Censorious Asshats and High School Theatre

Curmie really does plan to get to two pieces he’s half-promised: an update of his nine-year-old post on the de facto costs of a university education today compared to yesteryear, and a close look at the 303 Creative SCOTUS ruling. 

But on the 4th, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall alerted him to a story in the New York Times about how difficult it is to find a high school play that won’t run into trouble with some gaggle of censorious asshats (the usual nod to Ken White for the locution). Curmie couldn’t get to the Times story, but found it on Yahoo (a useful work-around, Gentle Reader, if you, like Curmie, don’t have a Times subscription). 

By the time Curmie had a chance to really respond, however, it was time to watch the Boston Pops Independence Day celebration, which has become a tradition at Chez Curmie… and then life happened, and Curmie is only now finishing up his essay.

Anyway, by the morning of the 5th, Jack had posted his commentary on his Ethics Alarms blog. There are some good comments, too. (Feel free to ignore the ones from those folks who would find a way to blame the fact that their beer isn’t cold enough on a Woke conspiracy to undermine American values.) 

Michael Paulson of the Times lists a host of proposed (or even initially approved) plays and musicals that have been deemed problematic or indeed cancelled by schools across the country (those with links are ones Curmie has written about at some point in the last decade or so; he’s not going to bother to mention the college and community theatre productions that have met a similar fate): She Kills Monsters; Shakespeare in Love; Three Sisters (yes, the canonical Chekhov play); The Prom; Almost, Maine; South Pacific; Thoroughly Modern Millie; How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying; Bye, Bye, Birdie; Grease; Fences; Oklahoma!; Newsies; The Little Mermaid; Crush; Indecent; The Addams Family Musical; Marian, or the True Tale of Robin Hood; The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. 

That’s quite a list, but Curmie has a few additions: All Shook Up, Kismet (!), Spamalot, The Wiz, Legally Blonde, Dead Man Walking, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hairspray. Oh, and there was the superintendent’s interference in a production of The Producers.  The chances some idiots somewhere shut down a show that Curmie didn’t hear about: approaching ontological certitude.

The fact is that it would be difficult to name a show that doesn’t have something in it to offend someone. As Curmie wrote in the piece on All Shook Up:

Carousel is one of the creepiest plays ever; Henry Higgins—our hero—is a condescending, sexist, erm… sphincter in My Fair Lady (far more so than his Shavian predecessor in Pygmalion); Godspell requires a conflation of John the Baptist and Judas; all the heroes of West Side Story are gang members; the best songs in Jesus Christ, Superstar go to Mary Magdalene and Herod; the title character in Sweet Charity never strays far from her origins as a prostitute in the Fellini film on which the musical is based; “Hernando’s Hideaway” from The Pajama Game (done right, at least) drips with sexuality; Luther Billis cross-dresses in South Pacific, and extra-marital sex is taken as a given (albeit never made explicit). Need I go on?

(Notice that these were just the musicals, by the way.) At the time, Curmie suggested that none of these titles would be challenged. He apologizes for his woeful lack of imagination, as the complaints have now morphed into full-blown lunacy. 

It is certainly true that Curmie wouldn’t do some of these shows in high school, but it’s because they’re too difficult for high school actors, or because as a culture we’ve moved away so far from the mores of when the play was written that audiences will struggle to get to the real meaning of the text. (Curmie says this while acknowledging that he’s seen some really good productions of, say, The Taming of the Shrew that have found ways to undercut the play’s obvious sexism because it’s more important that we have some empathy for Petruchio.) 

Speaking of sexism, many classic musicals certainly have more than their share, and several have more and better roles for men than for women, which becomes a particular problem at the secondary school level due to the fact that far more high school girls than boys want to perform. That doesn’t mean those shows don’t have some great tunes and story lines that still resonate with audiences and performers alike. 

