"The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization"

by Dr. Indira Etwaroo 

[The arts are at a crossroads.  I’ve blogged about the theater in crisis, especially the regional repertory companies, but this post is about all the arts, which Dr. Indira Etwaroo labels “the soul of civilization.”  When I started writing and posting about the crisis in America’s theaters, I was referring to finances, shrinking audiences, staffing issues, and other matters all lumped together in the category of arts-administrative concerns.

[The threat that Dr. Etwaroo is writing about below is political.  The culture war is specifically assaulting our arts institutions as surely as the Russians are assaulting Ukraine’s cities and infrastructures.  And the forces arrayed against the theaters, galleries, museums, dance companies, and orchestras—the big ones and the little ones—are using not just money as a weapon, but threats of legal action, and even take-overs.

[Dr. Etwaroo writes about one sector that’s among the most vulnerable: the arts organizations that serve the underserved and marginalized segments of our population.  Her alarming and frightening article was posted on the American Theatre website on 3 April 2025.]

Now is the time for artists and institutions to step up in defense of the most fragile and vulnerable among us—including our arts organizations themselves.

We stand at a critical crossroads in American history—a crossroads where democracy, creative expression, artistic freedom, and the very artists and arts institutions that uphold these ideals face unprecedented threats. It is not lost on me and so many others that one of the first political acts by the current administration—23 days following the inauguration—was the takeover of the Kennedy Center [12 February 2025], the national cultural center of the United States. Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison [1931-2019] makes clear an urgent truth:

I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether in music or writing or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office, and people who want to control and deceive, know exactly who will disturb their plans. And those people are artists.

[Remarks made by Morrison, appearing with authors Sonia Sanchez (poet and professor; b. 1934) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (b. 1975), on 15 June 2016 at Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre for Arts and Social Justice, an event presented by the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Each writer also received the studio’s Marlon Brando Award in honor of their joint artistic and social justice commitments.]

At the heart of these threats lies the potential to erode our very civilization—to degrade the cornerstone of America’s enduring experiment in democracy and pluralism. This cornerstone is rooted in the moral arc of the universe, made more dynamic by former Attorney General Eric Holder [b. 1951; 82nd United States Attorney General: 2009-15] when he shared, “The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice—but only when we put our hands on that arc and pull it.” The erosion of civilization would halt that collective pull, silencing the voices and perspectives that embody humanity, decency, beauty, truth, and justice. This is no abstract concern; it is a crisis that demands immediate attention and action, as it risks leaving permanent tears in the already fragile fabric of America’s rich and diverse tapestry.

[The line about “the arc of the moral universe” that Etwaroo attributes to former AG Holder was apparently often quoted by him, most recently, perhaps, on 3 November 2024, when he posted on several social media sites a plea for his followers to vote for Kamala Harris (b. 1964) in the 2024 presidential election.  He didn’t originate the line, however.  He was probably quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68), the civil rights leader, who used the line often from as early as 1958.

[The coiner of the phrase—or, at least, the earliest recorded person to use it—appears to have been Theodore Parker (1810-60), an abolitionist and Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, who used it in an 1856 sermon.]

In a fabled lecture, anthropologist Margaret Mead [1901-78] once posed the question, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” Students suggested answers like a clay pot, tools, or weapons. Mead responded, “The first sign of civilization is a healed femur.” The femur, the longest bone in the body, connects the hip to the knee. In societies without modern medicine, healing a fractured femur requires about six weeks of rest. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, providing support and protection until the injury healed. Mead explained that in societies where the rule of law is survival of the fittest, no healed femurs are found.

[The origin of the above Mead anecdote remains unknown and there’s no concrete evidence, such as a written statement or a recording of Mead, to verify independently its authenticity.  This search is summed up by Nur Ibrahim, a New York City-based journalist from Pakistan, on Snopes, a fact-checking website. and reported by numerous sources. 

[The attribution to Mead appears to have been popularized by Ira Byock (b. 1951), emeritus professor of medicine and community and family medicine at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, who claimed in his book The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (Avery, 2012) that Mead made the statement in answer to a student’s question.  Other sources picked up the anecdote and retold it as fact without attribution.

[In Paul Brand and Philip Yancey’s 1980 book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: A Surgeon Looks at the Human and Spiritual Body (Zondervan Publishing House), however, co-author Brand (British physician and surgeon; 1914-2003) recalled a different source for the story: a lecture given by Mead.  The anecdote spread in various renderings in newspapers, speeches, and on the ’Net.

[In an authenticated remark, however, Mead had a different sign of a civilization in an interview she gave in Talks with Social Scientists (Southern Illinois University Press), edited by Charles F. Madden and published in 1968.  A published transcript is linked to Mead's Wikiquote page.  (On Rick On Theater, there are two posts regarding my searches for the sources of quotations and other published documents: “‘A Tennessee Williams Treasure Hunt’” [11 April 2009] and “Literary Detection” [3 January 2011]).]

