Freedom of expression
Who draws the line?
By Don Corathers
One reason we are all drawn to theatre, and a reason the theatre is still a vital part of our culture after three thousand years, is its enduring power to engage our passions and important ideas in a way that is immediate and meaningful to the audience and the actors. That’s why theatre is so valuable as an educational tool, and it’s also why the content of a piece of theatre can sometimes make us uncomfortable.
In a school setting, the sensitivities are especially high. It is not surprising that there is frequently a certain tension between a professional theatre educator’s idea of the kind of dramatic literature that will best serve the needs of her students and the ideas of some members of a community about what is appropriate for a sixteen-year-old to do and say on the stage. Sometimes those tensions are expressed in open conflict. A student, a parent, an administrator, or a citizen who may not even have a child in the school will raise objections to a particular piece of theatre that’s planned for production. Other voices will join the discussion. Depending on the community and how the teacher and school administrators respond, the dispute might move in an orderly way toward a quiet resolution, or it might not.One does not have to look very far to find examples. Here are a few recent ones:
+ A Wilton, Connecticut high school principal canceled plans for performance of a student-written play about the Iraq War in April 2007, saying it lacked balance.
+ Three students were threatened with suspension for using the word “vagina” during a March 2007 open mic reading of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues at John Jay High School in Cross River, New York.
+In West Des Moines, Iowa, plans for a production of The Laramie Project faced a vitriolic censorship campaign that featured a state senator accusing the Valley High School theatre program of “mocking Christian faith.”
Together, these three incidents, which were widely covered in the press, represent the major strains of material that’s usually found at the center of a school theatre censorship case: Plays that address a politically sensitive topic. Plays that have some sexual content (or content that is perceived to be sexual). Plays that are considered to be hostile to “family values,” however that term might be defined. Plays that contain one of George Carlin’s seven words. Other script selection problem areas include treatment of ethnic minorities; use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs; and weapons used as props. (See a list of other banned and challenged plays.)
Trust and respect
When somebody raises a question about the content of a play planned for production in a school setting, the single most important factor influencing the subsequent course of events is usually the quality of the relationship between the theatre director and the principal.
A few years ago Jeffrey Grove, veteran teacher at Stanton College Preparatory School in Jacksonville, Florida, knew he had some diplomatic work to do when new principal Deborah Lynch told him he couldn’t produce Urinetown “because the characters use the word ‘pee’ too much.” But she left the door open, telling him, “If you think you can change my mind, set up a meeting.”
Grove took two other theatre teachers and a CD of the Urinetown cast recording with him and urged Lynch to review the book while listening to the songs. “We told her that reading the script of a musical without the music is like eating orange juice concentrate right out of the can.”
Ultimately, Lynch approved the production, with reservations. “She said, ‘I think I’m going to get in trouble no matter what I do,’ ” Grove said. “ ‘And if I’m going to get in trouble, I’d rather err on the side of the kids.’ ”
On opening night, Lynch turned to Grove and said “I don’t know what I was worried about.” And later, when Grove directed For Colored Girls..., she told him “I hope somebody calls, because I know just what I’m going to say to them.”
“We’ve earned her trust,” Grove said. “But we have to be careful not to violate it.”
Lana Hagan, director of theatre education at Southern Illinois University and a former high school theatre teacher, says she thinks most school directors are “their own self-fulfilling prophesies. The ones who say, ‘Oh, I’d never be allowed to do that’ usually aren’t. And the ones who have good programs and have the ‘I can do that’ attitude get much more freedom. Most of the time it is an issue of trust… It’s all about mutual respect and keeping the big picture in sight.”
Policies and practices related to play selection vary widely among schools and districts. The general operating rule is that the principal is responsible for everything that goes on in his or her building, and many principals take that to include signing off on the drama teacher’s repertory choices. This is especially true when the teacher is relatively new to the profession and doesn’t yet have an established relationship with the administrator. But an informal e-mail survey of leaders and members of the Educational Theatre Association’s Thespian Society suggests that while it’s common for principals to reserve that right, a somewhat smaller number takes an active part in play selection.
In Colorado, any principal can object to a play, and the teacher has the right to appeal that decision to the district level, according to Jay Seller of Horizon High School in Denver. As a practical matter, though, it’s up to the teacher. “I personally feel a good theatre teacher will always inform their administrator about material that their community might find objectionable,” Seller wrote in response to an e-mail query. “Also, a good teacher is sensitive to what the community will accept on a high school stage.”
The principals of her acquaintance are a good deal more hands-on, wrote Cathy Archer of Rutland (Vermont) High School. “In most schools the principal reads the plays and has final say. The depth of their involvement depends on the school. In the past my principal signed off on anything I wanted to do. I now have to [obtain approval from] my principal and he mainly likes comedies so serious material is a harder sell.”
Sometimes the approval process flirts with absurdity. Archer said she had recently heard from a director who was required to cancel a planned production of an Agatha Christie play because it contained a murder.
