Proving the Relevance of "The Crucible"... by Cancelling It

The Offending Scene... we think

Administrators censor high school plays in many different ways.  Sometimes it’s refusal to put a show on the schedule; sometimes it’s butting into the design process; sometimes it’s shutting a production down during tech week or after a single performance; sometimes it’s firing a teacher/director for doing a show the administration had signed off on.  What’s consistent is that the school officials seldom if ever admit they screwed up, even if they do reverse themselves under nationwide or even international ridicule.

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 25^th 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 dialogue 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.

The Arts Are Messy, And That's a Good Thing

So, apparently several members of a touring company of Les Misérables scheduled to perform at the Kennedy Center on June 11 have decided to boycott that performance rather than participate in what CNN calls a “high-dollar fundraiser” for the Center with President Trump in attendance.

The cast was apparently given the option of sitting out that performance, and about a dozen of them decided not to go on.  Exactly who gave them the choice and under what circumstances is unclear.

Naturally, Kennedy Center director Richard Grenell, yet another spectacularly unqualified but heartily sycophantic Trump appointee, got in a tizzy about that, declaring those actors “vapid and intolerant,” while delivering banalities that neither he nor his boss believe about spectators of different political perspectives enjoying a show together.  Grenell appears to be incapable of independent thought, at least in his public pronouncements, so we can assume that he was sent out by Trump to spin the story.  Whether, as well-known theatre wag Howard Sherman suggests in a Facebook post, 47 is “completely incapable of appreciating the politics buried within the show itself” may be a matter of opinion, there is no doubt that there’s a fair bit of irony present.

The CNN article also refers to Trump’s February post, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST,” (yes, it was in all caps, because Trump is incapable of using an inside voice) while casually neglecting the inherent censorship involved in that proclamation and the fact that the single show in question was about as innocuous as it could possibly be, the drag queen in question behaving very much like a panto dame.  So much for the “leftist” press.

OK, let’s tease this out a little in as objective a manner as possible.  Chris Peterson’s double-header posts on the OnStageBlog site, first about the cast members’ announcement and later about Grenell’s response, were, to steal his phrase, “gloriously on brand.”  The actors are to be praised for being “rare and gutsy,” “putting their values before the stage lights,” and “principled,” and a host of other epithets.

Yeah, no.  The actors are quite likely (not necessarily, but probably) a gaggle of petulant virtue-signalers who think that not fulfilling the terms of their contracts and refusing to perform at a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center somehow makes them righteous.  It does not.  They’re risking little if anything: Grenell’s threats are similarly puerile and almost certainly meaningless, unless we really are headed for another McCarthy/HUAC era witch hunt, in which case those actors would likely be blackballed whether they perform next month or not.

Curmie strongly suspects that if the performers’ identities are indeed ever known, they’ll get more rather than fewer gigs in the future: theatre producers (and audiences!) are, in general, a rather liberal lot, and whereas actors’ notoriety may not be quite the same as fame, it’s still good for box office. 

Yes, productions at the Kennedy Center are likely to be (stealing Grenell’s phrase here) “vapid and intolerant” at least until Trump is no longer calling the shots, and there are those, as a Friend of Curmie recently posted on Facebook, who would rather see the Kennedy Center burned to the ground than turned over to the Emperor of Trumpistan.  But it is impossible to praise the US Army Chorus for their in-your-face rendition of “Do You Hear the People Sing” (as Curmie did) and also commend these folks for refusing to do so.

Is this a tempest in a teapot, then?  Taken in isolation, yes.  Both the actors and the Kennedy Center brass behaved utterly predictably, and neither looked good in the process.  It’s almost as if the arts were… you know… messy.

Curmie remains baffled, however, by the apparent belief that art is somehow apolitical.  Check out that image at the top of this post, Gentle Reader.  You will, no doubt, recognize it as one of the most famous paintings by Pablo Picasso.  (Curmie was visited as soon as he typed that sentence by the ghost of René Magritte proclaiming “Ceci n’est pas une peinture,” but you know what I mean.)  It is impossible to believe that “Guernica” doesn’t have a potent political message.  There’s a famous story that a Gestapo officer had barged into Picasso’s apartment, pointed at the painting, and demanded “Did you do this?”  The painter responded, “No, you did.”  Even if, as one might reasonably suspect, that anecdote is apocryphal, it rings true.  And if it’s fiction, it’s something of a work of art in its own right.

Ask Curmie what his favorite movie of all time is, and he’ll probably respond with either “Le Roi de Cœur” (“The King of Hearts”) or “Casablanca.”  Both are set in times of war: WWI and WWII, respectively.  At the end of the former, the denizens of the local insane asylum, having been released into the town, witness the deaths of dozens of opposing soldiers, then solemnly return to the relative sanity of the asylum.  Our hero, Private Plumpick (Alan Bates) climbs aboard a troop transport truck to head back to his unit… but then jumps off outside the asylum, strips naked, and rings the bell to enter, carrying only a cage with his beloved carrier pigeon. 