I am a first-generation Black American woman with Indo-Guyanese ancestry and Southern roots, raised in a lower socioeconomic environment in Southeast Washington, D.C., and Newport News, Virginia. It became clear to me early on that art was not readily accessible to all people. In those formative years, I began to shape what has since evolved into a core conviction: The arts are a fundamental right for all people. As an arts leader, a mother of a daughter, and an artist, I strive to make sense of and bring clarity to an increasingly complex world through the transformative power of creative expression. My work is a continuous search for truth.

This written reflection is rooted in the microcosm of these intersecting identities, understanding that U.S. arts institutions—more than 100,000 strong across the nation—are the cultural anchors that shape the collective consciousness of a country. As Christopher Robichaud [b. 1973], senior lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, shared [posted on his Facebook page, 6 November 2024; reposted on Medium, n.d. (possibly 11 or 12 November]: “This would be the time for the arts, broadly understood, to step in. The arts can change hearts and minds.”

The future of arts organizations, especially those serving the most vulnerable segments of society, hangs in the balance. This fragility is deeply rooted in generations of historical inequities, which have shaped the arts sector, determining whose stories are told, whose voices are heard, and which artists and communities are given the resources to flourish. As August Wilson [playwright; 1945-2005] poignantly declared in his 1996 speech The Ground on Which I Stand, “Black theatre in America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital . . . it just isn’t funded.” These words resonate as powerfully today as they did decades ago, not only for Black theatres, but for all arts institutions whose unyielding quest for visibility, recognition, resources, and opportunity stands at a pivotal crossroads.

The stark reality of these inequities is laid bare in the data. The 2017 Helicon Collaborative [research and strategy consultancy that focuses on using the power of culture for social good] report Not Just Money: Equity Issues in Cultural Philanthropy reveals that 58 percent of cultural philanthropic support for arts organizations flows to just 2 percent of the largest institutions—those predominantly centered on Western and European art forms. Meanwhile, 98 percent of arts organizations, and the communities they serve, are left with only 42 percent of that funding. This study also reports that a mere 4 percent of all foundation arts funding is allocated to groups whose primary mission is to serve communities of color—i.e., the arts institutions on the frontlines of addressing long-standing community disinvestment and vulnerabilities.

It is meaningful to look across sectors and challenge the disinvestments, even in our own communities. Woodie King Jr. [stage and screen director and producer, and founder of New York City’s New Federal Theatre; b. 1937], in his 1981 book Black Theatre: Present Condition, explains that “wealthy Black Americans, I am sorry to say, do not invest” in Black institutions or projects. “Wealthy Black Americans invest in AT&T or Twentieth Century Fox.” A survey by the DeVos Institute [of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center] found that the median budget of the nation’s 20 largest arts organizations of color is 90 percent smaller than their mainstream counterparts, with many operating on the brink of financial collapse. It goes without saying that vulnerable institutions are seeing long-standing disinvestments in almost all of the diverse revenue streams that are necessary for greater sustainability, community impact, and service to the common good.

“If arts and culture are primary ways that we empathize with, understand, and communicate with other people—including people different than ourselves—then enabling a broad spectrum of cultural voices is fundamental to creating a sense of the commonwealth and overcoming the pronounced socio-political divides we face today,” wrote Holly Sidford and Alexis Frasz in Not Just Money.

The ravaging effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the reckoning with racial injustice continue to reverberate throughout the arts sector, with most institutions still reeling. This moment demands visionary and decisive action, and it demands a reliance on the freedom of spontaneous creativity with the certainty of intentional conviction—a.k.a. jazz improvisation—to secure the survival of our arts ecosystem, even without the certainty of a notated score or blueprint for what comes next. As Miles Davis [jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer; 1926-91] once said, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note—it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” A spontaneous creativity is especially critical for the institutions most at risk. 

[The statement on improvisation is often attributed to Davis, but it’s not explicitly known where the quotation comes from.]

By no means does my reflection here seek to divide or to diminish the struggles unfolding across the broader arts and culture sector. I believe that we must work together and create solutions as a wider collective. But this reflection is aimed at prioritizing resources for those communities and institutions historically overlooked and most in need during this ongoing crisis—institutions and communities directly in the line of fire. These institutions have focused on immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, the disability community, women and girls, and the economically disadvantaged. By increasing support in these areas, we can realize a ripple effect that ensures “all boats rise” across the sector, as we fight for the very soul of our democracy, and indeed, the soul of our civilization.

I am inspired by the work of PolicyLink [national research and action institute dedicated to advancing economic and social equity] founder Angela Glover Blackwell [attorney, civil rights advocate, and author; b. 1944], whose championing of the “curb cut effect” provides a powerful lens for this advocacy. The curb cut on sidewalks was originally designed to assist people with disabilities. But this simple, yet profound intervention has proven to benefit everyone from parents with strollers to bikers, travelers, and workers. The principle behind the curb cut effect is that policies aimed at uplifting the most vulnerable often lead to societal benefits that ripple outward, strengthening the collective whole.

