To be clear from the very start, two points. Judi Honoré, the owner of Shakespeare Books & Antiques in Ashland, Oregon, has every right to display anything she chooses in the window of, or for that matter anywhere in, her store. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, also located in Ashland, Oregon, has every right as an organization to express its institutional opinion about events locally or nationally as it sees fit, and to align its business practices accordingly.

These rights, however, came into conflict this summer, when a window display of banned books at Shakespeare Books & Antiques, which has been in place (albeit with rotating inventory) for the past several years, was perceived by members of the OSF company as making a racial commentary about a current OSF production. Specifically, the origin of the dispute arose from the juxtaposition of an edition of Little Black Sambo to a collection of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, while OSF was producing The Wiz, the retelling of The Wizard of Oz with an all-black cast.

The controversy has extended throughout the summer, and continues to simmer. OSF is still developing plans for a town hall meeting intended to allow members of the community to share their opinions of what has emerged from expressions of discomfort over the window display and its significant aftermath. But before that happens, on Monday October 31, Shakespeare Books & Antiques will close. So how did this come to pass, that ideals of social consciousness and free speech became seemingly oppositional positions?

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For those unfamiliar with the children’s story Little Black Sambo, it recounts a simple, non-realistic tale of a child who is sequentially threatened by a group of tigers into parting with all of his clothes, then driven up a tree, after which the tigers fall to squabbling and end up chasing one another by their tails at the base of the tree until they somehow melt into butter, which is then brought home by the child and used by his mother to make pancakes for the family. The book, by Helen Bannerman, first appeared in 1899 in England, and has been republished and retold in numerous editions ever since.

While the original preface stated that it was written by “an English lady in India, where black children abound and tigers are everyday affairs,” some versions employ illustrations more evocative of Africa, while others conflate the two.  The depiction of Bannerman’s little boy and his family has also varied widely, from relatively realistic to grossly stereotypical, with some editions employing iconography more akin to those often seen in the early 20th century American South, as also seen in a 1935 animated short based on the story.

Within decades of its appearance, LBS, while one of the relatively few children’s books with a black protagonist, was increasingly perceived as racist. Langston Hughes cited the book as being of the “pickanninny variety,” writing that the name “Sambo” was “amusing undoubtedly to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at.” Even after LBS began to be removed (and banned) from schools and libraries, the name was taken up by a chain of US restaurants, started in California in 1957 as their brand, growing to more than 1,100 outlets by the 1970s before collapsing (after an attempted rebranding) in the 80s.

New editions of LBS have continued to emerge, with some making efforts to address the racial portrayals, particularly with regards to the illustrations, including some which have sought to more accurately bring accuracy to the setting of India. But the name remains a racial slur in the minds of many people, as it already was when the book was first published.

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Portion of banned books display at Shakespeare Books & Antiques in Ashland, Oregon in September 2016

The context for the display in the Shakespeare Books & Antiques (SBA) window is provided by two signs. The first, shown within a frame in the display itself, reads:

BOOKS REFLECTING THE HISTORY OF RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES

Our position is that these books should still be available to read during these critical time [sic]. As Scott Parker-Anderson so eloquently wrote for the Library of Congress, “The truth about the past can make people uncomfortable, but it does not change the truth. There were slaves, they were treated horribly, and called horrible names. Those are the facts, that cannot be changed. REMEMBER, those that forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”

The second sign, affixed to the window, reads:

BANNED BY SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, SOMETIME

We believe attempts to censor ideas to which we gave access, whether in books, magazines, plays, works of art, television, movies or songs are not simply isolated instances of harassment by diverse special interest groups. Rather, they are a part of a growing pattern of increasing intolerance which is changing the fabric of America. Censorship cannot eliminate evil, it can only kill freedom. We believe Americans have the right to buy, stores have the right to sell, and authors have the right to publish constitutionally protected material.

