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| The Offending Scene... we think |
There have been, no doubt, dozens of cases over the past few
years that Curmie missed… but there are a fair number he’s chronicled
here. In chronological order (in order
of Curmie’s posts, not necessarily when stuff happened): Kismet in PA,
Legally Blonde in OH,
All Shook Up in UT,
Almost, Maine in NC and Spamalot in PA,
Indecent in FL,
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in OH,
The Addams Family Musical in PA,
and Dog Sees God in CA and The Laramie Project in AZ…
and now The Crucible in GA.
What’s particularly intriguing about this one is that no one
is really sure why the show was cancelled after a single performance. Or, rather, the only thing we know with any
certainty is that someone, almost certainly the school’s
administration, is flat-out lying.
Curmie tends to learn about these incidents through one of
three sources, all of whom have written about this one: Howard Sherman,
Chris Peterson at the OnStage blog, and Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms. (Curmie hasn’t
contributed as much as a comment on EA for months since it took a hard turn
from its titular ethics orientation to GOP propaganda, but he suspected that
Jack might weigh in on this one.)
Here’s what we know for sure: a production of Arthur
Miller’s McCarthyism-inspired play was scheduled for two performances at Fannin
County High School in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and was cancelled after opening
night. We know, also, that the original director
(a teacher?) was fired/forced to resign a couple of weeks before the show was
to open, leaving a high school student in charge. This much is about as far as we can go
without fear of propagating untruths.
Well, there’s one more thing that we’ll get to in a moment, Gentle
Reader…
We do have the school’s official statement on the affair. Officials claim that
“after Friday night’s performance of The Crucible, we received several
complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play. Upon investigation, we learned that the
performance did not reflect the original script.” The likelihood that the school’s statement is
an outright lie may be a little short of ontological certitude, but it’s pretty
damned close.
You will notice, Gentle Reader, that no specifics about the
alleged violation are forthcoming. The
students say they didn’t add, delete, or change any words, and there has been
no assertion to the contrary by the administration. That, one suspects, is because such a
statement could too easily be shot down.
Better to leave it open-ended and hope the opposition—in this case, the
students—admits to something.
Well, that happened… sort of. The production did open with a scene of the
girls dancing in the woods, enacting a moment that was only narrated in the
script. One might suppose that you could
argue that the scene represents a change in the script, but it’s pretty much of
a stretch. It’s only fair to point out
that Jack Marshall writes that a director at the American Century Theater
(where Marshall was Artistic Director) wanted to do precisely what the Fannin
County students did, but was refused by both Dramatists Play Service and Arthur
Miller himself. There’s no reason to
doubt this testimony, but professional and amateur contracts are different (Curmie
has handled both), and things may be different since Miller’s death 20 years
ago.
Curmie, who directed about 50 educational theatre
productions over six different decades, confesses he would never have even
considered the possibility that he’d need permission to stage that scene… and
he’s asked permission for a lot of trivial changes: changing “God dammit” to
just “Dammit” for a production at a church-related college, changing the title
of a Greek tragedy to the one we’d been using in publicity for the new season
before deciding on a translation that used a less common Anglicization of the
title, and so on.
More to the point, perhaps: Curmie has read, taught, and
seen The Crucible multiple times, and he wouldn’t have caught the
alleged departure from the text, or at least wouldn’t have thought it
noteworthy in legal terms. He might have
been skeptical of the aesthetic choice, but that’s a different matter. And you’re going to tell me that not one, but
several, spectators at a high school production in a tiny town in
northern Georgia caught that supposed breach of contract and were sufficiently
incensed that they called the principal that night? And that the “investigation” took only a
couple of hours? Curmie detects a
distinct whiff of eau de cow pasture.
