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| Ana Mota addresses the GPISD School Board |
Anyway, the production of the well-known musical Little
Shop of Horrors at South Grand Prairie High School in Texas was canceled
earlier this month. Curmie learned about
it from Chris Peterson’s post on the OnStage Blog on October 11. He references an
Instagram post by Ana Mota (exactly when that was posted, Curmie can’t say, but it was after
the 6th and before the 11th).
So, let’s let Ms. Mota tell the story (slightly edited):
On October 1st, 2026, I earned the role of Seymour [the male lead] in our school musical, Little Shop of Horrors. I had the same opportunity as everyone else did and was ultimately decided to be the best fit for the role.
On Tuesday, October 6th, I was informed that I will no longer be allowed to portray this role due to a decision made by the district and its legal team concerning Senate Bill 12. For those unaware. SB12 prohibits sexually oriented performances on public property in the presence of anyone under 18….
This would be a good time to invoke the oft-repeated advice
of Popehat’s Ken White: that educational institutions shouldn’t hire their
lawyers from the back of a bait shop.
Okay, back to Ms. Mota:
In the end, their compromise was to change the musical altogether…. The district… decided to take extreme caution, removing me from the role. In turn, they violated Title 9; I was excluded from participation in an educational program receiving Federal financial assistance because I am female.
Well, a couple of things: First, Mota wasn’t excluded from participation; she was offered to share the female lead, Audrey, with the girl originally cast in the role, Criselle Zamarripa. Secondly, Curmie isn’t a lawyer, so he has no opinion on the validity of a Title 9 case (but see below).
But Mota’s calling attention to the district’s actions is
particularly noteworthy. Even if we were
to accept the dubious proposition that it’s somehow inappropriate to have Mota
play Seymour even though the director thought she’d be the best performer for
the role, we’re left with problems. If
the district really thought they had a case, they’d just move forward, with erstwhile understudy Adam Portales moving into the role of Seymour. Ana
Mota could share the role of Audrey with Zamarripa… or not. That would be her decision.
Instead, the powers that be scrapped the show altogether,
thereby stripping the entire cast of their opportunities to appear in the
musical. Sure, they can re-audition and
hope to be cast in the substitute show, Frozen. But the roles are different: it’s certainly
likely that the leads in Little Shop would be cast in Frozen, but
not necessarily in major roles. And
some, we might reasonably suspect, wouldn’t be interested in doing that show, because
they don’t like the show or they’ve become disillusioned by the process, or,
well, whatever.
Changing the play for no discernible reason also presents the
possibility that the problem wasn’t really that a girl was going to play
Seymour, but that the show was Little Shop. Indeed, the Broadway World article cites the District’s official statement:
In the musical, a romantic relationship develops between the two main characters. When District leadership learned of this issue and in consideration of themes in the musical involving an abusive relationship, a decision was made to pull that production and find something more appropriate. This decision was made in light of the District’s ongoing effort to ensure its programs remain consistent with Senate Bill 12 and all applicable law.
Even apart from the self-righteous inanity of this
statement, it does, of course, pre-suppose that no one in “District leadership”
has ever seen Little Shop on stage or screen, and that a musical that
has been performed on literally thousands of high school stages across the
country is somehow problematic. There
are, as of this writing, over 180 licensed productions of
the show in the works. It’s difficult to
determine how many of these are high school productions: many are listed by the
name of the venue, for example, but at least 75 can be clearly identified as
school or youth theatres. The latest
Playbill listing Curmie can find of the most popular shows in high schools across the
country is from four years ago; Little Shop ranks fourth among full-length
musicals.
Side note: when Curmie’s Beloved Spouse directed the musical
in small-town Iowa thirty-something years ago, there was some parent who
protested that the show was anti-Christian or something because of Audrey II,
the plant that feeds on human blood. There’s
always someone. Some school
administrators are smart enough to ignore the noise. Some, not all.
Before we go any further, Gentle Reader, let’s be clear
about one point in particular. Cross-casting
has been a part of theatre since its origins.
Antigone, Helen, and Athena were originally played by male actors. So were Juliet, Gertrude, and Rosalind. This last is of course particularly
interesting. When Curmie posted a link
on his personal page to one of Howard Sherman’s pieces about the brouhaha at GPISD, a dear friend from a professional organization wrote,
in part, “Wonder what they’d do about ‘As You Like It.’ Let’s censor
Shakespeare.”
If you’re not Shakespeare aficionado, Gentle Reader, that’s
the play in which, in the original production, a male actor played Rosalind,
who then dressed as a man, Ganymede, to go off into the Forest of Arden, where she
pretended to be… erm… herself to teach her beloved Orlando how to woo her: a
man playing a woman playing a man playing a woman. Importantly, no matter who plays Rosalind,
that actor will be playing a character of the opposite gender at some point.