In a photo of the SBA window dating from the start of the dispute, two LBS books can be seen: one an edition of the original story, the second an apparent sequel by a wholly different author and illustrator, Little Black Sambo and the Monkey People. It is the former which is placed adjacent to the Oz books and a framed list of the many Oz titles. Also visible, but only by their spines, are Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a collection of the Uncle Remus stories.

Describing other parts of the display, Honoré, in an interview, said, “The Color Purple may have been there at the time, but I’m really not sure.” She went on to list the aforementioned books, as well as two copies of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird.

The placement and proximity of LBS and the Oz books first came to light when four ASF company members, including actors from The Wiz company, which at the time was still in rehearsal, went to speak with Honoré in June. The accounts of the conversation given by Honoré and Ashley Kelley, one of the actors present, are fairly similar.

In Honoré’s description:

Middle of July, four actors were outside looking in my window. I didn’t know they were actors, they were just four black people. I went outside like I usually do and said, ‘Can I explain to you why any of these books are banned?’ and they said, ‘We’re actors in a play called The Wiz, which is playing here, and it’s an all-black cast and we object to the fact that you have Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Black Sambo, Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, these books right next to the Wizard of Oz book. Why do you have them that way? What kind of message are you trying to send?’

I said, ‘I’m not trying to send any message, they’re all just banned books. They said, ‘Well, we feel you’re trying to send some kind of a message,’ but I still don’t know to this day what kind of message I was supposed to be sending. I honestly don’t. But they saw me sending some horrible message by having them in that order. So I said, ‘Why don’t you come in and what we’ll do together is we’ll move them. If you’re that offended and you feel bad about it, we’ll move them together.’

Honoré notes that in moving the books, they were never removed from the window, but merely relocated away from the Oz books.

Via e-mail, Kelley described the encounter with Honoré as follows:

We went inside to talk to Ms. Honoré and we proceeded to have a peaceful conversation. We asked her what the inspiration was for the display and she began explaining the history of the books, not understanding what we meant. I told her specifically that I’m sure it wasn’t intentional but unfortunately the display as it stands is making negative commentary about the people in her community. Still not understanding, I explained to her that The Wiz was happening across the street which is the African American version of The Wizard of Oz.

She claimed she didn’t know there was such a version or that OSF was doing it. I told her that THAT was why we are offended by the display, the placement of these books that exploited African Americans next to the entire Wizard of Oz collection. I stressed again that I didn’t believe it was intentional but that unfortunately whether she knew or not it was making a statement. She kept defending why she had the black books to us and I in turn responded by telling her it wasn’t about the fact that she had those books and that I understand why she has them in the first place. My only issue was that they were next to all the Oz books…that’s all.

She finally understood and asked me what to do. Then SHE came up with an idea to move the books from the window and asked us if we would like to help. We said yes, walked inside with her and helped her move the books elsewhere. After that we stood with her for a while talking about her background and had a very pleasant conversation. We introduced ourselves. I thanked her for listening and for talking to us. We hugged and left her store.

After this, I sent an email to my cast to tell them about the positive experience I had with Ms. Honoré and that it was a very proud moment especially with all the horrible things happening with people of color all over the country and even in our town.”

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Shakespeare Books & Antiques (from their website)

If that had been the end of the issue, with hugs, it would indeed stand as a positive moment for all concerned. But things quickly became complicated.

Ashley Kelley expressed surprise as to the fallout, writing:

It was brought to my attention weeks later that the display had been put back and that Ms. Honoré was upset with me for telling people what happened at OSF…which I didn’t understand because the email was a positive representation of her and the bookstore because we were able to peacefully talk and come to a solution. Then all of a sudden there were SO many people involved and the story seemed to shift to “we asked her to remove the books from the store.” which was NOT the conversation at ALL.

I was honestly very disappointed in how such a positive moment turned sour based off of lack of communication it seems. I was under the impression that everything was handled after my initial encounter with her. Little did I know there were more conversations, other emails, letters, etc. that I had no involvement in.

