“There is more than one way to burn a book,” wrote Ray Bradbury, in an afterword to his novel Fahrenheit 451. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

It is no small irony, consequently, that Bradbury’s classic tale of book burning, written in the wake of Germany’s affinity for book burnings leading up to and during World War II, finds itself banned at times in the present day. Book challenges and resulting book bans may not send a plume of smoke into the sky, but the goal is the same: to make it difficult for people to be exposed to certain ideas, to control what they may learn and think. Another classic of thought control, George Orwell’s 1984, often finds itself alongside Bradbury’s novel where such censorship takes root. Both appear on PEN America’s dataset of some 5,800 books banned in US schools between July 2021 and June 2023.

There are multiple compendiums of banned books in schools that have been developed by different organizations. In addition to the expansive list from PEN America, The Washington Post studied trends within book challenges numbering roughly 1,000, drawn from 150 school districts during the 2021-22 year, publishing their results in a multistory report on December 23. Days earlier, on December 20, the Orlando Sentinel listed 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida this year alone, primarily due to new Florida laws which require school media specialists to remove books with pornography or so-called “sexual conduct.”

The 673 books from Orange County described many of the same trends as those summarized by the Post and PEN: young adult books, books with LGBTQIA+ content, books by authors of color. Among the authors whose works were placed into review were Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Gordon Parks, Ovid, Marcel Proust, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker; among the perhaps more unexpected titles are Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

It’s impossible to know what books are in Orange County schools but presumably the number and range is considerable. US News says the district serves over 200,000 students and has 91 middle schools and 60 high schools. That said, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the source of the challenges matches the profile ascertained by the Post in its study, which revealed that 60% of the book challenges came from only 11 people. 

Within the 657 books detailed by the Orlando Sentinel, it’s worth noting that a small number of plays were placed under review. They are, in alphabetical order by author:

Four Plays by Aristophanes

Dance Nation by Clare Barron

The History Boys by Alan Bennett

The Bridges of Madison County by Marsha Norman and Jason Robert Brown

The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico Garcia Lorca

The Collected Plays by Lillian Hellman

M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

The Beauty Queen of Leeanne by Martin McDonagh

Sweat by Lynn Nottage

Equus by Peter Shaffer

The Food Chain byNicky Silver

That’s right: in Orange County, Florida, students currently can’t read three Tony Award winners for Best Play, as well as a major work by a Pulitzer prize-winner, let alone a collection of plays by one of the earliest major dramatists in world history. There is no indication as to the specific reason why these books have been withdrawn or what universe of books these were drawn from. Is the list so short because the district hasn’t provided schools with a representative sampling of play texts or because the individuals lodging complaints simply haven’t focused their attention in that direction?

Curiously the significantly longer PEN list for 2022-23 doesn’t show any dramatic works, suggesting something in their methodology may be at play, though prose works by writers who are strongly affiliated with theatre can be found, including Alan Cumming, Tim Federle, Lupita Nyong’o, and Adam Rapp; a manga edition of Hamlet also appears. If for some reason PEN has extracted dramatic works intentionally, then they have done the field a great disservice, since the challenging or banning of any text must be brought into the light.

The presence of play texts in school classrooms and libraries is essential, because even in districts where drama has escaped the censors’ eyes, there simply are too few production opportunities for students to be exposed to the breadth of dramatic literature. Incidents of production censorship make the news intermittently, but my own workshops reveal how many titles are refused for production by school officials, and yet more aren’t even proposed by teachers who fear blowback for even suggesting them.

In the wake of the Orlando Sentinel article David Henry Hwang wrote on the social media platform Threads, “Proud to have my play banned in Florida! When the MButterfly movie was banned in China in the 1990s, this led to everyone there wanting to see it. Remains to be seen how Floridians react.”

Nothing would be more gratifying than to find that bans only increase the popularity of the works under fire, sending students to public libraries and bookstores to seek out the forbidden fruit. If that were the case, we’d see authors clamoring to be banned. But once a book is banned, even if the ban generates attention, time passes and attention eventually fades, while the book remains unavailable as part of an educational experience, whether in a classroom or in a school library.

As expansive and valuable as all three reports are, those from PEN and the Washington Post are surely not fully representative of the full extent of book challenges and bans across the country, since they rely on various forms of public records releases, external submissions in response to requests, and direct discovery through interviews. As with so many such cases, they still must be looked at as the tip of the iceberg and, when it comes to dramatic works, as largely insufficient, except to highlight the degree to which a relatively small activist group of narrow-minded people want to dictate what literature can be accessed by young people who are inquisitive, broad-minded and in search of thoughts and stories beyond those that have passed some manner of purity test invented by unqualified individuals on censorious crusades.