Curmie’s favorite sequence in “Casablanca” is the one in which Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) tells the orchestra to play “La Marseillaise” to drown out the Nazi officers who are singing the German anthem “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”).  Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) nods his acquiescence, the band plays, and everyone in the bar joins in.  (Apologies that I was unable to find a clip without a commercial.)  It is a triumphant moment, and everyone who sees it—well, maybe not Elon Musk, but everyone else—is uplifted, even if only briefly. 

Of course, Captain Renault (Claude Rains) has to shut down the bar in response.  His pretext, that he is “shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here.”  This moment, of course, is immediately followed by collecting his winnings. 

OK, Gentle Reader, does anyone want to argue that those films aren’t politically loaded? 

Curmie has argued for decades that the Dionysian Festival in Ancient Athens was founded more to consolidate the power of the tyrant Peisistratus than to celebrate a hitherto little-known demi-god.  Shakespeare’s dramaturgy changed when a female monarch died, to be replaced by a gynophobic one.  Expressionism in Germany and shingeki in Japan are unquestionably linked to socialist politics.  The list goes on.

Many artists throughout history have served at the pleasure of the politically powerful.  Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were all court musicians.  In theatre, Shakespeare, Racine, Calderón, and Zeami all received royal patronage.  But there were those who worked against the power structure: Euripides self-exiled from Athens; the plays of Václav Havel and Gao Xingjian were outlawed in their homelands; Athol Fugard was an outspoken critic of apartheid while that policy was still in place.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to agree with an artist’s point of view to appreciate the work.  You needn’t be Hindu to like The Recognition of Shakuntala, Buddhist to be engaged by The Lady Aoi, or Christian to enjoy The Second Shepherds Play.  And you certainly don’t have to believe in Apollo or Athena to treasure The Oresteia.

Things get a little messier when we talk about political perspective.  You can appreciate the artistry of “Birth of a Nation,” “The Battleship Potemkin,” or “The Triumph of the Will” without being a racist, a Communist, or a Nazi, but there’s friction, nonetheless.  That’s OK. 

We also need to understand that the same theatre artist can enjoy working on the plays of Shakespeare or Racine, which never contemplate even the possibility of a political structure other than monarchy, and also on plays by Bertolt Brecht or Lillian Hellman, who were Communists… and for the same spectator to enjoy them all, as well.

Performing before an audience, or even an audience member, you don’t want to perform for… that’s a different matter.  Should you take that lucrative gig in Russia or Saudi Arabia or China that you suspect will be used for propaganda purposes? 

Curmie is reminded of Dusty Springfield’s abortive tour of South Africa in 1964.  The British singer had apparently sneaked a clause into her contract that she would not perform for segregated audiences; the authorities were not amused.  She was de facto deported for her stance.  As a dear friend of Curmie wrote about the incident when posting about it on Facebook a few years ago, “Sometimes you don’t know who the punk rockers are until it’s punk rock time.”

How do we reasonably analyze the current kerfuffle?  Here’s Curmie’s take: if you’ve got a contract to do a show and you fake an illness or something to get out of a particular date, whatever your reasons, that’s unethical.  But if you’re given a choice of whether to go on or not, you damned well ought to be able to make your own decision. 

Would Curmie boycott the show?  Anyone who’s ever heard Curmie sing will know he’ll never have to make that call about being in a musical.  But yeah, it would take some cogitation.  Are you performing for President Trump or for President Trump, who really is in a separate category from literally anyone else ever to hold that office?  This is not a black and white scenario.  The question is about what shade of grey we’re talking about.

Three Stories from the OnStageBlog, Part 2: The Professional World

Curmie is finally getting to write the second half of his two-parter on stories from the OnStageBlog.  This one involves the casting of the musical Elf at Broadway at Music Circus in Sacramento.  OnStageBlog’s founder Chris Peterson often gets what Curmie’s grad school mentor would call “foam-flecked,” and his editorial here is no exception.  But he does have a point.  Sort of.

The company came under criticism when they announced the cast list for Elf; although a number of the leads were non-white, the entire chorus (seen above) looks pretty vanilla, i.e., white-passing. Actress (or is she the “social media manager for major hotel brands”?) Victoria Price is one of those who led the charge, pointing to the difference between the Broadway ensemble and the one in Sacramento, and noting that any comments critical of the casting were being deleted.  (Curmie assumes she’s telling the truth about this.)

Tony nominee Amber Imam joined the fray, writing that Price’s criticism of both the casting and the removal of negative comments was “absolutely right.  A show that takes place in NEW YORK CITY cannot… CAN NOT have an ensemble that LOOKS LIKE THIS!!!  Do better.  Have you learned nothing?????”