There are, of course, complaints from the left about such things as racist language or cultural appropriation. For all that, by far the majority of the censorious asshattery at the high school level emanates from the right. (It’s the other way around at colleges and universities and in the professional theatre world, but that’s not the current issue.) More importantly, whereas there are a couple of plays listed above that rather push the envelope, most of the alleged offenses are things like suggesting that gay people exist or uttering epithets considerably milder than what one would be guaranteed to hear on a two-minute stroll through any high school cafeteria in the country. 

Particularly sad are the attacks on plays like She Kills Monsters or The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (both of which have specifically made-for-schools versions), which have plentiful teen-aged characters and deal with coming-of-age issues faced by adolescents.  They are ideally suited for production by high school groups, in other words.

So, what’s the source of all this turmoil? Well, we’ll get to a couple of conjectures about that in a moment. But the real problem is simple: the reason we’re getting all of this censorious… erm… bovine fecal matter is that the asshats in question are, at least sometimes, getting away with it. Yes, it’s true that a number of the idiotic decisions were subsequently overturned because the culprits finally were sufficiently embarrassed by international humiliation online were able to claim victory by accepting changes already offered before their censorship saw the proverbial light. But even an initial decision in favor of suppression bolsters the spirits of the censors, and concomitantly disappoints and enervates student artists.

So, who is/are the problem? Curmie suggests a three-fold response. For the sake of brevity, Gentle Reader, please insert “Not all, but too many” before each of these sentences. In order of increasing degrees of both frequency and power, then:

--High school theatre directors seek to impose their personal political perspectives on their students and audiences.

--Principals and superintendents are even more cowardly than they are stupid.

--School boards are comprised of idiots who were elected by a tiny minority of like-minded morons.

So, let’s look at those individually. There does exist a subset of high school directors who are more interested in “making a statement” or being perceived as “cool” (or whatever the current term is) by their students than in providing the benefits associated with high school theatre, which in some ways harken back to the origins of school theatre centuries ago: critical reading, empathy, teamwork, friendships, confidence in appearing before groups, memory, what was once called “elocution,” and (yes) fun. After over forty years as a theatre professor and director, Curmie could go on, but he suspects that you already get the point, Gentle Reader. 

High school theatre shouldn’t be about the director except as a guide through the text and as the instiller of professionalism, and plays should be chosen for their ability to challenge and engage students without throwing them into the proverbial deep end. Plays should be enjoyable to be a part of, and to attend. Intentionally doing shows that are likely to offend the local audience is simply counter-productive, but the allure of what in Curmie’s youth was called “sticking it to The Man” is, perhaps, occasionally overwhelming. 

Most of the problem, however, stems from the common conceit (in both senses of the term) of the right. These folks (again: not all, but too many) are so insecure in their persons and their beliefs that any suggestion that their demographic profile, their belief system, isn’t the only one is seen as an attack. Simply alluding to a gay character is somehow “grooming,” having a black character complain about racism is anti-American, showing a Muslim character in a favorable light is an attack on God himself. 

Which brings us to the level of school administrators. As a class, these people are far more fond of rules than of thinking, and their one unifying characteristic is risk aversion on steroids: a single dissenting voice (from anyone other than a student or teacher, of course) sends them scurrying for cover like cockroaches when the lights come on. They’re also, of course, the very people who at least de facto approved that show when scripts and royalties were ordered, and in many cases insisted on being consulted on the choice of show… then, they are shocked!, to an extent that hitherto only Claude Rains in “Casablanca” had ever been shocked, that a character is wearing a short skirt or drinking a fake martini or says he has two dads. 

Or they cancel a show, demanding that changes are made in the text: changes that have already been approved by the playwright or the agency, and which were part of the contract signed by someone with enough authority to commit the school to its terms and to a few thousand dollars of the district’s money. Hint: that person is unlikely to be a show’s director. 

