“What’s the deal with all this high school theatre?”

That’s the kind of comment—spoken, written or tweeted—I’ve been getting regularly over the past four years since I began writing about instances of censorship of theatre in American high schools (and, on occasion, colleges). To be fair to those who may be skeptical about the extent of the problem, I myself have been surprised by the volume and variety of issues raised over the content of shows being done—and, in some cases, ultimately not being done—in school-sponsored theatre.

But between writing about these incidents, and directly involving myself as an advocate in some of them, I’ve come to believe that what’s taking place in our high schools and on our campuses has a very direct connection to what is happening (and will be happening) on professional stages.

So here are nine common questions that have arisen as my advocacy has increased, and some answers—although, as every attempt at censorship is different, there aren’t any absolute answers.

1. Why is there so much more censorship of high school theatre these days?

There’s no quantitative study that indicates the policing of what’s performed is any greater than it was 10, 25 or 50 years ago. Everything is anecdotal. But the Internet has made it easier for reports to spread beyond individual communities and for news-aggregation sites uncover and accelerate the dissemination of such stories. It only takes one report in a small-town paper these days to bring an incident to national attention; that was a rarity in the print-only era.

2. Isn’t this just a reflection of our polarized national politics?

School theatre censorship doesn’t necessarily follow the red state/blue state binary division, because the impulse can arise from any constituency. While efforts to quash depictions of LGBTQ life—as with Almost, Maine in Maiden, N.C., or Spamalot in South Williamsport, Pa.—may be coming from political constituencies galvanized against the spread of marriage equality, or from certain faith communities which share that opposition, that’s hardly the only source. Opposition to Sweeney Todd, both muted (in Orange, Conn.) and explicit (in Plaistow, N.H.) was driven by concern about the portrayal of violence in an era of school shootings and rising suicide rates, while Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was challenged by a black superintendent over August Wilson’s use of the “n-word.”

3. What’s the real impact of school theatre on the professional community?

The Broadway League pegs attendance at Broadway’s 40 theatres in the neighborhood of 13 million admissions a year and touring shows at 14 million a year. TCG’s Theatre Facts reports resident and touring attendance of 11 million. That totals a professional universe of 38 million admissions.

Based on figures provided to me by half a dozen licensing houses, there are at minimum 37,500 shows done in high school theatres annually, and conservatively guesstimating three performances of each in 600 seat theatres at 75-percent capacity, that’s more than 50 million attendees. In both samples, the numbers don’t represent the total activity, but high school theatre’s audience impact is undeniable, both as a revenue stream for authors and as a means of reaching audiences who might not see any other theatre at all.

4. Does it really matter what shows kids get to do in high school?

While there are valuable aspects to making theatre that apply no matter what the play choice may be, many schools view their productions as community relations, frequently citing that they want to appeal to audiences “from 8 to 80.” While the vast majority of students in the shows, and their friends who come to see them, will never become arts professionals, they are the potential next generation of audiences and donors for professional companies. If they are raised on a diet of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz (both currently very popular in the high school repertoire), how can we expect more challenging work , new work, or socially conscious work to sustain itself 20 years on?

5. Are school administrators fostering an environment in which censorship flourishes?

I’m unwilling to accept the idea that our schools are run by people who fundamentally want to limit what students can learn—or perform. But they are operating within a political structure topped by an elected board of education, and can be subject to political pressure that often makes the path of least resistance—altering text or changing a selected show, in most cases—the expedient way to go. Unless an administrator (or a teacher, for that matter) is independently wealthy, they can’t necessarily afford to risk their job fighting for the school play that may have challenging content. That said, students at Newman University rebelled against administration-dictated text changes, reverting to the script as written for the latter two of their four performances of Legally Blonde in November.

6. Isn’t this a free speech issue?

In a word, no. Schools have the right and responsibility to determine what is appropriate activity and speech under their control, and just because students are exposed to all manner of content in the media and even in their day-to-day lives doesn’t mean that schools can or must permit it, either in classrooms or performance. That The Crucible is in countless high school curriculums does not necessarily prevent it from being censored as a performance piece, despite the seeming double standard.

