Censorship on School Stages

 

[On 2 May 2023, the Washington Post reported:

Following a record-setting surge in efforts to change curriculums and ban books at schools nationwide, the education culture war has now reached the stage. [S]chool administrators have intervened to nix or alter school theatrical productions deemed objectionable . . . .

[I’ve blogged about other instances of this assault on free artistic expression numerous times on Rick On Theater.  Sometimes I addressed it directly, and sometimes I address a closely related subject, such as arts funding or arts education. 

[In any event, I’ve accumulated a mini-series of posts concerning the treatment of theater and the arts in our society.  Here’s a list of the main articles in that series:

• “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)

[Now I’m adding a new post.  This time I’m addressing the situation reported in the Washington Post that I quoted above.  There are many such articles in the media and statements by concerned organizations such as the National Coalition Against Censorship and the International Thespian Society/Educational Theatre Association; another sample is “On School Stages, Politics Plays a Leading Role” by Michael Paulson in Section A of the New York Times of 4 July 2023.]

The modern culture war that reached its peak of intensity in the 1980s and ’90s has reappeared from time to time over the last decades.  It’s back again now with the force of a Category 3 hurricane, largely fed by the acute divisiveness of our politics, the campaign season, and the combative jousting of the candidates, especially among Republicans.

This perfect political storm has hit school arts programs with growing force, particularly high school theater presentations.  School theater has been scrutinized often for age-appropriateness, and lately, progressive and liberal students and parents have protested against plays they feel portray women and people of color poorly. 

Plays such as 1971’s Grease, set in 1959 and criticized for the way the female character of Sandy Dumbrowski changes in the musical in accordance with Danny Zuko’s preferences at the end of the musical, and Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You from 1936, facing objections that the character Penny Sycamore is dumbed-down and portrayed as a cute little lady who doesn’t address any of her issues, have become targets of sexism complaints.

In March 2021, two seniors at Hunterdon Central Regional High School raised questions about racially insensitive content in the classic 1949 musical South Pacific, selected as the spring musical, that prompted the school to change its plans for the student production.  The students pointed out issues with the stereotypical portrayal of Asian characters in the play and raised concerns related to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes at the school and across the country.

The current surge of opposition, however, is coming largely from parents and school officials on the right.  The objections are largely the same as those raised against books the censors want removed from school libraries and material they don’t want taught or discussed in classes.  The schools’ selections for productions, some chosen by the students themselves, are being rejected outright or forced to undergo bowdlerization.

In April 2007, the principal of Wilton High School in Wilton, Connecticut, cancelled Voices in Conflict, an Iraq War play drawn by the students themselves from first-hand accounts of soldiers. The cancellation was due to questions of political balance and context.  One letter was from a 19-year-old graduate of Wilton High who’d been killed in combat a few months earlier.

In February 2008, the school superintendent in La Grande, Oregon, cancelled the La Grande High School student production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a 1993 play that premièred at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and played Off-Broadway in New York City in 1995-96, winning the 1996 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play and garnering Martin the Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award for playwriting.  Picasso is a comedy-fantasy set in 1905 at a Parisian café where Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, both in their 20’s, engage each other in discussions about art and relativity.  Objections were raised to some of the adult themes and content, notably sexual references and simulated drinking.

In March 2014, the school superintendent in Plaistow, New Hampshire, canceled Timberlane Regional High School’s planned production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Tony Award-winning musical Sweeney Todd (Best Musical, 1979), citing “discomfort” with the violence of the story.  The production was of a school edition of the musical Sondheim had authorized which tones down some material difficult for high school audiences and performers.

In July 2014, the administration of the South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Junior/Senior High School canceled a planned 2015 production of Spamalot due to its “homosexual themes.”  The 2005 Best Musical Tony and Outstanding New Musical Drama Desk Award winner, based on the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is an irreverent parody of the Arthurian legend.

In October 2014, the Catawba County school administration in Maiden, North Carolina, announced the cancellation of the student production of John Cariani’s Almost, Maine at Maiden High School.  Almost, Maine, which premiered in 2004 at the Portland Stage Company in Maine, is a romantic comedy that depicts multiple love stories, including one between two men.  It was selected by the American National Theatre as one of the most outstanding regional theatre productions of the 2004-2005 season.