Curmie would just love to see some principal or superintendent somewhere tell Karen and Skip just not to come to the show… oh, and to get a freaking life. Perhaps that happens from time to time and it just doesn’t make headlines. That would be unlikely, but even a Curmudgeon can dream… 

Finally, it’s time to quote Mark Twain yet again: “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.” First off, who gets on a school board? Especially recently, the answer is “zealots.” Seriously, Gentle Reader, could you even name a single member of your school board? Curmie admits that he couldn’t. And in nearly a half-century of voting, he has seen maybe two debates between school board candidates as much as advertised. These were sparsely attended events (to put it generously). Most of the campaigning consists of generic statements about the well-being of the next generation and oh-so-relevant information like having lived in the city since birth and being a loving spouse. 

So, how do you get elected to the school board? It certainly has little to do with any skillset relevant to the position. (Curmie has never known of a current or former educator being elected to a school board. That shouldn’t be a requirement, obviously, but one might consider it a reasonable credential.) Knowing people personally is a huge help. And what’s the best source of that? Well, church is a great place to start. 10% voter turnout, and they’re mostly from the Unification Church of Christ the Theocrat or Our Lady of Perpetual Whining. And thus we end up with a school board that pretends to protect kids from largely imaginary liberal groupthink by imposing their own blinkered and myopic world view. 

Unfortunately, what Curmie has just described is not the most insidious manifestation of theatrical censorship. Idiot administrators and proselytizing school boards don’t have to actually pull the plug on a show; they just need to act like they will. Prior restraint has long since become the most powerful weapon of those who would silence expression that makes them even mildly uncomfortable. They can claim, truthfully (sort of), that they didn’t forbid anything. 

The most chilling detail in the Times article isn’t that someone wants to suppress Three Sisters; it’s that 2/3 of high school teachers say that censorship concerns are influencing the choice of their upcoming season. Oh, and of course the Righteously Indignant can be guaranteed to smugly assert that this self-censorship is an acknowledgment of previous wrong-doing, rather than an extension of their own power-play. 

Curmie differs with Jack Marshall on two aspects of this story. Unsurprisingly, he sees less leftie indoctrination in high schools than Jack does. More importantly, whereas Jack expresses little hope for a solution—“I have no ideas for a way out. There may not be one.”—Curmie thinks we’re still at a point where fighting is worth the effort. This is, as the expression goes, a hill worth dying on. Stupid decisions have indeed been reversed in the wake of public scrutiny. 

Sure, some plays by David Mamet or Sarah Kane might be, nay, are inappropriate for high school performance. But there should certainly be a very wide range of what is acceptable. And we’re not going to get anywhere if we stay locked in our partisan bubbles. We on the left need to speak out against stupid arguments from “our side,” too. It’s not cultural appropriation to do Fiddler on the Roof; it’s not sexist to do Waiting for Godot as written, with an all-male cast; it’s not racist to cast a white actress in a role once (even famously) played by a black one if the role doesn’t require it. 

Curmie suggested in a recent post that if we constrain ourselves by looking only at left and right, we overlook the equally if not more important continuum from authoritarian to libertarian. That’s the battleground on which this conflict will be fought, and we need all the allies we can muster.

Pre-approving Freedom of Speech

The brouhaha coming out of Prague, OK recently gives me a chance to talk about a case in Fullerton, CA that I’ve wanted to write about since last spring, but that had never seemed to make it to the top of the stack. I’ll get to what they have in common—other than idiot administrators—in a moment.

Let’s start with the earlier case. At Fullerton High School, there’s an annual “Mr. Fullerton” event, a sort of variation on the theme of beauty pageant: it’s unclear to me how much is serious and how much is parody. Anyway, one of the elements of the contest is a question-and-answer session. There seems to be no exact transcript of what contestant Kearian Giertz (left) said, but his after-the-fact description seems to be universally accepted as catching the gist:

I said, ‘Hopefully, in ten years’ time, I’ll be winning Emmys, Oscars and Tonys’—just, you know, the typical answer—and, then I added, ‘But, more importantly, I’d really, really like to sit on the couch with the person that I love and say I’m married to them. And my case, that is a male. And, I hope that, in ten years’ time, gay marriage would be legal.