The same stringent oversight that affects school theatre is also often directed at school newspapers and media. However, while some school systems attempt to control all student speech, it is a First Amendment violation to infringe on student speech to the media about their dissatisfaction with the actions of a school, including censorship. Drama teachers, who are best equipped to make the cases for the shows they choose, are usually prevented from doing so by employment agreements which prohibit them from discussing school matters without the express approval of the administration, typically the superintendent.

7. Don’t shows get edited all the time in schools for content?

In all likelihood, shows are constantly being nipped and tucked by teachers and administrators to conform to their perception of “community standards,” whether it’s the occasional profanity or entire songs. But that doesn’t make it right, and it is censorship. Aside from violating copyright laws and the licensing contracts signed for the right to the show, it sets a terrible example for students by suggesting that authors’ work can be altered at will, undermining the rights of the artists who created the work.

Some writers and composers have authorized school editions or junior versions of their shows for the school market to recognize frequent concerns and to keep from denying students the opportunity to explore their shows. But the rights must lie with the authors, not each and every school. If that isn’t made clear early on, how can we expect to fight censorship anywhere?

8. When a show is canceled and then successfully restored through a public campaign, is that winning the battle and then losing the war?

That’s a genuine concern of mine—that once there’s a public battle over theatrical content, the school will thereafter clamp down even harder and apply greater scrutiny forever after to drama programs, academic or extracurricular. At the Educational Theatre Association’s national conference this past summer, one attendee asked the others if there were shows that they believed would be great for their students but which they couldn’t even raise as possibilities. Every single teacher in the room raised his or her hand. So the incidents that become public—ones in which a show is announced, then has approval rescinded—are the tip of the iceberg. Drama teachers and directors are already having their choices limited, often by self-censorship. There’s much more work to be done, but if blatant examples don’t come to light, it may never be possible to galvanize support for school theatre that challenges students to do great work and great works.

9. Can professional artists and companies make any difference when incidents of censorship arise?

Local theatres—professional, community and academic—make superb allies in fighting against censorship. Institutions and individuals within communities that are respected for their art occupy a position from which to speak out forcefully and effectively for school theatre programs. Whether it’s a nearby artistic director or a one-time resident who has gone on to a professional career, they bring a history and authority that will speak to both the local populace and the media. The vocal support of the Yale School of Drama and Yale Rep with the aforementioned Joe Turner, and of Goodspeed Musicals and Hartford Stage in the case of Rent in Trumbull, Conn., were key factors in the ultimately successful efforts toward restoring those shows to production.

In closing: The first time I inserted myself into a school theatre censorship debate in 2011, I assumed it was a one-off. I did not realize at the time that I had found a cause. Each time an incident comes to a conclusion, regardless of whether the outcome was, from my point of view, positive or negative, I think that surely the message is getting out there and this will be the last time. But then comes the phone call, the e-mail, the tweet, from someone I’ve never met and possibly never will, saying that a show is threatened or has just been shut down. And I begin my introductory speech, which is unfortunately well-honed at this point.

“This is no longer about education,” I say, “this is no longer about art. This is now a political campaign.” And off we go.

This post first appeared at AmericanTheatre.org

Aside from being the month of copious pumpkin flavored foodstuffs, October also brings two perennial theatrical top ten lists that are worthy of note: American Theatre magazine’s list of the most produced plays in Theatre Communications Group theatres for the coming season and Dramatics magazine’s lists of the most produced plays, musicals and one-acts in high school theatre for the prior year. They both say a great deal about the state of theatre in their respective spheres of production, both by what’s listed explicitly, as well as by what doesn’t appear.

In the broadest sense, both lists are startlingly predictable, although for different reasons. If you happen to find a bookie willing to give you odds on predicting the lists, here’s the trick for each: for the American Theatre list, bet heavily on plays which appeared on Broadway, or had acclaimed Off-Broadway runs, in the past year or two. For the Dramatics list, bet heavily on the plays that appeared on the prior year’s list.

But in the interest of learning, let’s unpack each list not quite so reductively.

American Theatre

As I’ve written in the past, what happens in New York theatre is a superb predictor of what will happen in regional theatre in the coming seasons, especially when it comes to plays. Any play that makes it to Broadway, or gets a great New York Times review, is going to grab the attention of regional producers. Throw in Tony nominations, let alone a Tony win – or the Pulitzer – and those are the plays that will quickly crop up on regional theatre schedules.