The company’s CEO Scott Klier issued a response that made the situation much, much worse: “cover-up worse than the crime” worse.  Here’s part of it:

Inclusivity has been and remains my casting and staffing goal for every production.

I fell short of that goal for ELF. There is an uncomfortable truth here: Our industry as a whole has largely failed to attract, train and foster the artists necessary to meet today's demand, and I fear this conversation will continue until it does. It will unfortunately take time. The painful reality of ELF’s casting process was that both the casting submissions and audition attendance revealed few candidates of color and, while those few were undoubtedly talented, they did not meet the dance, music and acting criteria set by our team.

Hoo boy… Claiming inclusivity as a “goal” and then going 0-for-15 at fulfilling it?  Blaming other people while admitting the decision was yours?  Admitting there’s a “demand” and then ignoring it? 

Price responds that the standard for Broadway is surely higher, but they managed to assemble a significantly more diverse cast.  True, but one might also note that the talent base is considerably both wider and deeper in New York than in Sacramento, which is not exactly the first city one thinks of when contemplating the American theatre.

Price then accuses Klier of “writing lies,” and asserts that “we will continue to be here and not just be here, but excelling in everything we do bc (as you basically said in your response) we are expected to be TWICE as good as our white counterparts to even be SEEN.”

Ultimately, she launches into a rather odd commentary, complaining about tokenization.  So having one black ensemble member is somehow a bad thing… even worse than having none, perhaps?  I don’t get it.

So let’s talk about casting decisions.  They’re sometimes extremely complex; other times they’re easy.  There are some shows that require actors of a particular race to play a particular role.  When Curmie directed “Master Harold… and the boys” a few years ago, Hally had to be white, and Sam and Willie had to be black.  Full stop; no discussion.  When he did Trojan Barbie, the male roles had to be played by two blacks, one white, and one Latino; the women’s roles were much more flexible in terms of race.  The majority of roles in most plays, of course, can be played by actors regardless of demographics, with the only considerations being things like blood relatives being of the same race (and that’s only true in realism).

Is casting the actors the director (or producer, or whoever is making the decisions) honestly believes are the best available an ethical strategy?  Of course it is.  Is attempting to employ a cast that represents the time and place in which the play is set reasonable?  Again, of course.  In this approach, it doesn’t matter which actors are white or BIPOC, only that some of the latter are included somewhere.  If you’re going to claim diversity as a goal, then an all-white chorus is probably a bad idea.  The key word here just might be “probably,” however. 

Often—by no means always, but often—there are two actors who are essentially equal.  For his last twenty-something shows, Curmie was always casting at the same time as a colleague, and we were discouraged from casting the same actor twice in a semester.  Unsurprisingly, we’d often want the same actors, leading to negotiations: “you can have Actor X if I can have Actor Y.”  But I remember one time in particular when I said “I need one of these four actors.  You can have whichever three you want, but I get one of the four.”  In this sort of toss-up situation, a director who doesn’t need to accommodate a colleague might reasonably think, “why not make a choice that adds to the diversity of the cast?”  

That said, sometimes one actor is just flat-out better than another in auditions.  A director would be remarkably stupid not to cast that person.  The thing is, there’s no way of knowing whether the actors cast in the Elf ensemble were clearly the best, or whether Klier’s interest in inclusion extends no further than a marketing blurb. 

Is there still some racism in the business?  Of course, there is.  Does Klier have a spotless reputation in terms of providing opportunities for non-white actors?  No.  But is Price’s claim about black actors having to be twice as good to even get noticed a gross exaggeration?  Yes, at least in terms of the industry at large.  And we might reasonably suspect that she’d be less insistent on an authentic depiction of the people who’d be in a particular place at a particular time if a production of Fiddler on the Roof had a couple of black folks in a small town in Tsarist Russia.

Curmie recalls overhearing one actress telling her friends that the reason I hadn’t given her a callback was because she was black.  I called back ten women; three were black.  She didn’t make it four because… wait for it… her audition wasn’t very good.  And, as Curmie wrote a couple of years ago, his “own experience as a director has included both casting BIPOC actors in roles obviously first played by whites and ending up with all white actors when he went into auditions thinking he’d almost certainly get a multi-racial cast. It works out how it works out.”

In other words, the original casting decisions might have been—as opposed to were—inappropriately exclusionary to non-white performers; the fact that there was some diversity in the leads mitigates but does not squelch the criticism with respect to the ensemble.  Some of Price’s arguments were legitimate; others were overblown at best.  Klier’s response to the controversy was sufficiently incompetent that he made matters considerably worse.  It’s rather a mess; Curmie suspects that the one objectively true statement in all of this is Klier’s claim that a reasonable resolution “will unfortunately take time.”

The good news, such as it is, is that the production got a positive review on the Broadway World site.  But there is not a word about the ensemble; indeed the list of principals is said to “round out the incredible cast.”

<Sigh.>

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.