Cue the idiot Assistant Principal. (As usual, Gentle Reader, Curmie apologizes for the redundancy.) Onto the stage trots one Joe Abell, ordering Giertz’s microphone turned off (“Cut him! Cut him! Cut him!”), ushering him backstage, and disqualifying him from the festivities for “going off script.”

Considerable brouhaha ensued, with student protests, public and private apologies by Abell, statements by school board members, the whole nine yards. The official (i.e., Cover Our Ass) statement from the district (I can’t find the original, complete text) said that whereas Abell’s actions were prompted by “what the Assistant Principal believed to be a statement that was off script and not pre-approved,” “the student’s statement… regarding… future plans and hopes did not violate any school rules,” and “[the] District believes that the matter should have been handled privately….” Abell was briefly suspended, then returned to his job. He will be re-assigned to classroom teaching in another school for next year: a move he had apparently already requested long before this incident.

Shift to Oklahoma. There, in the tiny town of Prague, high school valedictorian Kaitlin Nootbaar (right) was denied her diploma because she used the word “hell” in her valedictory speech. Yes, really. Ms. Nootbaar, like many teens, has changed her mind not infrequently about her long-term goals. According to her father,

“Her quote was, ‘When she first started school she wanted to be a nurse, then a veterinarian and now that she was getting closer to graduation, people would ask her, what do you want to do and she said how the hell do I know? I’ve changed my mind so many times.’”

He said in the written script she gave to the school she wrote “heck,” but in the moment she said “hell” instead.

Nootbaar said the audience laughed, she finished her speech to warm applause and didn’t know there was a problem.

That was until she went to pick up the real certificate this week [in mid-August].

“We went to the office and asked for the diploma and the principal said, ‘Your diploma is right here but you’re not getting it. Close the door; we have a problem,’” Nootbaar said.

He said the principal told Kaitlin she would have to write an apology letter before he would release the diploma.

She has (quite reasonably) refused to do so. As with the California case, there has been great hoopla, with even a little more spice in the mix: an appearance on the “Today” show, accusations from Papa Nootbaar that Principal David Smith “constantly picked on” Kaitlin throughout her senior year, and the inability of Smith or Superintendent Rick Martin to comprehend the fact that they’re embarrassing themselves and their district with their fit of censorial petulance.

It’s pretty clear in all this that no one is exactly without fault. The substitution of “hell” for the approved “heck” seems to have been deliberate, even if not planned from the beginning. David Nootbaar’s “stand your ground” rhetoric is at least one step past the line into libertarian arrogance. But the school’s conniption over a word that, used once, doesn’t even change a movie rating from G to PG, is positively absurd. Sure, “hell” is a stronger expletive than “heck,” but not by much. Songs like “Highway to Hell,” “Hell’s Bells,” and “Hell Is for Children” blare across public airways. Not so coincidentally, “heaven” songs often contain the word hell: “If you want to get to heaven, you’ve got to raise a little hell”; “If there’s a rock and roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band.” Plug “‘how the hell’ lyrics” into a Google search and you’ll get 154,000,000 hits.

The word most often linked with “hell” on the scale of potentially offensive language is part of one of the most famous movie quotations ever, from a G-rated movie… or did someone change that line to “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a darn” when I wasn’t paying attention?

More to the point, withholding a student’s diploma for such an offense, even if it were premeditated from the very beginning, is simultaneously overkill and a particularly good example of administrative impotence. It’s the former because the transgression, if it even qualifies as such, merits at most a private reprimand. It’s the latter because Ms. Nootbaar is by now already attending classes at Southwest Oklahoma University, and it’s only a matter of time before that piece of paper from her high school—if and when she gets it—will be shoved into a drawer or a box… or perhaps discarded altogether. One suspects that she’ll earn at least a BA or BS, and quite likely an advanced degree, as well. And nothing Prague High School attempts to do about that will matter in the slightest.