Anyone who follows the pattern of production would have easily guessed that Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike would proliferate this year, being a thoughtful, literary based comedy with a cast of only six. That American Theatre lists 27 productions doesn’t even take into account the 11 theatres that did the show in 2013-14, and certainly there are non-TCG theatres which are doing the show as well. It’s no surprise that Durang has said he made more money this past year than in any other year of his career; it’s a shame that financial success has taken so long for such a prodigiously gifted writer and teacher.

In general, shows on the American Theatre list have about a three year stay, typically peaking in their second year on the list, but this can vary depending upon when titles are released by licensing houses and agents to regional theatres. 25 years ago (and more significantly years before that) theatres might have had to compete with commercial tours, but play tours are exceedingly rare birds these days, if not extinct.

Perhaps this rush to the familiar and popular and NYC-annointed is disheartening, but it’s worth observing that the American Theatre list notes how many productions each title gets, and that after the first couple of slots, we’re usually looking at plays that are getting 7 or 8 productions in a given season, across TCG’s current universe of 474 member companies (404 of which were included in this year’s figures). Since the magazine notes a universe of 1,876 productions, suddenly 27 stagings of a single show doesn’t seem so dominant after all. Granted, TCG drops Shakespeare from their calculations, but even he only counted for 77 productions of all of his plays across this field. So reading between the lines, the American Theatre list suggests there’s very little unanimity about what’s done at TCG member theatres in any given year, a less quantifiable achievement but an important one.

Dramatics

While titles come and go on the American Theatre list, stasis is the best word to describe the lists of most produced high school plays (it’s somewhat less true for musicals). Nine of the plays on the 2014 list were on the 2013 list; 2014 was topped by John Cariani’s Almost, Maine, followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the two titles were in reverse order the prior year. The other duplicated titles were Our Town, 12 Angry Men (Jurors), You Can’t Take It With You, Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, Harvey and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Like the American Theatre list, the Dramatics survey doesn’t cover the entirety of high school theatre production; only those schools that are members of the Educational Theatre Association’s International Thespian Society have the opportunity to participate, representing more than 4,000 high schools out of a universe of 28,500 public, private and parochial secondary schools in the country. Unlike the Dramatics list, there are no hard numbers about how many productions each show receives, so one can only judge relative popularity.

Almost, Maine’s swift ascension to the top rungs of the list is extraordinary, but it’s due in no small part to its construction as a series of thematically linked scenes, originally played by just four actors but easily expandable for casts where actor salaries aren’t an issue. Looking at recent American Theatre lists, they tend to be topped by plays with small casts (Venus in Fur, Red, Good People and The 39 Steps), while the Dramatics list is the reverse, with larger cast plays dominating, in order to be inclusive of more students (though paling next to musicals where casts in school shows might expand to 50 or more).

The most important trend on the Dramatics list (which has been produced since 1938) is the lack of trends. Though a full assessment of the history of top high school plays would take considerable effort, it’s worth noting that Our Town was on the list not only in 2014 and 2013, but also in 2009, 1999 and 1989; the same is true for You Can’t Take It With You. Other frequently appearing titles are Arsenic and Old Lace, various adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Harvey, and The Miracle Worker.

No doubt the lack of newer plays with large casts is a significant reason why older classic tend to rule this list; certainly the classic nature of these works and their relative lack of controversial elements play into it as well. But as I watched Sheri Wilner’s play Kingdom City at the La Jolla Playhouse a few weeks ago, in which a drama director is compelled to choose a play from the Dramatics list, I wondered: is the list self-perpetuating? Are there numerous schools that seek what’s mainstream and accepted at other schools, and so do the same plays propagate themselves because administrators see the Dramatics list as having an implied educational seal of approval?

That may well be, and if it’s true, it’s an unfortunate side effect of a quantitative survey. But it’s also worth noting that many of these plays, vintage though they may be, have common themes, chief among them exhortations to march to your own drummer, to matter how out of step you may be to the conventional wisdom. They may be artistic expressions from other eras about the importance of individuality, but in the hands of teachers thinking about more than just placating parents, they are also opportunities to celebrate those among us who may seem different or unique, and for fighting for what you believe in against prevailing sentiment or structures.

