Three Stories from the OnStageBlog, Part 1: High School

The recent writer’s block and attendant dearth of posts is when Curmie turns to familiar topics… like theatre, for example.  There will be, I hope, a more complex piece forthcoming, triggered by a thought-provoking editorial a while back by Joel Grey in the New York Times.  For right now, though, it’s three stories from this fall that appeared on the OnStageBlog site.  Curmie is going to take two posts to cover the three stories—two here, one to come—lest the posts get too long even by Curmie’s standards.

A scene from the Dog Sees God dress rehearsal

The first two, from the world of high school theatre, are, as Stevie Nicks might have said, hauntingly familiar.  We start with Santa Rosa High School in California, where school officials shut down a production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead after opening night, capitulating to complaints that play is “obscene” and “offensive.”  The complainants were, of course, unidentified.  They always are.

Curmie read Bert V. Royal’s dark comedy, which imagines the Peanuts kids as dysfunctional teenagers, not long after its first production in 2004, and saw a production of it a couple of years ago.  He admits that he found it more vulgar than iconoclastic, more pretentious than profound, and frankly rather boring.  But it got great reviews from a lot of New York publications.  More importantly, small-town sexagenarian curmudgeons aren’t exactly the play’s target audience.  You know who it resonates with?  Adolescents and post-adolescents.  Go figure.

So… is Dog Sees God “obscene” or “offensive”?  Maybe.  After all, one of those reviews calls it “raunchy,” and the Dramatists Play Service blurb (linked above) suggests that “Drug use, suicide, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion and sexual identity collide and careen…”  All that stuff does in fact appear on stage, but Curmie doesn’t remember ever finding anything offensive, per se.  Of course, he’s not easily offended, and he’s not the parent of a teenager, so he may be missing something. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the parents of all the students involved in the production had been informed of the play’s content and had given their consent for their children to participate.  Ah, but you see, the school hadn’t warned the parents of other kids.  Oh, bloody hell.  And of course, the decision to shut the play down had been “not made out of censorship but out of caution and concern.”  Translation, if you’re not familiar with educational bureaucracy-speak, Gentle Reader: “we absolutely censored the play because we’re afraid of idiots who are unwilling to stand for their beliefs openly.”

The point here is that some caution might be appropriate, but the time to impose any restrictions is much earlier than opening night: before spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on scripts, royalties, sets, costumes, advertising, and all the other expenses involved in producing a play, and before the thousands of person-hours spent by faculty and students in rehearsal and in technical support.  It’s also worth noting, as Chris Peterson does in the article linked above, that another school in the same district did the play two years ago, placing second in a high school theatre festival. 

Given the fact that the cancelation was apparently ordered by district officials rather than by, say the school’s principal, that’s a rather significant indictment of the decision-makers.  If the previous production was “obscene,” then this one should not have been allowed to proceed (note: the theatre teacher didn’t write a personal check for the royalties).  If the earlier show was deemed acceptable, then the board is clearly signaling that they will be swayed by a heckler’s veto.  Not a good look.

Theatre people being a somewhat canny lot not given to submitting to authoritarian stupidity, the company proceeded to find another venue, the privately owned Mercury Theater in nearby Petaluma, whose owners volunteered their space after hearing of the cancellation.  (Hats off to them!)  They did two shows there, at least one of which was sold out to the point of turning people away.

The good news, such as it is, is that the board backed down, at least somewhat, following community uproar and nationwide humiliation upon reconsideration.  Their compromise solution, that the play could continue but only to audiences over 16, would have made sense as an initial decision, provided, of course, that those under 16 could see the show with parental approval (or perhaps if accompanied by a parent).  It’s unclear whether Santa Rosa High includes 9th graders or not.  If it does, then there’s a reasonable chance that 15-year-old freshmen could work the show but wouldn’t be allowed to buy a ticket. 

This, alas, wouldn’t surprise Curmie.  School boards do all too often represent the perfect storm at the nexus of authoritarian impulses and intellectual cowardice.  Quoting Paul McCartney this time: “La la how the life goes on.”

Curmie was tempted to cite yet another popular song from decades ago to introduce the second OnStage article in question.  But with all due respect to Herman’s Hermits, “Second verse, same as the first” isn’t quite accurate, although it’s pretty close.  There are indeed similarities between the Santa Rosa situation and one at Cesar Chavez High School in Phoenix.  