In October 2021, drama students at Hillsboro High School in Hillsboro, Ohio, were forced to cancel performances of She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen, winner of the 2013 AATE (American Alliance for Theatre & Education) Distinguished Play Award. The play, which premiered at the Flea Theater in New York City in 2011, tells the story of a teenage girl who finds her deceased sister’s Dungeons & Dragons notebook.  Among her discoveries is that her sister may have had a relationship with another girl.  The Hillsboro production was to have been of a version of the play for audiences aged 11 and up, but the schools superintendent announced, “The fall play has been canceled this year because the play was not appropriate for our K-12 audience.”

In April 2022, after the opening performance of the Turlock High School production of Be More Chill by Joe Tracz and Joe Iconis (based on the novel by Ned Vizzini), the administration of the Turlock Unified School District decided abruptly to cancel the rest of the pay’s run.  A spokesperson for the Turlock, California, schools cited “concerns that the content was too mature for a general audience that includes all age levels” as the reason for the cancellation.  Be More Chill, commissioned and originally produced in 2015 by the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, follows a teenager who takes a pill that transforms him from loner to cool.  The musical, a 2018 Off-Broadway and 2019 Broadway hit, was nominated for the 2019 Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Musical.

In January 2023, the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, abruptly canceled a student production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (Broadway, 2017; Best Play Tony nominee), citing sexual content.  A Duval County school district spokesperson declared that the decision was made because the production “contains adult sexual dialog that is inappropriate for student cast members and student audiences.”  Because Vogel’s play is about the 1923 Broadway production of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, for which the producer and cast were arrested and convicted of obscenity, Indecent is a play about censorship that was itself censored.

In February, Indiana’s Northwest Allen County Schools pulled the plug on the Carroll High School production of Adam Szymkowicz’s 2017 play Marian, or The True Tale of Robin Hood, a gender-bending retelling of the Robin Hood legend, after parents raised objections to its depiction of a same-sex couple and a nonbinary character.

In March, Iowa’s South Tama County Community School District halted a performance of the play August: Osage County at South Tama County High School over fears that its treatment of suicide, addiction, and racism was inappropriate for school-aged children.  Tracy Letts’s 2007 play is a Pulitzer Prize-winner, a 2008 Tony awardee for Best Play, and a 2008 Drama Desk Award recipient for Outstanding Play.

Also in March, the Northern Lebanon School Board in Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania, denied approval for a 2024 high school production of The Addams Family (Broadway, 2010-11; Outstanding Musical Drama Desk Award nominee), labeled “the number one school musical in the country,” because, the board averred, it “promotes bad values.”  The board president said, “The fundamental thematic theme, for me that I could see, was moving towards darkness, embracing death, embracing despair, embracing the pain.”

On 4 July, Independence Day, the New York Times reported:

School plays—long an important element of arts education and a formative experience for creative adolescents—have become the latest battleground at a moment when America’s political and cultural divisions have led to a spike in book bans, conflicts over how race and sexuality are taught in schools, and efforts by some politicians to restrict drag performances and transgender health care for children and teenagers.

According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, “Censorship happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their political or moral values on others by suppressing words, images, or ideas that they find offensive.” 

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.  All the examples I cited above occurred in public schools.

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.”)

Schools and school districts present many justifications for censoring high school theater productions.  A 1 September 2022 article on Dramatics.com, the website for Dramatics, the publication of the International Thespian Society (part of the Educational Theatre Association), explains that the schools “might find the language, lyrics or actions performed on stage too mature for teenage audiences.  Or they might find the story’s explorations of certain themes or issues too controversial.”  

Students, as citizens of the United States, have a constitutional right to free speech and free expression.  A school, especially a primary or secondary school, might present an exceptional case, however, because of the ages of the audience and the participants and because the population is somewhat captive. 

Schools are charged with supervising and overseeing the appropriateness of the material to which their students are exposed.  A decision to control content in order to create a production that doesn’t raise controversy, or to suppress students’ views is, however, improper. 

While school officials have considerable discretion in controlling school-sponsored activity, there are limits when it comes to suppressing non-disruptive political expression.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1969 (Tinker v. Des Moines School District) that students have the right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam war, a view that was at the time highly controversial. 