The school system in Loudoun County, Virginia uses a written policy and regulation that were approved by the board of education after a wrenching controversy over production of a student-written play titled Offsides, about a gay high school football star. The Loudoun regulation, adopted in 2005, is rigidly prescriptive, requiring not only playscripts but even playbill art to be approved by the school principal.
The regulations “haven’t made things impossible, just more difficult,” said John Wells, drama teacher at Loudoun County High School, a neighbor of the school where Offsides was produced. (Wells is also the author of the widely produced short play Competition Piece, among other titles.) The new policy has “definitely added another layer of inconvenience and frustration to the already difficult job of selecting a piece that will challenge but not overwhelm, please but not patronize, stimulate but not offend, and satisfy but continue your employment.
“We spend a lot more time looking over our shoulders in the vain hope of not offending people, which is basically impossible.”
The Miami way
In Miami, things are different. For the past ten years the Miami-Dade County school system has operated under a policy guideline—unique, as far as we’ve been able to determine—that specifically prohibits administrators from involving themselves in play selection.
The guideline is a radical inversion of the administrative review model that prevails—at least on paper—in most school systems. So long as the theatre program stays away from work that indulges in one of four narrowly defined areas of unprotected speech, the principal is prohibited from exercising prior restraint and from disciplining a teacher or student for a production choice.
Robert D. Strickland was the theatre supervisor for Miami-Dade schools in the early nineties when a school board member named Janet McAiliey proposed the development of a policy that would protect student rights of expression. Strickland worked with McAiliey to write the document, and to shepherd it past school board lawyers, focus groups of administrators, theatre students, and teachers, and finally a public political process. It was adopted by the school board in August 1996.
In addition to a strong statement of support for student free speech rights, the guideline represents a commitment at the highest level of the school system to the principle that the professional theatre educator is the person best qualified to make judgments about dramatic literature for his or her students.
“Now, with rights come responsibilities,” Strickland said. “You do not pick material for shock value. Your choices must fit within the curriculum. You have to think about the educational value to the children who are going to do the play and to the children who will see the play.”
In the nearly eleven years since it was implemented, the policy has been reviewed and reapproved by the school board once and tested a number of times. The tests involved both administrators who, unaware of the system’s guidelines, continued to review their teachers’ selections, and educators whose choices were found to be outside the boundaries of protected speech. The most recent case, which Strickland declined to discuss in detail, came when a middle school principal canceled a production of the politically charged drama My Name Is Rachel Corrie by a class of eighth graders last September. In each case, Strickland said, the situation was resolved by assiduously applying the terms of the policy guideline.
Strickland said he believes the Miami-Dade policy can serve as a model for other school systems.
“Several other counties have looked at our policy, and even if they didn’t adopt it, it’s a starting place for them,” he said.
Blackout
A 2007 incident at a regional play festival in Indiana shines a light on just how slippery the questions that this subject raises can be.
At the Indiana Thespian Society’s central regional conference at Greenfield Central High School near Indianapolis last January, a production of the sketch comedy piece Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind was blacked out in mid-scene by the host Thespian director, with the concurrence of the state’s Thespian chapter director, because they considered some of the language and subject matter to be inappropriate. The production was stopped about three scenes from the end. Standing on the darkened stage, the actors from the International School of Indiana were told over the public address system that while their work on the piece had been good, the content was inappropriate for the event.
Todd Terrell, who was in his first year as Indiana chapter director for EdTA, said he didn’t know anything about the show before the conference but became concerned about it when the first scene ended with a line that contained a potent expletive. He went to the light booth and talked to International School theatre director Matthew Owens, who told him the piece had been performed for the school principal just the previous night. (Owens, in an interview, confirmed this and said he offered Terrell his principal’s cell phone number on the spot.)
The Thespians in Indiana, as in some other states, require schools performing at regional and state events to submit a statement from an administrator affirming that the material is consistent with the school’s community standards. While the show continued, Terrell checked the paperwork on it and discovered that it did not have the required signature.
“At that point, I was ready to let it go,” Terrell said. “I thought we would let them finish their performance and I would take the director aside afterwards and tell him that the language was inappropriate.”
Then, toward the end of the show, there was a scene in which one character asked another, “How many times a day do you masturbate?” That was enough for Terrell and Greenfield Central Thespian director Ted Jacobs, who killed the stage lights and announced over the P.A. that the show was over.
Owens said he was “very shocked.” It was the first time he had taken a show to a conference.
“I worry that people may think I was trying to make a point of some kind,” he said. “I wasn’t. I looked at it and thought this is something that’s appropriate for high school students. We had just done it at our school.”
Afterward, he said, “I had a really good discussion with my kids about censorship and theatre, what theatre is about and why we do it.”
Jacobs, interviewed in May about the incident, said, “I’m an English teacher so I’m sensitive to the censorship issue. And I’m not going to say that you should never use that language on stage. But there are things I can’t do in my house, and that’s one of them.” He said he had no regrets about stopping the show, and that other theatre teachers approached him afterward and told him they supported his decision.