“There’s an ingrained societal suspicion that intentionally supporting one group hurts another,” Glover Blackwell wrote in “The Curb-Cut Effect” for the Stanford Social Innovation Review in [15.1; Winter] 2017. “That equity is a zero sum game. In fact, when the nation targets support where it is needed most—when we create the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully—everyone wins. The corollary is also true: When we ignore the challenges faced by the most vulnerable among us, those challenges, magnified many times over, become a drag on economic growth, prosperity, and national well-being.”

Leaders who serve historically disadvantaged cultural institutions and communities are not lacking in vision, skill, imagination, or the cultural nuances and sensibilities that can only come from within our communities. What is required now are sustained investments and an unshakable belief in our capacity to lead, to be critical changemakers and thought leaders, and to dynamically contribute to a vibrant, flourishing arts ecosystem that anchors a civilization at risk.

Technology is critical to our future, but it is not the next frontier. The construction of larger and more advanced buildings plays a vital role in the growth and expansion of our ecosystem, but they are not the next frontier. The defense and lasting strength of our most fragile institutions and communities—that is the true frontier ahead of us. That is the building of a civilization. A. Philip Randolph [labor unionist and civil rights activist; 1889-1979], leader of the historic 1963 March on Washington [for Jobs and Freedom; 28 August], reminded us that “a community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.”

Without well-orchestrated and highly coordinated interventions and partnerships among the philanthropic, corporate, community, and arts and culture sectors, these long-standing fragile institutions may shutter, recalling the time when federal funding cuts in the 1990s meant that 87 percent of Black theatre institutions at the time were unable to keep their doors open. Just in New York City, eight African American theatres closed in the 1990s, as Samuel A. Hay [playwright and founder of the National Conference of African American Theatre (1983); b. 1937] recorded in African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Without the larger arts and culture sector protecting the very institutions that hold and embody the rich diverse narratives that are our great pluralistic and democratic experiment, the arts and culture sector could very well become part of the cultural monolith that we are trying to push back against—one that builds empires and not civilizations.

I understand that equity is not a monolithic or singular construct, but a complex and multifaceted intersectionality. It is woven through the threads of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, faith, and so much more. This nuanced, holistic understanding is the frontier we must embrace if we are to advance together. So many institutions across this vast and beautiful cultural sector have stood resolutely at the intersection of social justice and the arts, serving as guiding lights for marginalized voices to be heard and celebrated. Now, as we face this pivotal moment, we must stand poised to redefine the very role of arts institutions and reach a resounding radical consensus—to challenge the status quo, to reimagine our purpose, and to set about “imagining a world,” in the words of Audre Lorde [writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet, and civil rights activist; 1934-92], “in which we can all flourish.” With the need to exercise unprecedented courage, conviction, and an indefatigable commitment to building a civilization that will live past our time—as one plants trees under whose shade they may never sit—we can rise to defend this right, stand against the forces that seek to dismantle it, and shape a future where healed femurs abound, standing as a living testament to our shared humanity and the unbreakable strength of a collective will to heal our fragile and fractured democracy.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alice Walker [b. 1944] admonished: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” [This statement is widely circulated in print and digital media as a quotation from Walker, but its original source isn’t known. The exact time and place where she first made this remark isn’t documented.] I would humbly recommend a few actions that can be taken now. I am confident there are many more.

•   A National Cross-Sector Arts Task Force: This task force would bring together national leaders from philanthropies, corporations, communities, and the arts and culture sector with a focus on a strategic, multi-year plan to invest in arts institutions that are specifically in the line of fire at this time: immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community (particularly trans people), the disability community, women and girls, and the economically disadvantaged.

•   Community Standing with Community: Community leaders, community members, and businesses can seek out vulnerable institutions and invest in them: buy tickets, donate (giving at every level is meaningful), and create sponsorships and partnerships to build resiliency and greater connections among the community. Volunteer! If there is a skill or pro bono service that can be provided to move an institution forward, provide it. Make Some Noise! For these vulnerable institutions who may be in danger of closing their doors in silence, don’t let it happen. Share their website and upcoming events on social media to keep them alive and well. Use your influence. Share with your followers.

We have the power to reimagine the world, but only as a collective. In the midst of World War II, Pulitzer-winning writer Katherine Anne Porter [1890-1980; Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in 1962; 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter] penned a sentiment in 1940 that resonates with the struggles we now face—words that provide hope, encourage us to take the long view, and propel us forward . . . together:

In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away [introduction to the 1940 Modern Library edition of Flowering Judas].

[Dr. Indira Etwaroo (b. 1971) is a producer, director, scholar, and arts and culture executive.  She’s artistic director and CEO of Harlem Stage.

[As I noted above, I blogged on the crisis besetting theaters in the United States several times in recent months.  Look for my occasional series subtitled the “Regional Theater Series.”  I’ve also written and reposted a number of articles on the culture wars and advocating the support for the arts both in schools and in the communities.  The complete list would be too long to append here, but “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023) are two pieces that I’d suggest.