Claudia Alick, the community producer at OSF, who also chairs the company’s Diversity and Inclusion Planning Council, said in an interview that after learning of the encounter, she had discussed the conversation at the bookstore between the company members (three of whom were actors and one staff member, per OSF’s press office) and Honoré in a “healthy conversation” with Cynthia Rider, OSF’s executive director, who indicated that she wanted to speak with Honoré. Alick said she then went home to prepare an agenda for that conversation.

That same day, Rider called Honoré, asking to meet and discuss what had occurred. Honoré says that Rider said, “I’d like to discuss with you your banned book — she didn’t say banned book, she said your public window display — and protecting my staff. That was her exact language.” Honoré then describes her decision not to wait for a meeting with Rider at the store, and instead closing the shop and heading straight to OSF to ask for an immediate meeting with Rider. She ultimately met with Rider and with general manager Ted DeLong in an impromptu session. Alick had already left the OSF campus.

Julie Cortez, communications manager of OSF, relating Rider’s impression of the meeting, wrote that, “While Cynthia says Judi seemed upset when she arrived, by the end of the meeting their relationship seemed cordial.” Honoré describes the meeting as more problematic, saying, “I knew I was in deep trouble when Ted DeLong [OSF’s general manager, who also attended] said he thought Huck Finn was a horrible book.” Honoré says she was asked to remove the books from the window.

Further describing the meeting, Honoré recalled, “I said, ‘If you have a group of students and they’re really dumb and you keep telling them they’re really smart they will become smart. Vice versa if you have a group of students who are really smart, you keep telling them they’re dumb they will become dumb. If you have a sweet little town like Ashland and you keep calling us racist, it will become racist. I think the positions you guys have been taking have been incorrect.’ I don’t think they appreciated that much.”

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Some may recall that Ashland and Oregon Shakespeare Festival were in the news this summer for another racially based incident, which was widely shared on social media and subsequently reported in mainstream media outlets. In that case, a man verbally attacked a black actor in the OSF company as she walked down the street, shouting, “It’s still an Oregon law. I could kill a black person and be out of jail in a day and a half. The KKK is still alive here.”

News reports indicated that the man who threatened the actress was likely a local homeless man who was known to the Ashland Police for other aggressive actions. The police determined, according to a report in the Mail Tribune, that “no crime had been committed,” even as they were “decrying this hateful speech.”

Asked about that incident, vis a vis the conversations over her window, Honoré was dismissive, saying, “One black actress was apparently yelled at by our town schizophrenic who said horrible things, but he yells at everybody, including me. If I don’t give him a dollar, he’ll say something like, ‘I’m going to kill you.’” She went on to volunteer, “They said the police officers were picking them up for no reason whatsoever, and they had to ride around in a car with a white person or they felt like they’d be targeted and get picked up. None of that is true. I mean I know our little sweet town and that doesn’t seem to happen here. And then they also said that if they go into a store and they’re asked more than once, ‘Can I help you,’ they’re being targeted for shoplifting.”

However, that incident happened in late June, subsequent to the meeting between Rider and Honoré, but before the dispute between SBA and OSF became widely known.

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Immediately following the meeting between Honoré and Rider, Honoré says she went back to her store, upset at learning about the e-mail that was circulated and Rider’s original request to come to the bookstore and discuss the display. So she returned LBS to its original location in the window.

“Honestly, I felt like I was either sandbagged, slapped in the face or backstabbed, when they went back to OSF after I felt I had done something really nice for them. After I had temporarily moved it, then I put it back where it was. But that was for maybe a day, and then I thought better of it and I moved them way to the end again.”

Claudia Alick subsequently visited the store and had her own conversation with Honoré, who Alick says recounted her studies in college (Honoré attended UC Berkeley in the late 60s and early 70s, where she wrote her thesis on sexism and racism in textbooks) and repeatedly protested, “I am not a racist.”