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Looking at musicals on the American Theatre list is a challenge, because their list is an aggregate of plays and musicals, and while many regional companies now do a musical or two, it’s much harder for any groundswell to emerge. In the last five years, only three musicals have made it onto the TCG lists, each for one year only: Into The Woods, Spring Awakening and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. That doesn’t mean there’s a dearth of musical production, it simply shows that the work is being done by companies outside of the TCG universe.

Musicals are of course a staple of high school theatre, but the top ten lists from Dramatics are somewhat more fluid. While staples like Guys and Dolls, Grease, Once Upon a Mattress, You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown and Little Shop of Horrors maintain their presence, newer musicals arrive every year or two, with works like Seussical, Legally Blonde, Spelling Bee, and Thoroughly Modern Millie appearing frequently in recent years. At the peak spot, after a six-year run, Beauty and the Beast was bested this year by Shrek; as with professional companies, when popular new works are released into the market, they quickly rise to the top. How long they’ll stay is anyone’s guess, but I have little doubt that we’ll one day see Aladdin and Wicked settle in for long tenures.

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When I looked at both the American Theatre and Dramatics lists over a span of time, the distinct predictability of each was troubling. Coming out when they do, before most theatrical production for the next theatre season is set, I’d like to see them looked at not as any manner of affirmation, but as a challenge – whether to professional companies or school schedules. I admire and enjoy the plays that are listed here, and nothing herein should be construed as critical of any of these shows; audiences around the country deserve the opportunity to see them. While I do have the benefit of living in New York and seeing most of these popular shows there, I must confess that I am most intrigued by the theatre companies and school groups that might just say to themselves, ‘Let’s not do the shows, or too many of the shows, that appear on these lists. Let’s find something else.’ Those plays may never appear as part of any aggregation, but I suspect the groups’ work will be all the more interesting for it, benefiting both artists and audiences.

“It’s one of my lost plays that I feel we can bring back,” says British playwright Alan Ayckbourn of 2003’s Sugar Daddies, which will make its U.S. debut this month at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre, directed by the author.

ACT has previously staged 10 Ayckbourn plays with other directors. So what prompted this in-person visit by the playwright himself to stage a work little seen beyond his home base of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England?

“They asked me, is the simple answer,” explained Ayckbourn. “I met Kurt Beattie the artistic director when he came to Scarborough two years ago. He slipped me the ground plan of their Allen Theatre, which is conveniently in the round, and he asked if I’d fancy working there.”

Ayckbourn says the plays – about a young woman who helps an elderly crime boss who she helped after he’s hit by car, and ends up as his protégeé –  is based in part on the Faust legend. “It is, in the end, the story of a girl corrupted by worldly goods, “ Ayckbourn says. “Do you sell your soul or do you hold on to it? There’s nothing particularly English about it.”

Still, Ayckbourn notes that he’s not planning to Americanize the play for the Seattle production. “I’d been down the road of Americanization early in my career. It turned out to be a very unfortunate choice. If you’re not an American writer, your vocabulary when you’re translating is much narrower. It’s the same as trying to squeeze Tennessee Williams into Cheltenham.”

The author of 77 plays (not including one-acts, children’s shows and holiday entertainments), Ayckbourn has directed American acting companies in two plays previously, Henceforward at The Alley Theater in 1987 and multiple engagements of By Jeeves after its stateside debut at Goodspeed Musicals in 1996. Does he find a difference when working with U.S. actors?

“Here [in Scarborough] I have the advantage,” Ayckbourn notes, “of having a rolling company and they are, to an extent, imbued with the ethos of the way I work and the style in which I write. It used to be difficult for American actors, because they went after the jokes in my stuff and fell flat on their faces – because there are none. Most of my jokes come from monosyllables like ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

“I have to ask people not to treat it like a broad English comedy. The more seriously you play my stuff, the funnier it gets. But these days, because of my age and reputation, if you like, they treat me a bit too reverently. I have to knock the reverence out of them.”

“Urk!” “Huff huff.” “Sshing!” “Fwoosh.” “Fwooom!” “Twackk!”