[And one more, a real old essay (not of my writing) that I think is important.  It was written in 1939, almost 85 years ago, by a highly esteemed reporter and political commentator, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974).  It’s called “The Indispensable Opposition” (16 November 2011), and I think it’s something that every American should read.  It applies here.]

"The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship"

by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith 

[On 30 July 2023, I posted “Censorship on School Stages,” my take on a trend that had been developing across the United States for over a year at that time.  The Rick On Theater post was inspired by newspaper reports such as the Washington Post’s “The culture war’s latest casualty: The high school musical” by Hannah Natanson (2 May 2023) and “On School Stages, Politics Plays a Leading Role” by Michael Paulson in the New York Times (4 July 2023). 

[“Censorship on School Stages” (Rick On Theater: Censorship on School Stages) was my first post focusing specifically on school censorship of theater, but I’d blogged on censorship, suppression, and other forms of repression of the freedom of expression in numerous other articles, 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 (22 May 2011), “Culture War” (6 February 2014), and “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015), among others.

[Over the years since I started ROT, which just passed its 15th anniversary last 16 March, I’ve established an ad hoc series on the accommodation of theater and the arts in our society.  Sometimes I addressed this topic directly, and sometimes I addressed a closely related subject, such as arts funding or arts education.

[At this juncture, let me quote myself (in slightly reformatted form) from “The First Amendment & The Arts,” just to make one thing clear before you read this article on my blog:

I ought to confess here that I’m pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  One of my favorite theater lines is from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s musical 1776.  Stephen Hopkins, the iconoclastic and cantankerous delegate from Rhode Island, declares, when asked to vote for or against an open debate on independence, declares: “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 fairly well sums up my feelings: we should be allowed to talk about anything in this society, even stuff most other people don’t want to hear.  The only proper response to speech we don’t like is more speech.  You don’t cut people off when you don’t like what they’re saying, you debate them.

[“‘The Courage to Produce,’” which is a conversation between Nadine Smith and Jessica Lit, ran in the Winter 2024 issue of American Theatre (40.2), and was also posted at AMERICAN THEATRE | The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship on 1 April 2024.  (American Theatre, now a quarterly magazine, is published by the Theatre Communications Group, an organization for non-profit theater companies in the U.S.)

[Nadine Smith, a former journalist, is the Executive Director of Equality Florida, the state’s largest organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  In 2022, she was named to the Time 100, Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world

[An award-winning journalist turned organizer, Smith was one of four national co-chairs of the 1993 March on Washington.  She was part of the historic meeting with then-President Bill Clinton (42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001) on 16 April 1993, the first Oval Office meeting between a sitting president and LGBTQ community leaders.  She served on the founding board of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization.

[Smith, who lives in St. Petersburg (which she calls “St. Pete”) with her wife Andrea and son Logan, is a Florida Chamber Foundation Trustee and served on President Barack Obama’s (44th President of the United States: 2009-17) National Finance Committee.  She’s been named one of her state’s “Most Powerful and Influential Women” by the Florida Diversity Council and has received the League of Women Voters’ Woman of Distinction Award.  In 2018, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Floridians by Influence Magazine, a magazine of Florida politics.  She currently serves as chair of the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

[Equality Florida is a political advocacy group that promotes civil rights and protections for LGBTQ residents of Florida.  Equality Florida was formed in 1997 by Smith and Stratton Pollitzer, an expert in LGBTQ non-profit development, just before Governor Jeb Bush took office (1999-2007) and Florida's state government became considerably more conservative.  

[A former actor, Jessica Lit is the Director of Business Affairs of the Dramatists Guild.  She’s an intellectual property and entertainment attorney with a focus on empowering artists of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to take control of their careers by educating them about their legal rights.  She recently decided to channel that interest into launching a solo practice, The Lit Esquire PLLC, aimed at doing just that. 

[Lit has a strong background in the arts, having earned her B.A. in theater performance from New York City’s Fordham University in 2011 before she went on to start a theater company with fellow classmates that focused on producing works exclusively written by women.  

[After stepping away from performing, Jessica earned her real estate license in New York and worked for three years as a full-time agent under several high-profile brokerages in New York City, where she specialized in working with performing artists to help find their first apartments in the city.

[While she no longer performs as a career, Lit has stayed involved in the arts in any way she can, including serving as a co-producer on a weekly magic show on New York City’s Upper West Side from 2014 to 2015 and appearing in an episode of The Perfect Murder (2017-18) on Investigation Discovery, a cable channel dedicated to true crime documentaries.

[Lit earned her Juris Doctor (J.D. – Doctor of Law) degree in 2019  from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York City with a concentration in intellectual property.  While at Cardozo, she facilitated student-led discussions sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, was an active member of the Moot Court Honor Society, and served as Problem Editor for the 2019 BMI Entertainment and Communications Law Moot Court Competition.  Jessica was admitted to the New York State Bar in 2020 and recently relocated to her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina.]

A dialogue on how students, teachers, and parents can push back against a wave of conservative legislation and intimidation that threatens to chill theatrical expression.