The incident is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of them the rarity and unintended drama of a piece of theatre being arrested in the middle of a performance. Beyond that, it raises questions about just what is meant by “community standards,” and whose standards should apply in a festival setting, and what kind of notice should be given to hosts and audiences about potentially offensive material.
Dawgone it
Students of today probably find this difficult to believe, but there was a time when characters in plays, films, novels, and other manifestations of American pop culture kept most of their clothes on and almost never uttered a profanity much stronger than a heartfelt “dang.”
That is the time when the most popular plays in the present-day high school repertory were written, when Broadway operated under the same constraints on language and subject matter as much of school theatre does now. A glance at the top ten non-musical plays in the Thespian Society’s annual production survey in a typical recent year will confirm this. Most of the titles are at least fifty years old: The Crucible, You Can’t Take It with You, The Miracle Worker, Our Town. The top ten musicals include a few more recent titles, but half of the shows on that list are from the fifties or earlier, too.
For the school director who wants to give students and audiences a contemporary theatre experience, editing the text can be a solution when the problem is a few expletives. The first rule of editing a play text is, “always ask,” said Roxane Heinze-Bradshaw, an associate editor at Samuel French, Inc. “Always ask. Always ask.” Some playwrights will freely grant permission for language changes, she said. Some are adamantly opposed.
It is a violation of both copyright law and a producing school’s contractual agreement with the leasing agent to make any changes in a copyrighted script without the permission of the author.
The reluctance of some writers to allow text changes in their plays is a source of enormous frustration for theatre teachers. It is impossible to know how many directors ignore the law and edit without permission, but obviously it happens.
“Do you realize the huge can of worms you are opening here?” one anonymous teacher wrote in response to an e-mail query. “Every director self-censors by deleting words or phrases and re-editing heavily… and I am [dubious] about everyone’s honesty in asking permission first. You may actually make theatre education diminish by making it harder to do. Be careful here.”
Publishers, who are obliged to protect the interests of their writers, cannot bend on the question. But they will pass on requests for editing expeditiously and are glad to talk with directors about text issues, said Brad Lorenz, head of professional leasing at French.
“Call us,” he said. “We’ll try to help. That’s our job.”
Happy endings
It is worth noting that the three school censorship cases cited at the beginning of this article all have relatively happy endings. (Also worth noting: that’s not how these things usually play out.)
The teacher and students from Wilton High School in Connecticut who created a theatre piece about the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq became a cause célèbre after the New York Times reported that their principal had blocked the production. They later presented readings of the work, by invitation, at the Public Theatre and The Culture Project in New York.
The superintendent of schools reversed the suspensions of the three Cross River, New York students who had been threatened with discipline after performing a section of The Vagina Monologues. They, too, became media celebrities for a while, appearing on The Today Show with playwright Eve Ensler.
The West Des Moines production of The Laramie Project offers a textbook example of how a teacher, principal, and school district administration can work together to produce challenging and rewarding theatre.
Valley High School theatre teacher Stacy Hansen began by researching other school productions of The Laramie Project, which has been a frequent target of school theatre censorship over the past few years. She talked it over with her theatre mentors—colleagues, college professors, and others in the theatre. Finally she took the idea to her principal, Vicky Poole.
“She asked me ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’” said Hansen, who is now home on maternity leave with a two-month-old daughter. “And I told her we might be picketed by protesters. She said, ‘There’s education in that, too.’”
With the support of her principal, Hansen decided to go ahead with the production. She secured production rights and obtained permission to edit some of the dialogue, and Poole briefed the district’s curriculum director and superintendent.
“We were in constant communication from then on,” Hansen said. “We had great administrative support. They say to us, ‘You’re the professional. You know what you’re doing. Just communicate with us and we’ll support you.’”
Thus when auditions were announced and the play became a hot topic—one Des Moines talk radio host called it “the culture war equivalent of the atom bomb”—curriculum director Phyllis Staplin was ready to articulate a rationale for the Valley High production. “It is edgy, but it is for a mature audience,” She told the Des Moines Register. “There is no doubt about it, this is providing a teaching opportunity for diversity and acceptance. Hate crimes are issues that need to be addressed in our society. I don’t feel we should be sheltering our students.”
The school board invited comment on the planned production at a mid-September meeting, and an agenda item that had been scheduled for twenty-five minutes went on for three hours. A majority of the people who spoke about the show praised it, and at the end of the meeting each member of the board made a statement in support of the production.
The November performances were picketed by protesters—about ten members of Rev. Fred Phelps congregation, who try to picket every production of Laramie, showed up. But even that worked in the show’s favor. At least in part because of the publicity generated by the protests, Hansen had to add a fourth performance to satisfy the demand for tickets.
It was all a great learning experience for her theatre students, Hansen says now. “They learned a lot about acceptance. They were able to see, ‘Yeah, we have to accept other people who don’t agree with us.’ They were living it.”
Don Corathers is editor of Dramatics. This article was originally published in the Spring 2007 issue of Teaching Theatre.