It’s also important to point out that terms like “as
written” in licensing agreements not only need not, but literally cannot mean
that literally everything in the staging must be exactly as prescribed. Acting editions differ from published
editions. The latter version is what the
playwright wrote; the former is generally transcribed by the stage manager of
the original production. Thus, for
example, a character may be described physically according to what the actor in
the Broadway show looked like; Broadway Licensing isn’t going to come after you
if the “beautiful blonde” of a script is played by a beautiful redhead (or a
beautiful Latina, Asian, or black woman, for that matter) unless there’s
something in the script that demands that she be blonde.
Curmie remembers seeing a production of The Crucible
performed in the round. So what? Well, the opening stage direction in the acting edition says “One emphatic source of light is at the left.” There is no left or right in arena
staging. Is DPS going to forbid all but
proscenium productions? Of course not; they
make their money, and their clients’ money, by getting as many legitimate
productions as they can. Some discretion
is mandatory. (Note also that the
opening sequence in the acting edition is considerably more detailed than in
the regular published form.)
The situation is aggravated by the fact that, according to
Howard Sherman, two different parents contacted Broadway Licensing (now the
parent company of Dramatists Play Service), and both were told that the
licensing company did not shut the production down and would have been very
unlikely to have done so, especially if the opening scene were removed. You can hear both ends of one of those
conversations here. (We’ll casually avoid talking about the
ethics and legalities of recording a phone conversation without the consent of
the other person on the line.)
Sherman reports that students were initially told that the
second performance was cancelled because of parental complaints that the show
was “evil and disgusting and things like that.”
Fannin County is almost too stereotypical a place for this to happen:
rural (not many county seats in the country with fewer than 1300 residents),
overwhelmingly white (93% white and not Hispanic/Latino),
overwhelmingly Christian, especially Protestant (over half the county’s congregations are Southern Baptist);
MAGA (Donald Trump got over 82% of the vote in the ’24 election). It is, in other words, precisely the kind of
place where brie-eating, Chablis-sipping, clove-cigarette-smoking elitists (or,
indeed, anyone with a little knowledge of the world) would suspect the locals would get
their collective skivvies in a twist over a high school production of an American
classic.
And then, as if by magic, the complaint changed to a
strained argument about production rights.
Oh, by the way, Caden Gerald,
who played the leading role of John Proctor, says in a video posted to Facebook
that administrators saw the scene in question “every morning that we ran it.”
Curmie finds it difficult to argue with Chris Peterson’s conclusion
that the administration “didn’t stop the play to protect a license. They
stopped it to quiet the backlash. They threw their students under the bus for
the sake of avoiding Facebook drama.”
Someone is lying. All
the students, their parents, and two customer service reps from DPS… or a
chickenshit principal (the usual apologies for redundancy). That seems like an easy call to Curmie.
But there’s one more point to make. Even if the administration is telling the
truth, they are still 100% responsible for the fuck-up and for the
nation-wide embarrassment wrought upon their school. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it
was appropriate to fire the original director, and that there are legitimate
reasons for not making the details known.
Let’s assume, also, that the students are lying about administrators’
seeing rehearsals, about being told the play was shut down because of content
complaints, and about the administration only discovering (as opposed to
announcing) the alleged violation two days after cancelling the second night.
It’s still the school’s fault. It is the responsibility of the school, not of
a high school senior, to comply with the licensing agreement. In the absence of a responsible adult
director, the school had an obligation to ensure that someone in a position to
speak for the school be able to sign off on the production’s adherence to the
licensing agreement. If someone from the
school saw even a single rehearsal, it was that person’s responsibility to ask
the simple question, “did you change anything?”
If Caden Gerald is lying, and no one from the administration saw any
rehearsals, they bloody well should have.
The Crucible remains in the canon and on stages throughout the country because it speaks to conditions far beyond colonial Massachusetts or even mid-century hysteria about the Red Menace. It’s about the problems created when people abandon truth and justice in order to pander to the mob. To say that the actions of Principal Scott Ramsey and his minions in shutting down the production is thus deeply ironic is to err on the side of understatement.
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