The kooky, macabre musical The Addams Family was named the most-produced tuner on U.S. high school stages for the 2022-23 school year. But there will be at least one less mysterious and spooky production for next year’s tally since a Pennsylvania school board voted to cancel a 2024 production, citing the show’s “dark themes.” [This instance was an example in “Censorship on School Stages.”]

Since 1938, the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) has polled theatre educators to identify the most-produced musicals and plays, but its latest survey also measured the impact of a troubling resurgence of censorship. A whopping 67 percent of educators told EdTA they are weighing potential controversies when they make show selections—and with good reason. 

In recent years, a so-called “parents’ rights” movement has staked a claim in controlling the K-12 curriculum, leading to a surge of banned books and restrictions on performances. Florida’s House Bill 1069, which restricts media with sexual content, has even put Shakespeare’s oeuvre under scrutiny. Many lessons now only excerpt the Bard’s plays rather than teach them in full. As part of a counter-movement, the New York Public Library recently launched the Books for All initiative, making censored playscripts and musical libretti available online to teenagers nationwide.

[Considine is slightly misleading here. NYPL is not supplying censored books in the sense that the texts to which the library is providing access are edited or abridged. NYPL is providing online access to the original texts of books, plays, and libretti that have been banned elsewhere.]

The polarized political climate has only added to the backstage drama at high school theatre auditoriums, the latest arena for the culture wars. Parents and school board members are challenging show choices, requesting script changes, and outright canceling student productions with social or political themes, especially LGBTQ+ content. Last year, a Florida school gained traction on social media after canceling a production of Indecent, which centers on a queer Jewish romance. [This case of censorship is also in my post.] And last fall an Illinois school board canceled a production of The Prom, a musical about a group of Broadway actors who travel to a conservative town to help a lesbian student banned from bringing her girlfriend to the prom—though in response to uproar over the decision, the show will in fact go on this spring.

In Indiana, students took matters into their own hands, independently staging the gender-bending play Marian, or the True Tale of Robin Hood after a school canceled the production for its LGBTQ+ themes. An Ohio school requested 23 revisions before staging The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, removing explicit language and the mention of gay characters. A Texas school board canceled a school field trip in response to a social media post accusing a production of James and the Giant Peach that featured actors playing both male and female roles as being a form of “drag.”

This disheartening trend of censoring playscripts and productions coincides with an uptick in conservative legislation aiming to limit queer representation in the classroom. The ACLU is currently tracking a staggering 233 schools and education bills that directly target LGBTQ+ rights and expression.

This threat of censorship not only robs theatre kids of time in the limelight; it also deprives young students in the audience of the opportunity to witness different human experiences. It targets educators and their beliefs and impacts how—and what—they teach. These attacks also affect dramatists and composers, whose works are being amended and pulled from libraries and stages.

Censorship was a major theme of the 2023 EdTA conference in St. Pete Beach, Fla., where middle and high school theatre educators gathered last September. The programming included “The Courage to Produce,” two sessions curated by Jordan Stovall, the director of Outreach and Institutional Partnerships at the Dramatists Guild of America (DG), about navigating controversies and best practices for educators. The sessions were inspired by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund’s “Dramatic Changes: A Toolkit for Producing Stage Works on College Campuses in Turbulent Times.” The following excerpt from a conversation between Jessica Lit, the DG’s director of business affairs, and Nadine Smith, co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, has been edited for length and clarity.

                                                       Illustration for American Theatre by Colin Tom

JESSICA LIT: Welcome to “The Courage to Produce.” If you’re not familiar with the DG, we are a national trade association for playwrights, librettists, lyricists, and composers, and our mission is to aid dramatists in protecting the artistic and economic integrity of our work. Our sister organization, the DLDF, was created in 2011 to advocate and educate and provide resources in defense of the First Amendment. Since its inception, it’s been an active voice in supporting institutions which have been the targets of attacks on free speech, including the recent cancellation of Indecent at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Fla. The DLDF also recently partnered with the EdTA to establish standards for protecting free expression when theatrical works are taught in educational institutions.

Today I am joined by the co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, Nadine Smith. Equality Florida is Florida’s statewide civil rights organization dedicated to securing full equality for Florida’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community. Would you like to talk a little bit about Equality Florida and introduce yourself?

NADINE SMITH: Good morning. I live in St. Pete, and we founded Equality Florida when we realized that we were doing lots of local work, but this place called Tallahassee [the capital of the state of Florida], out in the middle of nowhere, was where big decisions were being made that impacted our lives. Actually, we’ve been around for 27 years—formally in January of ’97, but we existed before then.

For decades, we held at bay all of the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Florida. But 20 years of increasingly extreme Republican control of every level of government has sort of metastasized with [Donald] Trump [45th President of the United States: 2017-21] and [Ron] DeSantis [Governor of Florida since 2019]. And so we saw in these last two years what began first and foremost as an attack on the transgender community, trans kids in particular, and we also saw a whitewashing of history—no more racist dog whistles; it is a foghorn. We’ve seen bodily autonomy attacked in every way, from abortion bans to banning access to medical care for the trans community, and a stripping away of rights.