In the latter case, officials from the Phoenix Union High School District delayed the opening of the school’s production of The Laramie Project only hours before the scheduled opening, citing “the need for additional time to better prepare our audience and the public for the seriousness of the play’s content. So there’s something akin to censorship by a school board who should have done their jobs earlier in the process.  A little communication between the theatre director and district officials would have gone a long way.

Here’s where Curmie’s profession may get in the way a little: no one in my line of work doesn’t know that The Laramie Project is about the torture and murder of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie in 1998 (well, Curmie had to look up the date, but you get the idea, Gentle Reader).  The play, constructed by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, consists of statements by Laramie residents, company members’ journal entries, and news reports, all transcribed verbatim and presented by a small group of actors, each of whom play several roles. 

But, as Curmie is reminded every time he and Beloved Spouse watch the Macy’s or Rose Parades, not everyone is expected to know everything: “Who the hell is that country singer who’s apparently so popular?”  So it’s not exactly dereliction of duty for school officials not to recognize the title of the play.  True, given the fact that reading as much as a one-sentence description of The Laramie Project would tell administrators pretty much all they’d need to know, that level of supervision doesn’t seem overburdening.  And if students’ claim that the board had initially signed off on the project is accurate (as opposed to the board not explicitly forbidding the show), then there’s a real problem.

Still, the theatre faculty certainly should have known that the material might require a warning to prospective audience members; that they didn’t initially provide one or (apparently) consult with the board doesn’t show them in the best of light.

Students, of course, started throwing around words like “censorship.”  But the board’s actual press release doesn’t seem outrageous.  Here’s part of that statement:

The themes and language in the play need additional acknowledgments and disclaimers for families and students in attendance. Many of our students have younger siblings, and we must properly inform families about the content they are going to see so they can make informed decisions about whether younger family members attend. In addition, we want to ensure proper mental health support is in place for those in the audience who may have strong feelings about the play’s contents.

That’s fine if they meant it, and if they were really talking about a delay rather than a cancellation… and it turns out they were.  The play went on a week after the scheduled opening.  According to one report, it was unaltered, although the director had apparently agreed to excise “bad language”  (over the strenuous, and absolutely legitimate objections of many of the students involved: “If you change all the language that was said, is it really even a hate crime anymore? You're censoring it. These real things were said about this person that died because of a hate crime.”)  It is unclear (to Curmie, at least) whether the bowdlerization ultimately occurred, or, if so, if it was approved by the rights-holders.

It seems that the production was originally scheduled for only a single performance.  That seems odd, but plausible.  If that’s the case, then the single show a week after schedule with appropriate content warnings almost, almost, solves the problem.  The good news, of course, is that there aren’t a lot of high school productions that get nationwide publicity.  We take our triumphs where they come.

Stuck in the Middle. With You?

 

Curmie was never a huge fan of the Scottish folk-rock group Stealers Wheel (although he really liked some of Gerry Rafferty’s solo efforts a little later). The band’s biggest hit, “Stuck in the Middle with You,” however, is truly a classic. Curmie hears it not infrequently on the local oldies station and on Spotify. Lyrics like “Trying to make some sense of it all / But I can see that it makes no sense at all” seem to resonate even more now than they did when Curmie was an adolescent over 50 years ago. But the chorus—“Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / Stuck in the middle with you”—is what virtually everyone of Curmie’s generation remembers. 

The clowns and jokers were apparently intended to be representative of music industry moguls and hangers-on (hey, if you can’t trust Wikipedia, who can you trust?), but they certainly serve as an apt description of the current practice of censorious asshats at both ends of the political spectrum. Curmie isn’t exactly “in the middle,” but he would be happy to be “with you,” Gentle Reader, in noticing that there are a lot a clowns to our left and jokers to our right. Problems is, they’re a fair bit more insidious than those terms suggest. Curmie’s post from a little over three weeks ago seems to have barely scratched the surface, so here are a few more stories about freedom of expression, presented in the order Curmie became aware of them (not necessarily in actual chronological order). 

At the Smithsonian. Last month, a group of students from Greenville, SC’s Our Lady of the Rosary School visited The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They wore matching blue beanies, in part to be able to identify each other more readily as they moved around the museum. Thing is, the beanie bore the inscription “Rosary PRO-LIFE.” They had apparently worn the hats while attending pro-life rally shortly before visiting the museum. 

There’s a slight problem there, as kids that age don’t yet have the discernment to make an intelligent personal choice about a controversial issue. They’re little more that props for their parents’ and their school’s ethical/political stance. (Happens all the time from every possible socio-political perspective, of course.) There’s a considerably bigger problem, however, if allegations made by the American Center for Law and Justice, which represents the children’s parents, have any validity. 