William Shakespeare is credited with inventing countless words and phrases that the stuff of our everyday speech is made on. But I daresay that the words which appear above—if words they be—are not of the Bard’s making. Yet I just read them in Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. That is, in the graphic novels of those plays from Capstone Press, where they’re employed like the “pows” and “bams” of TV’s “Batman.”

You might think that graphic novels of Shakespeare are a freak novelty, but in fact they’re an entire subgenre. I’ve amassed an incomplete selection of these works that stands some two feet high—a mix of comic books, paperbacks and hardcovers. And I know I’m only scratching the surface. (By way of example, Oxford University Press has a series that would apparently be contraband in this country; in North America, only Canadians can purchase it. No kidding.)

I plunged into this array of adapted Shakespeare as a fan of the plays but no expert, and as a novice in the world of comics and graphic novels. My interest emerged from my own experience, at age eight or nine, during Nixon’s first term, of reading The Iliad and A Tale of Two Cities, not in their original versions, but via the series of comic books called Classics Illustrated. Although they ceased publication in 1962, my brother and I scavenged barely vintage copies from paper drives and tag sales and secured them in a tin breadbox (also found curbside); we would withdraw them from their cask on a narrow loft in our garage to read about Sydney Carton and Helen of Troy. Why we required an aerie for this I don’t know—our schoolteacher mother wasn’t likely to have objected. As a result, I am no snob when it comes to this form, but rather a childhood fan looking to see how it has developed.

Remarkably, the original Classics Illustrated titles have been reissued, so I’m now able to see how Shakespeare was handled back in the day. There’s a mighty startled Macbeth on one cover, wearing a winged headpiece in a comic which first appeared in 1955 (and which now costs $9.99 as a reprint, startling me as well), staring at a floating dagger enveloped in a flaming nimbus that evokes the burning bush. The interior art, from the years before Jack Kirby, recalls Prince Valiant, but the language, albeit edited, is unmistakably rooted in Shakespeare (then again, the Norse comic hero Thor was derided in the film The Avengers as “Shakespeare in the Park” for his faux classical aspect). Rather than dumbing down the text too much, words like “thane” and “raveled” are footnoted. What’s most striking, looking at an original Classics Illustrated book after so many years, is that while it is all too obviously a product of another time, it doesn’t seem over-simplified for children; I imagine that those of us who read them once upon a time felt pretty smart without feeling pandered to.

The modern era, so far as I discovered, kicked off in the ’80s with Workman Publishing’s rather conventional Macbeth, illustrated by Oscar Zarate; its first notable creative mark came with what Workman billed as Ian Pollock’s Illustrated King Lear, Complete and Unabridged. Owing more to Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe than to DC or Marvel, this was a Lear of grotesques. I suspect it would send a purist running away quickly, despite fidelity to the original text. Applying the language of theatre, Pollock’s book is visually avant-garde, even almost three decades on.

Indeed, it was the language of theatre that came to mind most often as I traipsed through these recent volumes; primarily dating from the past decade or so, they mostly adopt the visual style of superhero comics or Japanese manga (there are three competing series of Manga Shakespeare). As a result, they resemble nothing so much as storyboards for intricate movies. Because most stay reasonably faithful to the text, the words often crowd the frames; they break loose when they portray action that would be blocked on stage, or offer us a normally offstage vision (we see the dead Ophelia just as the text describes her). Wiley’s manga edition of Julius Caesar is at its strongest as “silent” panels overtake the text in the final pages.

The storyboard parallel is most pronounced in one of the newest entries, the sci-fi epic Romeo and Juliet: The War, credited to four creators, including the august Stan Lee. The horizontal, hardcover, full-color book resembles one of those profusely illustrated tomes on The Art of Star Wars, created to sate the desires of die-hard fans. But don’t go looking for faithful language here: In their first meeting at the masquerade, our futuristic Romeo propositions Juliet with, “Maybe one day I can see you without your costume.” Though less visually epic, there’s also a sci-fi Macbeth graphic novel from Puffin that acknowledges its effort to blend Shakespeare with the works of authors Larry Niven and Anne McCaffrey: If starting the story of the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor with him astride a dragon in the year “Stardate: 1040” sets your heart racing, this is your book.

