One of Curmie’s best sources for information about such
cases, going back to 2014,
is Howard Sherman. His blog, now called
Downstage Center, migrated to Substack back in July. This month, Sherman has written about four (!)
cancelations of high school shows. That’s
a lot, needless to say. Curmie intends
to write about all four. He’s decided to
start with what he considers the least problematic of the stories (it’s bad
enough, though) and move up to progressively stupider and less excusable examples.
Anyway, writing about all four is going to take a while and make for a very long blog post, indeed… so: each story gets its own post. Curmie has decided to start with what he considers the least problematic situation and move up to the most colossally stupid. You are free, Gentle Reader, to disagree with either the strategy or the ordering, but we’re doing the four stories in this order: The Wave at Grunin Performing Arts Academy in Toms River, New Jersey, then Flashdance at Watertown HS in Wisconsin, She Kills Monsters at Copley HS in Ohio, and finally Little Shop of Horrors at South Grand Prairie High School in Texas.
A good way to open this discussion is by quoting the intro
to Sherman’s series:
High school theatre productions are in rehearsal across the country, so it’s unfortunately inevitable that in a few cases, school theatre censorship rears its head as well. That these incidents all arose in the run up to the annual Banned Books Week is sadly fitting, especially when there is no Banned Plays Week to draw attention to this related, but separate, example of censorship in high schools.
So, let’s talk about The Wave. We’re leading with this one primarily because Curmie knows nothing about the show other than what appears in Sherman’s article and what can be gleaned from a change.org petition. Curmie quotes here from the latter:
The Wave is about a real incident that happened in a highschool in 1967, adapted from a novel into a stage play. It portrays an experiment that a teacher did on his class after they learned about World War II and Nazi Germany to show how people fell for what Hitler told them and how Germans who weren't Nazis didn't notice what was going on. The Wave shows how history can repeat itself when propaganda is presented as something nice and teaches a valuable lesson in individuality and thinking for yourself even when a group of people tells you otherwise.
The play was scheduled to be performed during School
Violence Awareness Week, i.e., October 19-23. Sherman quotes from the Asbury Park Press’s
Ilana Keller that Superintendent Gary L. McDonald wrote that the school wanted to “create a
culture of empathy and acceptance rather than divisiveness,” and was concerned
that the students involved might not “fully understand the complexities of the
material they were set to perform” or “feel the weight of responsibility to
perform it with the sensitivity it requires.”
The first of these is a very odd argument, given that the
play appears to be an examination of anti-Semitism and how such hate-based
ideologies can take hold. Curmie might
have thought that Fascism is rather more divisive than inclusive, and that
therefore critiquing such a movement isn’t really all that bad. This is why he will never be a
high school administrator. Well, that
and worries that Medicare might not cover the required lobotomy.
As for McDonald’s worries about the play being performed for
younger students, the solution appears pretty damned obvious: don’t show it to
them. That’s fundamentally different
from not allowing the high school kids to do the show.
That said, the concern that the students might not grasp the
implications inherent in the show isn’t completely out of line. It’s not an overwhelmingly persuasive
argument and it comes rather too late in the process, but at least it’s not
screaming-into-the-night looney. That’s
why it’s the least objectionable of the quartet of closures in Curmie’s mind.
Significantly, Curmie (because he’d signed that change.org
petition) received an email a few days ago that the show is back on—not for its
original October slot, but “some point in June of 2027.” A link to the petition site led to a page
saying, simply, “Victory!” Whether the
1100+ signatures on that petition mattered at all, we can’t
say, but they couldn’t have hurt. Nor
could the support of the New Jersey Thespians,
the state’s chapter of the Educational Theatre Association, which sponsors the
International Thespian Society, which as of seven years ago had inducted 2.3 million members (including Curmie).
The rationale offered by Grunin Principal Tierney Meeker is at least superficially reasonable,
a variation on what we saw a couple years ago when school officials at Cesar Chavez High School in Phoenix delayed the opening of The Laramie Project by a week “due to
the need for additional time to better prepare our audience and the public for
the seriousness of the play’s content.”
A six-month delay isn’t exactly the same as a one-week
delay, but the perceived need to, in this case, “provide… students with
meaningful educational opportunities, historical context, and access to
resources that will deepen their understanding of the Holocaust, genocide, and
the circumstances that allow prejudice, authoritarianism, and blind obedience
to take hold” does sound familiar… and not entirely unreasonable.
That doesn’t mean that the school acted appropriately. Howard Sherman’s follow-up piece, posted after the administration’s partial reversal, makes a couple of significant points: that the play was already well into rehearsal, and that school officials could have said initially that they were delaying rather than scuttling the production… or even, had the re-instatement been even under consideration, that they were contemplating such an action. While it was important to make these arguments, it’s not like Sherman was opening vast new vistas of understanding: they’re pretty obvious.
Sherman also points out, however, something that might not come immediately to mind, but is just as important: a warning against “over-preparation,” which could actually diminish the play’s impact by taking away any element of surprise. That’s why Ron Willis, one of Curmie’s most important mentors, actively discouraged having his Intro to Theatre classes read a play before seeing it. This preparation is first cousin to the trigger warnings that Curmie wrote about earlier this month: if you know something is coming, you’re anticipating that moment instead of going where the play and production want you to go.
It is also rather condescending to suggest to
high school kids that they can’t really understand a play based on… wait for it…
a classroom exercise for high school kids.
<Sigh.> There are problems here... not as severe as those in the upcoming posts, but bad enough.
Anyway, there’s essay #1 in our series of 4. Watch this space!
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