The ACLJ claims that museum staff verbally abused the kids and claimed the museum was a “neutral zone” where religious and political messages are forbidden; the kids were thrown out of the museum. ACLJ Executive Director Jordan Sekulow asserts that “The employee who ultimately forced the students to leave the museum was rubbing his hands together in glee as they exited the building.” No, Curmie doesn’t believe that museum employees behave like the villains in 19th-century melodramas, but the museum authorities don’t deny the ejection, and claim to have initiated “immediate training to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of incident.” 

Sekulow argues that museum staff’s actions constitute “a clear and egregious abuse of the First Amendment, which protects their right to free speech without government interference, and we are ready to take action. A government institution cannot censor an individual's speech, much less speech from the inherently Christian pro-life position.” Wow. The first sentence is absolutely correct; the government, represented by the museum employees, overstepped. Bigtime. The second sentence, including the “much less” business—well, that seems to suggest that Sekulow thinks people who agree with him have more freedom of speech rights than do we mere mortals who disagree with him on a particular issue. Sekulow is a self-righteous ass, but he’s also right that the museum staff behaved outrageously, and that matters more. 

In Lansing, KS. The Laramie Project, a documentary theatre text, i.e., one which is edited rather than written by its creators, had been one of three texts in the curriculum in the high school’s Social Justice Expository Unit in the senior-level English Composition class. The play, produced by the Tectonic Theater project, consists exclusively of “found material”: direct transcripts of interviews, news reports, etc., in the aftermath of the murder of Matthew Shepherd, apparently simply for being gay. 

It appears that the entire unit, which also included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's essay “We Should All Be Feminists” and the 2016 documentary “13th,” has been scrubbed from the curriculum, despite a committee recommendation that the material remain. That’s because the school board, like so many others, is comprised of members who are lazy, guided more by political affiliation than by any real interest in education, and (probably) stupid. 

The impetus for the removal came from a student’s mother, Kirsten Workman, whose initial objection was that the material was being taught in an English class instead of a history class. Two comments: 1). She’s almost certainly lying. She doesn’t want anything about race or sexual identification taught anywhere. 2). Literature is about something. That may not be true of what one of Curmie’s friends calls “beach novels” (and Curmie likes them as much as the next person does) but higher-end fiction and nonfiction alike have something to say about the world. You can’t read Shakespeare or Dickens or Kafka without thinking about the implications of the worlds they describe… that’s kind of the point. 

Anyway, there were the usual accusations about the right’s current bogeyman, Critical Race Theory, which according to Workman creates students “trained to feel like victims and to be hopeless that they can change social justice or change injustice because we're not teaching them about the tools they have right there at their disposal to make a difference.” Curmie doubts that anything bearing much resemblance to CRT was in fact being taught, but even if it were, the whole point of the theory is that we as a society need to address these issues. Encouraging helplessness couldn’t be further from the reality of the situation. 

Tectonic’s Artistic Director, Moisés Kaufman, has made copies of the script of The Laramie Project available for free to any Lansing student who requests one, and the censorial impulse may indeed have backfired. Seriously, Gentle Reader, when you were an adolescent, which would you have been more likely to read (and Curmie means really read): a class assignment or a free book the grown-ups tell you is too naughty for your consumption? 

Curmie isn’t necessarily predicting this result, but the situation does seem somewhat akin to the political aftermath of the Dobbs ruling. Back in May, Curmie suggested that the “red wave” everyone was predicting would happen in the November elections might not be as overwhelming as the journalistic chattering class would have had us believe. Who was right? 

The Iowa Senate. There are many horrible things about Iowa Senate Bill 1145, which was introduced a couple of weeks ago (it’s in committee hearings now). Most of these, as Peter Greene points out in the article linked above, have to do with mandatory reporting of any students who as much as ponder whether their actual sexual identity matches the plumbing they were born with. Curmie is always uncomfortable with mandatory reporting laws—one of the benefits of retirement is that he is no longer bound by Title 9 restrictions and can exercise judgment on whether or not to report what he strongly suspects to actually be an ill-intentioned rumor. The proposed legislation performs all sorts of gyrations to try to balance the presumed rights of parents against the possibility of child abuse. What it also does, in Greene’s words, is to “[take] a chainsaw to any student hope for privacy.” 

