenaea High School Theatre Festival Award, its highest honor, at that time as a memorial to Smart.  It recognizes individuals or groups who embody the festival’s values, particularly for things like fighting censorship and promoting the spirit of theater.]

Robert Schenkkan: Congratulations! And finally, as a sort of postscript to this whole extraordinary event, I understand that the superintendent who initially censored this production was fired. Is that correct?

Jereme Anglin: Yes.

Dean Jahnsen: The entire school board has been going through a lot of fire recently because of consolidation efforts, and she was let go at the end of last year.

Jereme Anglin: I think it was after a series of bad decisions, and then the community just feeling that the superintendent didn’t really mesh well with our community, with our program.

Dean Jahnsen: And our beliefs.

Robert Schenkkan: Very clearly not. We live in a very challenging moment right now. The arts are definitely under assault. Censorship is a very real issue. Leila and Dean, as you look back on it now, what are the lessons that you took away from this experience which you think might be meaningful to other artists?

Leila Paine: I think that the biggest thing that came out of it, at least for me, is that instead of being passive and letting it happen and accepting it, we took all the emotions and anger, what we had gone through, and we worked with Brent and turned it into art. Instead of just letting it happen, we took our experiences and made something greater. And then also the fact that, as artists, you’re not alone. There are so many more people out there who support the arts than you think there are. So, just because you have one person telling you, “No,” or a group of people telling you what you’re doing isn’t okay, that it’s not right, [that] doesn’t mean that they’re right, and doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. 

Dean Jahnsen: What I noticed is that I didn’t really see a lot of support from the younger generation when it first happened, but when I got to Lenaea and noticed everyone supporting us, it really showed me that the young generation is out there to support and defend the arts, especially in the political climate we are in. 

Robert Schenkkan: Jereme, Brent, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?

Brent Lindsay: Hearing Leila and Dean talk about it, I’m reminded that when we performed [REDACTED] at the school, when we had school board members, or assistant superintendents, or even the principal or vice principal come and sit and watch that piece, oftentimes what happened at the end is the whole black box would leap to its feet uproariously. And the one person sitting would be that school board member, isolated, alone, and I think it was just as shocking to me to see that story play out, to see how lonely it was to be that person who is trying to achieve some sort of power that was rejected by the community. And I think that that’s where art lives. When art finds its feet and its power, that’s what could happen, and this show, like no other that I’ve done with the students, absolutely reflected that. 

Robert Schenkkan: This is such an inspiring story, and I want to thank you for sharing it with the Guild. And I wish you all the very best in your future endeavors!

Dean Jahnsen: Thank you very much. 

Leila Paine: Thank you so much.

[Santa Rosa High School's ArtQuest Theatre program premièred the original one-act musical entitled [REDACTED], a piece exploring censorship, on 23 and 24 January 2025 in the school’s Black Box Theatre.  The performance featured scenes, songs, and designs created by the students in collaboration with The Imaginists. 

[The one-act play mocked the topic of censorship itself, and featured student monologues, scenes, and songs addressing mature themes such as suicide and sexual assault.  The play touches on canceling plays and burning books and the fictional pro-censorship advocates, Mommies Against the Arts, chanted, “Protecting kiddies is our duty! / We cancel anything that smells a little fruity!”

[The SRHS production of [REDACTED] was performed at the 2025 Lenaea High School Theatre Festival from 6-8 February 2025 at the Harris Center for the Arts at Folsom Lake College in Folsom, California (119 miles east-northeast of Santa Rosa; 23 miles east-northeast of Sacramento).  The SRHS ArtQuest Theatre production of [REDACTED] won several top honors at the theatre festival, including the Bob Smart Spirit of Lenaea Award and the Gold Medal for One-Act Play Production, two of the festival's highest awards, and 12 additional individual and group awards across various categories.

[According to KQED, the National Public Radio outlet in Santa Rosa, Lenaea Festival Board Director Cheena Moslen said upon giving the [REDACTED] company the Spirit Award:

This group refused to be silenced.  They mobilized their community, pushed back against censorship driven by fear, and ultimately staged their production, selling out performances.  But that hurdle seems to be the beginning of a larger issue of silencing and oppression.

My experience with this school reminded me that we are not just performers—we are powerful, and our voices matter.

[(Besides being Board Chairman of Lenaea, Moslen taught secondary-school English and theater for 25 years, performs as a Filipinx American storyteller, and is an educational equity coach.)

[Robert Schenkkan is a Pulitzer Prize, Tony, WGA, and Humanitas Award winner and three-time Emmy nominated writer.  Author of twenty plays including: All the Way (2012; Broadway: 2014), The Great Society (2014; Broadway: 2019), The Kentucky Cycle (1991; Pulitzer Prize: 1992; Broadway: 1993), Building the Wall (2017; Off-Broadway: 2017), and Old Cock (2024 [world premiere, Porto, Portugal]; U.S. premiere: 2025 [Off-Off-Broadway, New York City]).  Upcoming: ReCON$ruXion at Alabama Shakespeare Festival (April 2026) and Motion/CAPTURE with Lisbon’s Mala Voadora company (workshop in Alentejo, Portugal: February 2026). Member of DG Council, DLDF, Orchard Project, NTC, and New Dramatists Alumnus.

[Jereme Anglin is an actor, director, and educator whose career has taken him from the streets of Paris to the stages of both U.S. coasts.  A proud member of Actors’ Equity Association and a devoted practitioner of the Suzuki Method of actor training, Anglin taught for a decade on the East Coast before joining ArtQuest, where he champions rigorous, imaginative, and physically dynamic performances.

[Brent Lindsay, proud member of the Osage Nation, creates contemporary performances that intentionally upset assumptions and expectations, honoring the power of live performance as a vital community space for reinvention.  Brent is a writer, director, actor, and founding Artistic Director of the Imaginists, a regionally and nationally recognized artist-run theatre based in Santa Rosa, CA. 

[Dean Jahnsen (SRHS Class of ’25) is a freshman at the University of California, Davis, where he’s studying Political Science and Art History.  He’s passionate about protecting artistic freedom and fighting censorship. Dean was president of the ArtQuest Theatre company, where he played a major role as a student activist in defending his program.  He continues to advocate for the arts in the Bay Area. 

[Leila Paine (SRHS Class of ’25) is an incoming freshman at Cornish College of the Arts [since 2025, the arts school of Seattle University, a private Jesuit university in Seattle, Washington] and is majoring in Acting and Original Works.  She was the vice president of ArtQuest Theater at Santa Rosa High School, where she found her passion for the arts.  She plans to continue fighting against censorship and fighting for equality.]