One of the ways that’s shown up most visibly has been the banning of books and theatre. I think it’s important for people to understand that this isn’t some movement that has grown organically from concerns raised by parents. The Florida legislature wrote the law in such a way that any resident of the county, they don’t even have to be a parent, can get any book pulled off the shelf in Florida. It’s a de facto ban even when it’s not a technical ban—i.e., schools fear they are vulnerable to lawsuits if they don’t remove books preemptively.

We were talking earlier about, how often do you think of eras in American history, where we see these book bans, a clamping down on art? And what else usually arrives with that? We have to raise the alarm at how perilous this moment is, at how normalized things that should be not just abnormal but hideous to us have become. You know, when they banned The Life of Rosa Parks, we were like, “This is outrageous.” And now it’s like, yeah, there were just another 10,000 titles pulled off shelves.

[The Life of Rosa Parks by Kathleen Connors (Gareth Stevens Classroom, 2013) was pulled from second grade classrooms in the Duval County public school district in Florida in 2022.]

I’m a Shakespearean actor, paid for it as well. In schools in Florida, they will not do Shakespeare because of how many gender-reversed roles there are in Shakespeare plays. So they will do excerpts.

JESSICA: Thank you, Nadine. I’m going to introduce myself. I’m the director of business affairs for the DG, and I do a lot of advocacy work. I also help in creating resources for educators, and for our members, to help advocate for their rights in the industry.

We’re all here because we love theatre and its ability to bring people together to tell stories that may not have been told, to be a vehicle for change. We understand that censorship and cancellations aren’t new. They’ve been around for as long as stage plays have been around. But as Nadine has just talked about, there are new trends, and it’s not just angry voices. It’s legislation coming down from our local, our state, our federal governments that we need to start thinking about as we enter this new era.

Today there is proposed, pending, and passed legislation in many states. Nadine, you talked a little bit about the book banning that’s happening in Florida, but is there other legislation that theatre educators should be aware of as they move through this new time?

NADINE: Yeah, bans on drag queens or drag performances. The insinuation is that any time somebody is performing in drag, it is inappropriate for children to be present. So if you bring your child to a play like Twelfth Night, have you brought them to a drag show? Have you exposed them to a dangerous ideology that will play “tug of war” with their gender identity?

In Florida there was a program at a theatre in Orlando, similar to a drag Christmas. They ended up putting on tickets for the first time that no one under 18 was allowed. The governor insisted that law enforcement be present. They left the theatre and said nothing untoward occurred, nothing inappropriate. The governor went after their beverage license anyway, claiming that the language on the ticket was printed too small to be of value, and that even though there was nothing sexually inappropriate, the fact that there were people performing opposite of their gender was sufficient to pull their license. They only just settled with three businesses; one of them was Hamburger Mary’s [a restaurant that presents a “family-friendly drag show”]. People are touting it as a win, but the chilling effect is very real.

The chilling effect is intentionally vague so that it casts a big shadow. The impulse is to go, “I don’t want any problems. I will do the least dangerous thing. I will do the thing that is so far from the line that I can’t get caught up even in their overzealous prosecution.” And slowly, the impact of that, not the actual letter of the law, begins to create the worst kind of censorship, which is self-censorship, where we don’t even permit ourselves to think things or pursue things because of a fear of what that vagueness might ensnare.

In the same way they say sunlight is the best disinfectant, ensure that anything which is vague is made concrete. Say to them: “Would you put in writing why this play is impermissible by law?” Six months from now, that could be the most important document in a lawsuit. Make them be explicit about why. And if you’re in a place where these restrictions aren’t being put and you’re not constrained by them, I would say, make sure that you’re building this into all of your performances.

It’s a time for courage. You might be that person in your school district, in your institution, along the chain who’s going to disrupt people sinking to the path of these resistances.

JESSICA: I think what you highlighted specifically is that schools are where kids are being introduced to ideas and cultures for the first time, and we shouldn’t shy away from introducing them to these cultures and different opinions and different viewpoints and different lifestyles because we’re afraid that they can’t handle it. If anyone can handle it, it’s young minds who haven’t been exposed to the discrimination, the hate, and all those things yet. This is actually a great segue to our next question for you.

[Jessica Lit addresses the lessons students can learn from being exposed to a variety of plays, a subject I introduce in “Censorship on School Stages,” but I also write about the unwelcome lessons the efforts to suppress and censor what students can see or read in secondary school can teach.]

Can you speak about the importance of addressing topics of queer identity, relationships, self-actualization in the classroom? We know that high school and middle school theatre is an entry point for many kids who identify with the LGBTQ+ community. 