As the Sentinel and the Post note, challenges don’t always result in bans and some works may yet be restored to school shelves. That’s why the only response is to support the books and the opportunity for expansive learning – and to watch for where theatre is being silenced, be it in performances, or just as text on shelves in schools.

Sutton Foster and Shuler Hensley (center) in The New Group production of “Sweet Charity” (photo by Monique Carboni)

Last week was not the first time I’ve been puzzled by Hilton Als’s writing on theatre.

I didn’t understand the rather cruel rationale by which he described the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein as follows, in a capsule review of Julie Salomon’s biography of Wasserstein:

Wendy Wasserstein was the kind of woman many women didn’t feel comfortable befriending, especially since she was what they feared being themselves: overweight, single, and a fag hag.

I was stumped when Als, wrote the following about Annie Baker, in reviewing her play John.

Baker has produced only one play about a woman’s life, and it was a one-act comedy, a relative trifle compared with her other work. Sometimes, it has been difficult to distinguish between Baker’s world of guys and her own ethos.

What about Circle Mirror Transformation? Is it explicitly about one woman’s life? No, not necessarily singularly, but do her plays genuinely warrant this characterization of them by Als? Are they collectively, in Als’s shorthand, “dude fugues”?

Baker projects her complicated, sometimes disappointing, but never less than human relationship to men, who interest her because they display their competitiveness more readily and openly, and thus more theatrically, than women do.

Interestingly, the review of John, in which Als felt that Baker was at last engaging fully with female characters, seemed focused on the naturalistic interaction of the characters, three out of four of whom are women. But he does make a generalization, suggesting that one or more of them may be “crazy,” a timeworn dismissal of women’s behavior. He does so without ever engaging with the play’s strong supernatural elements, which are almost impossible to overlook when we find one character reading H.P. Lovecraft to another, subverting the motivations and altering our perceptions of the characters and events as played on the surface. Indeed, we are to understand that the character who initially seems most unmoored from reality is in fact the most perceptive, not a madwoman.

So what has me – and based upon what I’ve seen on social media, many others – rather frustrated with Als now? It’s his review of The New Group’s Sweet Charity, which goes out of its way to critique not only director Leigh Silverman’s work on the revival itself, but her body of work as a director and perhaps even her personal attributes. It’s certainly fair for a critic to do much of that (reviewing people as opposed to their work, however, strikes me as unwarranted) – and to be clear, Als absolutely has the right to write about the theatre as he sees fit – but it’s the apparently gendered critique of Silverman, in a way that seems to overwhelm actually engaging with The New Group’s Sweet Charity itself, that’s striking many as problematic.

At this point I should acknowledge that as a cisgender, heterosexual middle-aged white man, I am perhaps singularly unqualified to weigh in on this subject, given my identity and the identities of the parties involved. If any readers feel that’s the case, I would urge them to stop reading this now. They might wish to consider an essay by Victoria Myers at The Interval (worth reading even if you choose to read on here), the most sustained, non-Facebook piece prompted by Als’s review that I’ve seen to date.

In the very first paragraph of his Sweet Charity review, Als writes, in reference to Silverman:

The problem is that she’s too serious about theatre; she wants her shows to count—to have a moral purpose. Sometimes a play is just a play, and not all of her productions can bear the weight of her imperative.

He goes on to refer to her “joyless directorial form” when she directed a piece for The Five Lesbian Brothers. He describes thinking of her as “downtown’s ‘woman’s director,’ in the old M-G-M George Cukor sense of the phrase.” He characterizes her work on Charity as having “very little shine or imagination” He compares her unfavorably to the director and choreographer of the original production, writing, “Silverman’s moral stance is different from Fosse’s. She’s not excited by display; she keeps things small, somehow.” He concludes by saying that like the show’s character, Oscar, who dumps the character of Charity at the very moment other shows would deploy as happy ending, “Silverman may have been driven by the same impulses: instead of trusting in and directing the flow of Foster’s natural wellspring of talent, she set out to dam it.”

So Silverman is, in Als’s view, a woman who is far too serious about her work and should just lighten up; in every way inferior to the man who originally conceived, directed and choreographed Charity; generally yet mysteriously reductive; and someone whom actors (those who, given his examples, are other more exuberant women) have to fight past in order to give engaging performances.

But while idolizing Bob Fosse (and Sutton Foster), Als doesn’t explicate what Silverman has actually done with Charity, a 50-year-old relic of an era when entertainment was frequently trapped in telling stories where women fell only along the virgin-whore duality. That was certainly evident in Charity’s source material, the film Nights of Cabiria.