Moreover, there are a number of male characters often if not
indeed usually played by women: Peter Pan, Ariel in The Tempest, and, in
opera, Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, to name but a few. Curmie recently saw a college production of Into
the Woods in which Jack (of beanstalk fame) was played by a woman. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Mota has also
played Jack in that show, at the same school she now attends! One suspects that boulders did not fall from
the skies nor chasms open in the earth’s crust despite the outrageousness of
the casting.
Of course, especially at the high school level, there are
almost always more girls than boys auditioning, and more often than not there
are also more male than female roles. Curmie
has been quite open about the fact that when he first started out (most theatre
folks begin as actors), if he was the fifth best guy auditioning, he’d be cast;
the same level of skill would have made him the tenth-best woman… for four
roles. Filling in with girls/women who
can act is generally a better strategy than using a considerably weaker actor
just because he’s got the right kind of dangly bits.
Indeed, anyone who knows the first thing about educational
theatre, especially at the secondary school level, understands this phenomenon. Show Curmie a high school theatre director
who says they’ve never cast a girl as a guy, and he’ll show you someone who
hasn’t been around very long… or a liar.
This is one reason why the statement of support for the students by Jay Gerlach, the Executive Director of Educational Theatre
Association, carries so much weight… or ought to do so:
Portraying a character whose experiences or identity differ from one’s own is fundamental to theatre education. We ask students to consider another perspective, understand another person’s motivations, and imagine a life beyond their own. Those are lessons worth teaching. A student’s portrayal of a character of another gender should not, by itself, cost that student a role or an entire company its production.
Yeah, what he said.
To be fair, Seymour isn’t exactly a walk-on or even a chorus
part, nor is it traditionally a “breeches role,” but it really doesn’t matter if
the actor is male or female. Indeed,
in his most recent post on the issue, Sherman writes that “the licensing house MTI [Music Theatre International] permits
cross-gender casting so long as the gender of the character remains as written.” Sometimes matters of race, gender, body type,
and so on are important. This isn’t one
of those times.
Moreover, whereas Curmie was never a star debater in high
school or college, he does remember that the presumption always rests with the status
quo. Think instant replay in a
football game. Whatever the referee
called is what the ruling is going to be unless there is “clear and convincing
evidence” to the contrary. That role is,
or at the very least should be, Mota’s until and unless there is a demonstrable
reason why it shouldn’t be, Curmie is
going to trust the director of the show to cast the production in such a way as
to make for the best possible production.
But even if the arguments are only equal, she plays Seymour.
We all initially assumed that the district’s decision was based
on the anti-drag legislation from 2023.
At the board meeting of on October 15, board president Emily Liles
invoked the identically named (SB12) anti-DEI bill from 2025 as the basis for
Mota’s removal from the role. Apparently
there’s a law, or at least a tradition, in Texas that any bill designated SB12
must be remarkably stupid, over-broad to the extent that it is particularly
susceptible to selective enforcement, and based on paranoid delusions about the
presumed horrors of a just and open society. <Sigh.>
Whether the district just wasn’t clear at the beginning, or
whether they abandoned one SB12 for another when people pointed out that they really
didn’t need to follow a law that was twice ruled unconstitutional is a matter of conjecture. Well, the whole
business about “a romantic relationship” in their official proclamation sure
does make it sound like they’re just a gaggle of sheltered bigots, but that
might conceivably not be true.
What is definitely true is that Mota challenged the board: “I
ask that you look at the exact wording of Senate Bill 12 and find what is it in
that bill that prevents me from portraying a male role in a theatrical context.” Her mom, Nancy Jimenez-Mota, also got into the act: “What part of SB 12 are
you referring to? How are you legally
interpreting the law to conclude that my daughter’s role violated whichever SB
12 you are referring to?”
Particularly interesting in this regard is this reporting from
PBS/NPR affiliate KERA:
“Liles did not elaborate on how that law would ban Mota from playing the role…. KERA has also emailed the district asking
what specific part of the law it was complying with and has not received a
response.” It sure does look like Liles
didn’t respond to the demand for specifics.
Curmie strongly suspects that’s because she can’t.
And now there’s an actual Title 9 lawsuit. Mota’s mom describes the decision to move
forward with the case:
I think there’s a time in which we need to stand up for the freedoms granted by the Constitution and for us, this was our time to act. These laws are created with ambiguity to keep us afraid and limited and end up being un-American by limiting our freedom of expression. Even though the alternative of inertia is more attractive and safe than the idea of speaking up, freedom was not carved from silence.
As Curmie said above, he takes no position on the legal
issues. But ethically, everyone involved
in censoring this production deserves to be out of a job at the very least… and
perhaps to be fed to Audrey II.
Curmie generally considers himself pretty proficient at
snark, but he yields to Howard Sherman on this one. He closes the second of his three articles on
this case thusly: “Auditions have not yet been held for South Grand Prairie
High’s production of Frozen. There is no word on how the school board
will rule on the gender identities of the snowman Olaf or the reindeer Sven.”
Ana Mota says she’ll audition. She’s likely to get Anna or Elsa, but it would somehow be fitting if she landed Olaf or Sven.
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