Furthermore, the court observed in 1989 that “public educators must accommodate some student expression even if it offends them or offers views or values that contradict those the school wishes to inculcate” (Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier). 

The disruptive/non-disruptive dichotomy makes this a somewhat hazy issue.  The First Amendment gives school authorities some protection to limit speech that could potentially cause disruption to the school.  Legitimately, this can only apply to an actual disruption, not a fabricated one used as cover to suppress material that someone just doesn’t like.

If the script has problems ranging from bias to the examination of difficult topics, then you write or speak about alternative viewpoints; you argue with the play, but you don’t censor it.  That’s the lesson the school ought to be teaching.  Not censorship and suppression.

Howard Sherman, a national advocate against the censorship of school theater, declared in a speech to the Florida Association for Theatre Education in October 2017 that if students

have the chance to tell stories that engage with what is difficult in the world, indeed with what may be wrong in the world, alongside telling stories that bring joy and entertainment into the world, then their work in theater makes them better actors, writers, directors, designers and technicians.  But it also makes them better people and better citizens, with knowledge, gifts and understanding that will be of value to them whatever they may be in life.

The award-winning children’s writer and author of more than 30 books on education- and justice-related topics Sean McCollum has asserted:

Teens, as a matter of course, are hungry to explore and develop their understanding of complex, mature subjects of love, loss, and the harsher lessons of life.  These may be sensitive themes, but coming to grips with them is the difference between becoming an adult and remaining a child.

Done with thoughtfulness and compassion—and the leadership of caring adults—theater has a unique knack for creating a safe space for young people to do just that, as cast, crew, and audience.

High school is a peculiar community.  Chronologically, the age-range isn’t very wide, but intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically, it’s vast.  The high school population starts with 14-year-old 9th-graders, most of whom are still children, barely adolescents; it ends with 17- and 18-year-olds who are nearly adults—some are adults.  Many can vote and most can drive, go to the most restricted films, sign contracts, get married, and enlist in the military.

This makes determining age-appropriateness a challenge for school authorities, but it mustn’t be an excuse for simply closing down plays (or banning books, cutting off discussions) that touch on difficult or controversial subjects.  These ideas and issues are all around us all the time; we can’t avoid them, like it or not.  Some of them are even vital in our society.

Labeling cancellation and censorship as protecting the children is, in reality, keeping them ignorant.  It stops any discussion of hard topics, whether sexuality or bigotry or violence, from occurring.  Remember that arts in the schools are supposed to be educational experiences, not just entertainment.  If a play raises uncomfortable issues, teach to them, discuss them in class, schedule an assembly on the subjects and bring in knowledgeable and articulate people to explain the issues, give their views and arguments, answer questions.

Avoiding sensitive subjects altogether, which is what censorship accomplishes, leads to a population of ill-informed citizens.  Talking about them, especially in a scholastic environment, isn’t the same as endorsing them.  But people, including adolescents, should know what they’re accepting or rejecting.

When I taught writing in college—freshmen, so only a year older than the audience we’re dealing with here—I taught a unit on Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, which was part of the writing course curriculum.  Now, I’m not a proponent of Marxism or communism; I’ve been to both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and they’re not systems under which I’d want to live.  But the classes were about argument and the devices writers have available to propel their positions—and which ones play more on emotion than reason.

My point was that you don’t have to accept Marx’s conclusions—I don’t—but you should know what his line of reasoning was.  (This was the early and mid-1980s, when the Soviet Union was still ascendant.)  After all, he did manage to persuade a significant number of people around the globe.

A few years later, I was teaching 9th-grade English in a New Jersey high school.  I was new to teaching high school and, though I’d been teaching college writing for several years, my field was actually theater, and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind was on the curriculum.  I knew the play, and as I had a theater background, I decided I’d be more comfortable with a play than a piece of prose literature as a text, so I started there.  (Later in the year, I taught Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun from 1959 for similar reasons.)

Now, Inherit the Wind was on the school’s approved reading list, so there was no push-back from the English Department or the school administration, but I did run into some difficulties with students whose parents rejected evolution, the subject at the center of the play’s drama, on religious grounds. 

I didn’t teach evolution per se; this was an English class, not a science class, after all.  But, as I suggested just now, I contend that everyone is free to accept or reject an argument as she or he sees fit, but one should know what the argument is, what the supporters and opponents believe, when making that choice. 