Alick says that after listening to Honoré for ten minutes, she interjected, “I never said you were a racist. Nobody said you were a racist. Those words haven’t come out of anybody’s mouth. I just wanted to know what was the decision made, because I think that I might have a different understanding of that decision, because you put the display back and I’m confused by that. And so then there was another ten minutes where she finally admitted that she was pissed and those were her words. She was pissed at the actors for – and in her words it was for – ‘sending nasty e-mails about me.’”

In a separate interview, OSF artistic director Bill Rauch spoke to the issue of leveling charges of racism at anyone:

[LBS] is a much beloved story for many, many people, especially older people who either had it read to them by their parents or read it to their own children. That’s come up again and again and again. Some of the emotion people have felt has been that by OSF saying, ‘We do not support the juxtaposition of those original racial caricature drawings on the cover of that book being juxtaposed next to The Wizard of Oz,’ they felt that we were personally attacking a story that was a beloved part of their childhood and therefore somehow calling them racist for liking that story.

Alick says she informed Honoré that, “It’s interesting that you said those e-mails were nasty. I can share with you that it was just them sharing their own personal experience and they didn’t say anything that was negative or nasty about anyone. It was actually pretty generous and kind framing and language that was used to describe what happened.”

According to Alick, after further conversation with Honoré about how the display might prove troubling not just to artists but to any persons of color walking down the street, Honoré asked, “What do you want us to do?” Alick says she responded, “No, we’re not going to tell you what to do. I just wanted to get clarity about what you were doing. You get to decide what you’re going to do.”

Alick says she was aware of other OSF staff members having one-on-one discussions with Honoré, emphasizing that they were private, personal communications. But Alick says that, “[Honoré] started coming to the festival, and stopping people of color and – I’m going to use the word harassment – harassing them, saying ‘Aren’t you in The Wiz? Well this, this and this.’ She did the same thing to me, where she stopped me on the street and had just a really kind of gross exchange with me that wasn’t kind, that was so problematic. And so organizationally, people of color asked essentially, ‘Hey, would you please do something?’ We’re like, ‘Well, the only thing we can do is let her know privately we won’t be doing business with you. We won’t be investing in your services in the future because you’re treating our company members this way.’ It wasn’t a comment on her public display. It was a comment on her direct behavior with our company members.” She later added, “We didn’t do anything public.”

Honoré recounts writing a letter to Rider on July 18, in which she set out the events regarding the window display and all that had transpired much as described here, adding her account of a positive conversation with another OSF actor of color regarding the display, which had prompted her decision to once again shift the Sambo book away from the Oz books. She also expresses deep upset with all that has occurred, including being called a racist by someone she describes as an OSF actor. She concluded the letter by writing, “In my opinion, Ashland, and this includes our residents and our police department, are profoundly inclusive and make every effort to reach out to everyone, as are the merchants of this very special small town.”

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On July 26, Rider sent the following letter to Honoré:

I am in receipt of your letter of July 18 describing your recent experiences with OSF staff and actors regarding your display window.

For myself, my colleagues in senior management, and those most deeply involved in the work of expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion here at OSF and in Ashland, the most important facts, which you allude to in your letter, are as follows:

1. You received feedback from various OSF staff members, who are by definition your fellow community members, that your window display that included blackface caricatures was hurtful and offensive due to their racist origins.
2. You removed the display.
3. You heard reports that emails were circulating at OSF regarding this chain of events, and decided to reinstall the display.

Through these events, you have demonstrated a distinct lack of empathy for the experiences of the people of color who brought this matter to your attention and their reactions to your display, and reinstating the display caused continued pain to those individuals and by extension to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Because of this, I am by this letter informing you that Artistic Director Bill Rauch and I have given instruction to our staff not to patronize Shakespeare Books & Antiques for any Festival-related goods or services until further notice.