How do we engage with this type of material now? Do we, to employ Als’s metaphor, admire them as eternal soap bubbles or, as so many works of entertainment now do, mine them for a grittier take, which rather than blowing ash upon works, strips them of their glitzy patina to better engage with the reality that might lie underneath? Certainly taking a darker view is not only a man’s right. Silverman has even made small revisions to the work, which go unremarked upon.

Broadway’s last Sweet Charity played out in pop colors along more Fosse-esque lines, though I recall Oscar’s rejection of Charity at the show’s end, in Denis O’Hare’s performance, as particularly ugly and cruel. In Silverman and Shuler Hensley’s hands, it seemed a genuine expression of personal failing, filled with regret. Both are perfectly valid readings of the script, which while written by the hugely successful Neil Simon, has become dated in the half-century since it debuted. It is hard to find Charity’s repeated humiliations as funny, as they were once intended to be. While my memory of O’Hare’s performance in contrast to Hensley’s is inevitably subjective, I’m intrigued that its dissonant harshness has stuck with me for 11 years, while my most recent experience seemed rueful and compassionate.

During an interlude from assailing Silverman, Als notes in his review the age of Sutton Foster, a relatively atypical critical practice, and it seems an arbitrary choice. It would be more pertinent had he connected it to his description of Charity as a “youngish girl.” In fact, Foster is the same age as Gwen Verdon when she created the role. While she reads as eternally youthful (the basis for her TV series Younger), a key element of Charity’s character, then as now, is that, in the time and society in which the show is set, the character is decidedly not youngish, with essential implications for the character’s motivations, and how we perceive them against the typical expectation of women in the 1960s. That Foster and Silverman chose to address that element is not diminishing Foster under Silverman’s cloak of darkness, but rather an actor and director working in concert to mine truth from what the text offers them.

That seems to be the operant motivation for Als’s critique – Silverman is denying the charm of the piece, and of the leading lady. But The New Group itself is noted for a repertoire that explores dark stories and ugly truths; that they were producing Sweet Charity seemed a dissonant concept when first announced. In fact, the concept that Silverman and Foster brought to the company (instead of Silverman simply being “hired,” in Als’s assumption) was in keeping with artistic director Scott Elliot’s aesthetic – and an experiment more reasonably undertaken in a 222-seat venue than a 1500 seat Broadway house. Has Charity been reduced, shrunken, made small, as Als would have it, or has it been made more intimate, more human, less razzle-dazzle in service of character and storytelling? Even before entering the theatre, all signs pointed to the latter, lest anyone be confused about intent.

To reiterate: Als is welcome to his opinion, as we all are. But as a critic, he repeatedly denigrates Silverman for ostensibly applying the same aesthetic to all of her work because she had the effrontery to tamper with Sweet Charity. He categorizes Silverman as a downtown women’s director, an implied pejorative, yet beyond a fleeting mention of her Broadway debut with Well, fails to acknowledge her “uptown” work, with three Broadway shows to date, which is unfortunately a rare achievement for any woman – or her ongoing collaboration with David Henry Hwang.

Instead of analyzing the choices Silverman made in Charity, he attempted to divine her motivation. Als tells readers of his disappointment with the show not being what he wanted it to be, rather than interpreting it according to what was there. Even in a much-reduced cast, why did Silverman choose to have Joel Perez essay all of the main male roles other than Oscar? Is it possible that Silverman was looking at male mores of the time and seeing a sameness that she wanted to emphasize? In reading Als’s review, we don’t even know that Perez plays multiple roles. The fundamentals of reviewing are made subordinate to an agenda.

At the start, I cited some examples of Als’s writing that I’ve found surprising. I have not conducted a years-long study of his work, and certainly his recent review covering both Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World displays none of the implied gender bias of his Sweet Charity review. So this is no blanket assertion of his motivations or beliefs, but simply an attempt to explore, overall, one piece of writing that has proven troubling to so many, including artists I admire. With Sweet Charity, Als – with guidance from his editors – could have critiqued the show, and Leigh Silverman’s work on the show, in a way that would have allowed readers to better understand the production on its own terms, rather than as a platform for his seemingly gendered survey of Leigh Silverman as a person.

In the song “The Book Report” from the musical You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, Lucy van Pelt struggles to complete her homework assignment: 100 words on Peter Rabbit. Falling short, she concludes it thusly: “And they were very very very very very very happy to be home. The very very very end.”

In honor of this blatant effort to reach a designated threshold without utilizing meaningful content, I would like to present the very very very first “Lucy Van Pelt Award for Verbal and Political Padding” to Senator Tom Coburn (R, Oklahoma), for the 2014 edition of his much-publicized “Wastebook.” For those who haven’t heard of it, the Wastebook is Coburn’s perennial compilation of excessive and/or unnecessary federal spending. It tends to generate a good bit of attention for its most absurd items in all manner of media. A careful parsing of Coburn’s annual lists may reveal a partisan bent and a truckful of snark, though in reviewing the past few years of reports, I did note that he wasn’t above calling attention to what he deemed wasteful spending in his home state too.