NADINE: You know, I am 58. I know, I look good. [Laughter.] I remember being young, being fearful, and being homophobic to try to put people off the trail, especially playing basketball and softball. I had to throw out a lot of diversionary tactics, though not very effectively. So I understand how internalized homophobia shows up as bigotry in the world. And all of that is by way of saying that, I felt an extraordinary amount of isolation. And there are a lot of young people who do not survive that level of isolation. The suicide rate among LGBTQ+ young people is often talked about, but there’s also the homeless rate, the dropout rate, the self-medicating rate, when you have no place you can turn and the only places that you spend the majority of your time, which are school and home, are hostile environments—the world gets very small very fast.

Representation and visibility are literally life-saving. I want to ring the alarm bell so loudly. The dangerous normalization of these hideous laws has created a world in which young people are watching their favorite teachers who created safety for them leave the profession. They’re seeing empty spaces on bookshelves. All of the books are being taken out of classrooms because they haven’t gone through the approval process. Even donating books that reflect different experiences is no longer permitted.

For people who live in other states, start organizing. In Illinois, they passed a ban on book bans. It’s important that there be a countervailing message, and in places where you’re not having to fend off these attacks, go on the offensive and make a big deal. Vilify what’s happening in Florida and other states. We have to take it that seriously and not just wait until the wolf is at the door.

JESSICA: Thank you. I’m actually going to take a question out to those in the room. How many of you have faced challenges when you’re teaching or presenting works? Or had students come to you asking questions about the current legislative landscape that we’re living in? 

A show of hands indicates there are educators present that have experienced this. One educator in a Catholic school speaks on the particular challenges they faced with administration when attempting to cast a transgender child in a production, and navigating bringing works by different artists into the classroom. 

NADINE: The only purpose of this is to create moral panic. It’s a playbook, and it plays out again and again. Because we haven’t gone through the conciliation process required of our history, we have all of these unexamined and unresolved ways of dealing with difference in America that show up episodically as this massive backlash.

There’s a professor at Boston University named Stephen Prothero and he’s written several books. One of them is about this phenomenon. He says the backlash is a lagging indicator of how much progress we’ve made. The only reason they’re going after us is because young LGBTQ+ people are visible, do feel like they have a place in the world, are showing up as their full selves in school, are finding a support network among their teachers. And so, basically, he says, by the time the backlash arrives, the cultural tipping point has already come.

I think of it as a slingshot, where they are grabbing that slingshot and they’re walking us backwards. But what they don’t realize is they’re creating this dynamic tension that will leave their grip. We won’t just go back to where we were when they attacked. We’re going to propel forward into a world that looks much more like one that includes all of us.

Another educator speaks about the experience of dealing with community-wide controversy and issues with their administration over a production of To Kill a Mockingbird.

NADINE: I think we have to come out of the closet and tell these stories, share much more of how these things are happening. Every time we make them shut things down or we make them explain, we also are kind of showing this universe of people how to fight back.

One university in Florida was told they had to take down the university’s equity and inclusion policy. And what they did was they said, “Here’s our former diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. We have been ordered by the state to remove it. So we want you to know that this is no longer our diversity, equity, and inclusion policy.” Of course, then everybody read their diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. 

I’m saying we’ve got to be creative. I love that you keep taking it back to the students and saying, How do we tell this lesson that teaches them how to navigate? Coming up with these ideas and strategies that don’t put students in the position of, “Hey, I’m going to defend you, I’m going to risk it all to defend you,” which is one instinct, but rather, “You’re not powerless in the face of this. They can’t stop your voice. They can’t stop your TikTok. They can’t stop your message online. Here’s the phone call to PEN America, you may go to the Dramatist Legal Defense Fund, or here are the articles that have been written that can contextualize this. Here’s the background on these organizations that are systematically going after art.” By showing them these things, I think they’re going to emerge into society as people who don’t quietly capitulate. They want you to be fearful.

NADINE: Even though young people are experiencing these really ugly, fascistic impulses that are curtailing their rights, how you guide them in those moments may produce more of what we need in this world.

Another educator speaks on their experiences with censorship, community backlash, and having books and plays removed from their school’s library system after attempting to add them to the curriculum. 

NADINE: We started a group called Parenting with Pride precisely because [of issues like these]. One of the things I encourage is to be proactive and work with the PTA, work with the parents’ groups, work with the parents of the students in whatever you’re creating. And say, “Listen, I don’t know if you’re even watching these timelines, but this atmosphere has developed where one parent will complain on opening night, try and shut down all of the hard work of your kid, and we really need to be in this together.” Which is a thing you probably never would have had to do or think about, but in this atmosphere, we have to go on the offense and we have to engage parents so that it’s not a mom consciously defending the virtues of children from sinister forces.

JESSICA: I want to speak a little bit about the First Amendment. It is different in high schools and middle schools than it is on college campuses, because your students are minors. But the Supreme Court has said that students and teachers do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. That is from Tinker v. Des Moines [I describe this case briefly in my 2023 post]. It’s a well-established freedom in our country.

I want to encourage all of you to use your voices to speak up, because while there is limited academic freedom, school boards and school administrations have a wider discretion in determining what kinds of materials can be taught. Discretion does not mean that they can censor something because they’re hostile to the ideas that are presented. There has to be a legitimate educational purpose for why they are removing or moving something.