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On August 4, the dispute between Honoré and OSF went fully public, in an article in the Daily Tidings (reprinted the following day in the Mail Tribune), resulting from Honoré sharing Rider’s letter with the paper. This marks the first time the word “boycott” appears to have been used in connection with the situation. The article also mischaracterizes Rider’s letter as a “ban on OSF staff purchasing items from the store,” instead of the actual language, which only proscribed staff from making purchases on behalf of OSF at the store. This occurred despite the article later quoting a letter to the editor from Rider and OSF artistic director Bill Rauch clarifying that they had not called for a boycott. But that became the prevalent narrative for the ensuing weeks.

While various letters to the editor played the dispute out in the local papers, as people took sides, the next major account of the situation came slightly less than four weeks later, when on August 30, the Daily Tidings reported that Honoré had decided to close her store, giving two months notice to her landlord for a closing on October 31. Honoré attributed the closing to a significant drop in business in the month of August, as well as the stress of responding to the conflict that had arisen with OSF. She said that in contrast to typical summer months, when her business averaged $20,000, her first 12 days of August yielded on $2,355 in sales and that on August 22, her total sales were $59.

In that article, the reporter John Darling included a statement from OSF, quoting it as follows,

If Judi is seeing a reduction in her business, that is either occurring for unrelated reasons or due to her decision to go public in the media and in her store windows,” the email said. “Given that OSF has only made one or two small purchases for Festival use at Shakespeare Books & Antiques over the years, the decision … was not about causing Judi financial hardship, but about communicating to our colleagues of color that we believe them and stand with them.

While Honoré in an interview described a seemingly dictatorial rule by the leadership of OSF over its staff (“She tells them what to do over there apparently and they do it,” Honoré said, referring to Rider), she was not able to provide any evidence that the OSF staff had been ordered away from her store for personal purchases. She affirmed that OSF had not revealed anything publicly about its communications with her, saying “They didn’t go public, I went public, and they’re calling the conversation I had with them a private conversation. Nobody told me that it was private.”

OSF shared with Arts Integrity a short memo they had given to “front line staff” to help answer questions from patrons about the situation, but the theatre’s first sustained public communication to the community, signed by Bill Rauch, headed, “A response to the ‘bookstore story,’” wasn’t issued until September 2.

It read, in part:

OSF has never sought publicity or media attention for its ongoing discussions with Judi about her window display. We intended privacy for all of our communications, written and verbal, prior to Judi reaching out to the Ashland Daily Tidings (a publication for which Judi’s husband is a columnist). I would like to emphasize that not once has anyone at OSF called for a public boycott of Judi’s bookstore. Our employees are, of course, always free to shop anywhere for their personal purchases, and before today we had never brought up this subject in any communications with our patrons or membership.

I stand by our decision not to do business with a person who has treated members of our company and community with disrespect. Since Judi went public about OSF’s decision, we’ve received numerous reports from staff and patrons about problematic and insensitive interactions in and outside of her store and on the OSF campus. Our attempts to continue the dialogue with her—with a mediator, if she would prefer—have gone unanswered.

Separately, Honoré said that she had asked Rider to visit the bookstore – Rider’s original intent in requesting a meeting with Honoré – but that Rider declined.

In the next to last paragraph of his community letter, Rauch wrote:

Free speech is necessary, but not all speech is neutral; all language, images and symbols are not equal. The fact that speech can be damaging must be acknowledged. As an institution and as individuals, how we use our right of free speech is a moral choice. It is not neutral to propound messages that deepen the isolation and oppression experienced by members of groups that have been historically marginalized. Propagating images that were historically stigmatizing to black people and that some people continue to experience as hurtful and stigmatizing is not a neutral act. In my view, we grow most when we listen with empathy and curiosity to all those who are different from us about their own life experiences.

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It’s worth recalling Ashley Kelley’s comment about what has transpired in Ashland, “I was honestly very disappointed in how such a positive moment turned sour based off of lack of communication it seems.” In conversation and written material, both Honoré and the OSF leadership expressed the feeling that each “side” was not listening to or understanding the other. That is the very definition of a lack of communication.