No, they chose to piss into the wind for no apparent purpose other than asserting one last time that they’re in charge. As virtually anyone who knows me personally will attest, one of my personal mantras is, “If you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” If you’re directing a play and you have to tell your cast that you’re in charge, you’re not. If you’re teaching a class and you have to tell your students that you’re in charge, you’re not. If you’re a high school principal and you’ve got to tell your recent graduates (and Ms. Nootbaar is, apparently, an alumna, even if she doesn’t have a piece of paper that says so) that you’re in charge, you’re not.

Both these stories feature over-reactions by school administrators: not just making mountains out of molehills, but constructing the entire Himalayan range out of an adolescent mole’s first attempt. But what I find fascinating is the “sticking to the script” trope. Notice that the students in question had to submit their commentary to school officials prior to being allowed to speak in public. Yes, I know that’s both legal and prudent. It’s also creepy… in two ways.

First, let’s look at the utterly dishonest pragmatics of the whole charade. This entire rationale is a scam. I spent a good share of the last week in auditions for a play I’m directing. I know some of the monologues students presented, and I can say with certainty that there were some paraphrases up there. At callbacks, by definition limited to those most likely to be cast, actors with scripts in their hands didn’t get everything word for word correct. And that’s actually OK. Sure, I want everything to be word perfect when we open. But I’ve been around the block a couple of times in my career: I know—don’t just suspect, but know—that someone will drop a line or say something at least as different from the text as “hell” is from “heck.”

I know for a fact that I both paraphrased and added a line when I gave a scholarly paper at a conference last month, despite the fact that I had the written text in my hands. And that made the paper more effective rather than less so, despite the fact that I’d spent a considerable amount of time crafting the presentation to say exactly what I wanted it to. Because I was making eye contact with my audience rather than burying my face in my text, I could sense where clarification was needed, when two examples instead of the three I’d scripted would suffice, and so on. There are two, and only two, differences between what I did and what Mr. Giertz and Ms. Nootbaar did: my variations from the script went unnoticed because no one else had seen the text (and because the audience was comprised largely of people who’d done precisely the same thing with their presentations earlier in the conference), and, well, I’m older.

In other words, using “going off script” as an excuse to punish someone is disingenuous simply because it happens all the time: it’s the equivalent of firing someone because they use the office computer to check Facebook during their lunch break. “The rules are clear. You can’t use the office computer except for official business.” Except that everyone does it, and singling someone out for doing so is always a stand-in for something else. One suspects that had Nootbaar inserted her current interest in marine biology into her speech, or had Giertz recently entered into a relationship with a girl and burbled that he hopes to marry her someday, there would have been no repercussions, despite the obvious deviations from scripted remarks.

More troubling, however, is the implicit assumption that it’s any of the school’s business to censor students. If you don’t trust your valedictorian not to say something offensive, don’t have her speak. It’s not a requirement—there was no such speech at either my high school or college graduation ceremonies. (Or at least I don’t remember them… that was a while ago.) As noted above, I understand the rationale. But I also reject it. If you’ve done your job as a school, you’ve instilled at least a modicum of responsibility in your students: tell the valedictorian or the participants in a light-hearted contest they need to stay on track and the chances are pretty good that they’ll do so.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t occasionally wish some student had done something else. But the ones who earned the right to speak deserve the right to do so without administrative interference. Conversely, those who seek naughtiness for its own sake will say what they want when they want, whether they’ve submitted a script or not. Trusting students to do what they’re supposed to do isn’t easy. It is, however, a risk worth taking, and ultimately the right thing to do. But that would require abstract thought and faith in someone other than themselves: the two things the average high school administrator lacks.