I’ll take the example of evolution. They may say, you know what, maybe fifth graders aren’t prepared to understand this concept so we’re going to move it to the eighth grade curriculum. That’s okay, but to say we’re not going to teach evolution because we don’t believe in evolution, we don’t understand evolution—that’s unacceptable.

Also, speaking about personal freedom as it relates to you as teachers: Nadine talked about organizing in your community, using your voice outside of schools. They can only really go after you if what you are doing outside of school is substantially and materially disrupting what’s happening in schools. So if you are going on your social media, you are organizing in your communities and creating protests outside of the school grounds or encouraging your students to do the same, you have that right under the First Amendment. I really want to make sure that you’re aware of that. Even though you are in a different situation with schools, it doesn’t mean that you’re now completely eradicated of your First Amendment rights. It’s something to really think about as you move forward.

And creating allies, not just with your parents and the kids, but within your community. One of the things that DLDF has done is rally people to attend school board meetings. Not just parents, but members of the community or people who care. Recently there was a cancellation of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in Ohio. We put out a statement, and many people attended a virtual school board meeting. The show went back on. It wasn’t parents that were even local to Ohio. It was people who care about theatre, people who care about seeing different points of views.

When these things happen, don’t think that you are isolated. Don’t think you’re alone. Think about the educators who are sitting here today. Think about the work that Equality Florida is doing. Come talk to us at the DG. We will do everything we can to help. We put out many statements, but we also have tried to help students find different venues to put a show on. There are resources available for you. Take advantage of them.

It’s a scary time, but the louder we can be, the better.  

To find out more about the Dramatists Guild, including the rights theatre writers have against censorship and cancellation of their work, visit www.dramatistsguild.com.

To find out more about the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund [DLDF], find out how to support this work, or to reach out regarding additional resources including “Dramatic Changes: A Toolkit for Producing Stage Works on College Campuses in Turbulent Times,” visit www.thedldf.org.

To learn more about Equality Florida, find out how to support this work, or to reach out regarding additional resources, visit http://equalityflorida.org/.

[Jordan Stovall/Wanda Whatever (they/them) is a playwright, arts administrator, queer events producer, and drag artist based in London.  They presently serve as the Director of Outreach & Institutional Partnerships for the Dramatists Guild, where they have worked since January 2016.

[Stovall’s plays have been shortlisted and selected as Finalists for the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Festival and Relentless Award, among others.  They have studied playwriting and have received artistic mentoring from the likes of Tina Howe, Tanika Gupta, Ola Animashawun, Deborah Zoe Laufer, Michele Lowe, Stefanie Zadravec, Gary Garrison, and more.  

[Stun premièred at The Cockpit Theatre in London after several developmental public showcases in the U.S. and U.K.; corpus premièred at the Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York following its showing at the Manhattan Reading Competition; Aviary premièred at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama after a showing as part of LGBTQ+ Tiny Shows at Omnibus Theatre.  They are a Resident of the Hamilton Project IX at the Barn Arts Collective.

[As a drag artist, Stovall is the founder and executive producer of the Time Out London Award-Nominated Boulangerie: A Queer Variety Show, and FUSSY, a bi-monthly ongoing party and series of queer community gatherings/arts-focused events at Dalston Superstore (formerly in residence at The Yard Theater, Hackney Wick).  

[They can be seen on upcoming miniseries Pistol on FX directed by Danny Boyle and Meet the Richardsons (BBC Studios).  They have performed in Bushwig NYC and Bushwig Berlin festivals, Sink the Pink, were a finalist in Season 1 and winner of the Christmas edition of drag competition The Gold Rush at The Glory.  They regularly perform in multiple venues across London (Dalston Superstore, Royal Vauxhall Tavern, The White Swan, etc.), as well as New York venues such as The Rosemont, Hardware, Club Cumming, Metropolitan, The Duplex, The West End, and more.

[They are Program Manager for the New Visions Fellowship, founding Co-Administrator for End of Play, National Playwriting Month, and founding Executive Administrator of the Dramatists Guild Institute.

[Stovall has an MFA in Writing in the Stage and Broadcast Media from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London (2019) and a BA in Theatre/Performing Arts from Florida’s University of Tampa (2011).

[Allison Considine, who wrote the introduction to this dialogue transcript, is the senior editor of American Theatre.  She studied literature and cultural studies and theater arts at New York City’s Pace University.  She is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor whose writing has appeared in American Theatre magazine, Backstage, Broadway Style Guide, and TDF Stages.  She contributed to the book American Theatre Wing, An Oral History: 100 Years, 100 Voices, 100 Million Miracles (American Theatre Wing, 2018), a 100-year history on the celebrated organization behind the Tony Awards.

[After college, Considine took a sidestep from acting and turned her attention to arts journalism, which allows her to explore the creative process behind the stage magic.  She enjoys connecting with emerging theater professionals educators about theater training—and, of course, seeing it all come together on stage.]

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.]