In the case of Inherit the Wind, since the play’s about whether or not a teacher in Tennessee in 1925 could legally teach evolution, and the trial in the play presents arguments for and against the constitutionality of the state law forbidding this, readers or viewers of the play should understand both sides of the debate.

I didn’t always win that argument, but I still maintain it’s valid.  Willful ignorance is not a worthy goal for a school or a society.  A mature mind questions received knowledge.  A maturing mind starts learning to do this in adolescence.  (I take my lead on this assertion from the work of the educational psychologist William G. Perry, Jr. [1913-98], plus my own observation of the cognitive development of students through their school years.)

Mind you, ‘question’ does not mean ‘reject’!  But if society’s leaders—in this instance, educational authorities—freeze the epistemological process or prevent it from happening at all, which is what censorship does, we end up with Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451.

Few school authorities—principals, superintendents, school boards—are prepared to stand up to community protests over a controversial play.  Tackling controversial issues is, however, the mission of art, not least of theater; plays shouldn’t just entertain but also sometimes disturb and provoke.  

School administrators have come to expect that anything even slightly provocative will lead to complaints.  They’ve also learned that one person’s complaint—known as the “heckler’s veto,” a term coined in 1965 by law professor Harry Kalven, Jr. (1914-74)—can succeed in getting a work removed.  If those with the power to censor keep cancelling material that might spark protests, we’re going to see and hear fewer and fewer challenging and meaningful plays, books, and discussions.

Is that what we want?  Is that what our democracy needs?

[The high school stage is the largest theatrical stage in the U.S. today.  Students’ first encounters with high school theater productions are likely to be also their first encounters with censorship.  Is that what we want our young people to learn in our schools—that when we run into something we don’t want to hear, or don’t want others to hear, we shut it down?

[High school art, music, and drama programs train sophisticated consumers.  That, in turn, stimulates adventurous and meaningful art forms.  Censorship of high school theater productions rarely occurs in a vacuum and usually reflects an attitude towards other forms of artistic and intellectual expression. 

[This generates wide socio-cultural repercussions in the community.  Accepting censorship of high school theater creates the conditions for the marginalization of all serious art and the discussion of important issues and ideas.  Examining those ideas is necessary for democracy to work—for all if us, not just the few who can manipulate the system.

[Children learn in different ways.  Some assimilate information best when they read it; some need to see or hear what they’re studying; and some learn by doing, making something with their hands or maneuvering their bodies.  The arts, and particularly theater, does all these—and all of them are necessary to make a production.

[Making theater is a study in problem-solving.  Each participant will have to figure out the best way to do any number of tasks in order for there to be a show.  But the answers don’t come out of a book, and the teacher/director doesn’t necessarily have the solution. 

[Theater is an endeavor where the right answer is “whatever works”—often “whatever works for me.”  Or, “whatever works for me in this instance.”  In order to arrive at that answer, the artist or technician has to look at all the possibilities, the materials on hand, and the goal to which he or she is aiming—and then choose. 

[Studies show that students’ grades and test scores rise when they’re exposed to the arts.  The American Council on the Arts asserts that when children do arts, they’re doing not only problem-solving, but also critical thinking and learning about other civilizations. 

[In my Rick On Theater essay “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011), I argued that an arts experience in school, specifically theater, benefits the learning of other subjects.  My premise was:

Theater has a relation to other academic disciplines such that theater can be used to inform and enhance the learning of those other subjects.  They are cognate fields . . . .

[Diminishing that experience, diluting it by cancelling challenging productions, invalidates that cognate learning path.  The censors are hobbling their students.

[There’s one benefit of theater in the school, one that’s enhanced when the experience excites all the students’ receptors—the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and critical—of which I have not spoken.  I’ve studiously avoided it, in fact, because I argued it in another post, “Degrading the Arts.” 

[An exciting and provocative experience of theater in school, as either a participant or a spectator, builds future audiences and a citizenry that values our artistic and cultural heritage.  A student who’s been exposed to art, theater, dance, or music as a youngster and is encouraged to experience and enjoy this part of life as an adult is less likely to be sympathetic to the forces that oppose free artistic expression.]