But this is a post about censorship, and that’s a different form of authoritarian bullshit. So, revenons à nos moutons: The bill also prohibits “any program, curriculum, material, test, survey, questionnaire, activity, announcement, promotion, or instruction of any kind relating to gender identity or sexual activity” for grades K-3. Except that it doesn’t, of course. It’s fine to use gender-based pronouns and to talk about mommies and daddies. It’s that icky same-sex parent stuff that they want to outlaw, even if it’s just a recognition of the reality that exists for some of those kids. 

Finally, the bill also seeks to redefine obscenity, with the clear intent of making it easier to censor children’s books (this term serving to describe not merely those ostensibly intended for children, but also those simply in the possession of children). The bill de facto removes the third prong of the Miller test codified by the Burger Court 50 years ago, making an exception only for works of “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value as to minors.” Quoting Greene again: “The very idea that a work with literary, artistic, political or scientific merit could also include a depiction of sex is rejected by this law.” Oh, jolly. 

At Pensacola Christian College. This one is just too predictable. Remember when, a dozen years ago, that Alaska high school wanted to prevent the school’s symphonic jazz choir from performing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not because of lyrics like “Put a gun against his head. Pulled my trigger; now he’s dead,” but simply because Freddie Mercury was gay? 

Well, apparently one member of the King’s Singers, the internationally-renowned a capella group, is also gay. And some idiot administrator (Curmie apologizes again for the redundancy) decided on forbidding these amazing singers (Curmie has seen them live once and on TV several times) to perform because the school “cannot knowingly give an implied or direct endorsement of anything that violates the Holy Scripture.” Sure. Scripture is actually rather ambiguous on the subject of homosexuality—a lot of Biblical scholars say the injunction so many on the right claim as divine authority for their bigotry is actually just a prohibition against raping male slaves—but it’s pretty clear on stuff like “false witness,” which one suspects is allowed to happen with grim regularity on their campus. 

Curmie would recommend attending a King’s Singers concert to anyone; not so much for attending Pensacola Christian College. But the group was paid, and a religious institution has the legal right to discriminate on the basis of dubious scriptural interpretation. There are worse things… 

Speaking of which: 

The Books of Roald Dahl. Puffin Books, a division of Penguin, has decided to reissue Dahl’s works… with changes to remove that which is “non-inclusive” or “insensitive.” There’s a word for that: censorship. No, not in the legal sense. The publisher has no governmental authority with which to suppress dissent, and apparently the Dahl estate approved the changes, so Puffin has the legal right to bowdlerize the texts, but releasing the revisions under Dahl’s name is problematic at best. For Puffin to call themselves a legitimate publisher raises some pretty significant ethical issues. 

The changes include changes in phrasing, cuts, and even additions. Apparently, there are literally hundreds of alterations, even as the publishers are claiming the changes were “small and carefully considered.” Here are just a few, as cited in the Guardian article linked above:

In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” [Ew.]

In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.” Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.” [Ugh.]

References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”. [Sigh.]

Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People. [Oh, FFS]

You can see further examples of Puffin’s inanity here or indeed in any of the other sources linked in this screed. 

If there’s anything good to come out of this travesty, it’s that Puffin is being reviled from the left, right, and non-partisan. On the left, there’s this excoriation on Salon and this from Forward, which, as a Jewish publication, notes Dahl’s undeniable anti-Semitism but concludes, “We have mistaken the art for the artist and lost the specificity that makes his work worthy of new editions. Dahl had many ugly, bigoted views. But, for the most part, they’re not in his books for children.” From the right, there’s similar commentary—from The National Review, Fox News, and The American Spectator. And from non-partisan free speech advocates, there’s PEN America and FIRE. 

Part of the reason for the unanimity of opinion is the fact that Puffin’s decision, coordinated by Inclusive Minds, a UK-based consultancy is dedicated to self-promotion and virtue signaling  “inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature,” is so profoundly inane that no sentient human, irrespective of socio-political biases, could see the changes as anything but an abomination. But Curmie also suspects that both sides see the opportunity to blame the other. The right, obviously, sees the initial impetus as left-wing weenie-ism. The left, meanwhile, views the situation as a multinational corporation looking to squeeze a few more bucks out of prospective readers by issuing “new editions,” which they would have us believe are sufficiently true to the original to be accepted without demur but sufficiently different to require the purchase of the bowdlerized versions. 

Both sides are correct.  Puffin has indeed settled on the perfect storm of the worst impulses of the left and the right. In so doing, they become the villains of the week, and Curmie is quite pleased that they’re currently being hammered from all sides. 

Ultimately, though, Curmie is just trying to make some sense of it all, but he can see it makes no sense at all. Someone should write a song about that.