The new report, on its comic book meets tabloid cover, trumpets $25 billion in government waste in only 100 examples. Without being deeply grounded in every item he cites, I must admit that a few do make one wonder. However, I have to chide Coburn for a few of his 2014 examples, specifically those derived from National Endowment for the Arts grants. Alongside “Swedish Massages for Rascally Rabbits” and “Watching Grass Grow,” Coburn calls out:

• “Teen Zombie Sings, Tries To Get A Date To The Dance” ($10,000 for the musical Zombie in Love at Oregon Children’s Theatre)
• “Colorado Orchestra Targets Youth With Stoner Symphony” ($15,000 for a Colorado Symphony concert thematically linked to the state’s newly legal industry, but performing standard symphonic works)
• “Roosevelt and Elvis Make A Hallucinatory Pilgrimage To Graceland” ($10,000 to The TEAM for their play RoosevElvis, to be seen this winter at the COIL Festival)
• “Bruce Lee Play Panned As Promoting Racial Stereotypes” ($70,000 to Signature Theatre Company for the production of David Henry Hwang’s Kung Fu)

Libby King and Kristen Sieh in The TEAM’s RoosevElvis (Photo by Sue Kessler)

While Coburn surely hasn’t seen or read any of these productions, his efforts to make these minimal grants into shameful instances of government funds gone awry relies only on inevitably reductive synopses and selectively quotes from the odd negative review as if to justify his point about these NEA funded projects. The headlines are of course chosen to make the work itself sound as absurd as possible. Worth noting: Coburn seems to have a particular distaste for children’s theatre, having also called out $10,000 for the production of the musical Mooseltoe at the Centralia Cultural Society in Illinois in the 2013 Wastebook. There are other arts related items in the 2014 report, but they’re actually funded outside of the NEA, the largest being $90 million for the State Department’s Cultural Exchange programs, targeted by Coburn for a handful of unconventional performers he selected from a much larger pool, a rigged argument at best.

Coburn’s increased role as an arts critic is no doubt due to the mileage he got out of his 2013 list’s inclusion of a $697,000 grant to the theatre company The Civilians for their musical The Great Immensity, about climate change. Obviously the subject matter was a hot-button for the Senator, and I imagine that numerous arts groups must be envious of the sum (far in excess of what groups typically get from the NEA), but Coburn fails to take into account the respect accorded to the work of The Civilians in artistic circles – and arts groups should take note that the largesse came not from the NEA, but from the National Science Foundation, due to the specific subject. It may be a bigger and easier target for Coburn, but it’s not a worthy one.

Whatever the politics and bias behind it, I’m willing to grant that there’s some value in Coburn’s list, such as highlighting the famous Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere or calling out excessive spending on the incompetent overhaul of government computer systems. But his four NEA-based examples this year are simply padding, as they represent only 0.00042% of his report’s dollar total, but 4% of his report. It’s just another example of a politician attacking the arts as an easy target, when there are bigger and more essential fish to fry.

Cole Horibe in Kung Fu at Signature Theatre (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Regarding the four “wasteful” grants in question, I can offer a personal opinion on only one, namely Kung Fu, which was ambitious and perhaps not completely realized in its debut at Signature. But it was – and is – a worthy project by an artist whose work is always deserving of support. By the way, David Hwang has told me there’s more work to be done on the piece and he’s recently made public note of plans to remount it soon to implement further changes. When that happens, I’ll do my best to invite Senator Coburn to Kung Fu as my guest though he may be out of the public eye and not up to it – he’s leaving Congress at the end of the year for health reasons, and this year’s list may be his parting shot.

Of course, health permitting, Coburn could keep producing the Wastebook after leaving office, if he has a real commitment to exposing government waste. But I’m willing to bet that he won’t. Why do I say that? Because surely most people realize that his annual screed is produced by his staff, maybe even eager young interns, not by Coburn’s own personal research and writing efforts. Come to think of it, I wonder how much the Wastebook cost the U.S. taxpayer each year, in staff research and writing time? I suspect it’s more than the federal government gave to Mooseltoe.

P.S. Let’s all go see The TEAM’s RoosevElvis when it plays New York’s P.S. 122 in January 2015 and each decide for ourselves whether the $10,000 from the NEA was well spent. I, for one, wasn’t aware of the show, but I’m now looking forward to it. Gee, thanks Senator Coburn!