A futuristic Romeo and Juliet may still startle today’s audiences/readers, long after the tale of star-crossed lovers has been adapted, manipulated, parodied and plagiarized in every possible permutation. But that’s where these many treatments of Shakespeare serve another purpose: to offer new interpretations in different settings and time periods without the expense of theatrical production. To be sure, the most explicitly educational books hew close to a traditional line, as evidenced by the series from Graphic Planet and Campfire Classics: Simon Greaves’s books from the Shakespeare Comic Book Company even subordinate image to text, offering side-by-side original text and simplified modern speech, as if subtitled. The books from Classical Comics, while drawn in superhero glory for the most part (though their A Midsummer Night’s Dream is appropriately pastoral), come in three “flavors” for each title: original text, plain text and quick text, suited to every entertainment or pedagogical need.

Emerging from this collection as among the most intriguing are the books that look least like conventional comics and instead adopt designs that play with visual style in new ways. Hamlet andMacbeth from “No Fear Shakespeare” bear a passing resemblance to the works of Art Spiegelman or Marjane Satrapi, while the Amulet Books Manga Shakespeare series offers the greatest variety—from an anime-inflected Much Ado About Nothing, to a roughly sketched, chiaroscuro Julius Caesar that eschews any shades of gray, to their pièce de résistance (of those I’ve seen): a Native-American King Lear. You may find it jarring to see an Indian chieftain declaring, “Attend the Lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester” and have trouble with a Cordelia who echoes Disney’s Pocahontas, but there’s no denying that a powerful imagination has been brought to bear.

Indeed, the play King Lear seems to have inspired the widest visual variety; in addition to Pollock’s early entry and the Amulet book illustrated by the one-named Ilya, Gareth Hinds’s stylistically eccentric version for Candlewick Press features typeset text that at times loops around water-colored images—but there’s no mistaking the impact of Cordelia’s death when the color drains from the page.

Although the artistic and textual approaches among these many volumes vary widely, it’s fairly safe to assume that at their root, all are efforts to make Shakespeare more approachable for the novice, most likely pre-college students. The importance of the standard middle school and high school curriculum is surely the reason for the plethora of graphic Hamlets, Tempests, Romeo and Juliets andMidsummers. I found no Titus Andronicus or Timon of Athens in my pursuits; they proved even rarer than stage productions of those plays. The volumes that attempted a more mass-market sales spin can run afoul of their own educational mission; for example, the folks at Spark Publishing, responsible for the “No Fear” series, apparently take an awfully benevolent view of Richard III, as they declareMacbeth to be “the only Shakespeare play with a villain for its hero.”

Depth of Shakespearean knowledge is evident among the creators of perhaps the most innovative of graphic-novel Shakespeares. The authors and artists of the Kill Shakespeare series from IDW Publishing have abandoned any singular work and instead dreamed up a massive Shakespearean mashup in which Hamlet and Juliet join forces to battle against such villains as Richard III and Iago, who seek to vanquish (in the words of their marketing copy) “a reclusive wizard named William Shakespeare.” While the characters are familiar, their quest is wholly new, and their challenge transforms even those we think we know well; the surviving Juliet, still mourning Romeo, has taken on traits more typically associated with Joan of Arc.

For those steeped in the world of graphic novels, Kill Shakespeare is the Elizabethan equivalent of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, or perhaps Jasper Fforde’s (unillustrated) novel Something Rotten, although Kill is unmistakably and distinctively its own achievement. Having only finished Volume 1 of the series (Volume 2 is available, while Volume 3 is in the works), I’m already eager to find out if the scantily clad vixen who beckons Iago on the final page is, as I suspect, the formidable Lady Macbeth; Classics Illustrated never looked like this (nor was it serialized).

Coming full circle, it’s worth noting that the Classics Illustrated trademark has been revived, for a new graphic novel series, by the Papercutz imprint. And while newly drawn and edited, these share a common trait with their predecessor of 50 years ago—they conclude with the same message: “Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated Edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original, obtainable at your school or public library.” It’s a message that might well conclude every graphic novel version of Shakespeare—although perhaps it’s unnecessary, since these adaptations, if successful, make their own case for the plays. On the other hand, I never did read The Iliad, did I?

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Here’s a link to the article as it appeared online here.