The situation escalated not because of the conversation between the four company members and Honoré, but only when Rider asked to arrange to meet with Honoré, who then opted to precipitate an immediate conversation. Rider perceived that meeting as having begun in conflict but concluding well, however Honoré’s takeaway was both frustration with Rider (who she called “elitist”) and anger that the conversation about the window display had gone beyond herself and the four actors, causing her to reverse the results of that meeting.

While the original conversation between Honoré and the four company members, and the meeting between Honoré and Rider, occurred first, the late July exchange of letters between Honoré and Rider occurred after the incident in which a black actor at OSF was verbally abused. An atmosphere of concern over the treatment of people of color in Ashland had been heightened as the bookstore dispute played out over a number of weeks. As in all cases, a specific event shouldn’t be the pretext for diminishing the rights of others, but the bookstore situation was thrown into sharper relief by the intervening incident.

Bill Rauch noted, “I do think that for members of our community who feel Ashland is such a progressive community, that there can be no racism in our town, that if a person of color says they’ve experienced racism in our town that it’s the problem of the person of color, that they’re oversenstitive, that they’re being overly cautious and that the racism is not real. I think the juxtaposition of these things has triggered a lot in terms of the community response as well.”

Honoré cites Rider’s letter of July 26 as having prompted the precipitous drop in her business, claiming that other internal e-mails, which she could not produce, went beyond Rider’s instruction that staff should not do business with Shakespeare Books and Antiques. However, when she by her own admission went to the press for the story that first appeared on August 4, there was no mention of any impact on her business, only her unhappiness over what she characterized as a call to boycott her store.

Reading Rider’s letter carefully, one could argue that the language about ceasing to do business with SBA might have been somewhat differently structured. If one doesn’t read the entirety of this closing phrase – “I have given instruction to our staff not to patronize Shakespeare Books & Antiques for any Festival related goods or services until further notice” – one might only take away “given instruction to our staff not to patronize.” A statement affirming staff members’ own unfettered right to patronize the store would have been useful.

But regardless of how the letter was read, it was internal to OSF, yet Honoré says it resulted in a roughly 85% drop in business. If the staff of OSF was Honoré’s overwhelming customer base, then regardless of whether one agrees with the request to alter the display, Honoré’s choices influenced the purchasing decisions of her customers. In seeing the situation as one of social consciousness and sensitivity, OSF was well within its rights ito decide what vendors it chose to do business with, and that wasn’t a secret within the organization.

Honoré claims that in her one meeting with Rider, she was told, “Take the books out of your window or we’re going to boycott your store.” Rider denies having made such a statement. Asked whether her communication regarding OSF-related purchases wasn’t in fact an implicit message to the OSF community to not patronize the bookstore, Rider said, “That certainly wasn’t my intention.”

Was OSF advocating censorship, which presumably they would fight were such an effort directed at their own creative work? Given that they had no control over Honoré’s store, it’s hard to accept that they were, especially since the conversation only was about the placement of the books, not over whether Honoré should carry them at all. OSF was advocating to Honoré, according to their institutional imperatives and as a part of the Ashland community, sensitivity to members of the OSF company – both full time staff and guest artists – that escalated over a communications impasse. Rider observed, “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you get to say whatever you want and nobody can tell you they’re upset about it.”

Because so many of the interactions within this dispute were person to person, it is difficult to pin down many absolutes, especially since the different parties offer differing impressions of the same event. In the fraught communications, it’s unfortunate that one possible rapprochement doesn’t appear to have been discussed. Might it have been possible for SBA and OSF to collaborate on further contextualizing the window display, so that it was clear the presence of LBS (and books like the Uncle Remus stories) was not to advance racially negative text or imagery? While Honoré absolutely has the right to display any books as she wishes, and there is no question that the books she displayed have all been officially censored at one time (or many times), a store window is not a museum or school, where history and education about featured items would usually be more fully explained.

While Shakespeare Books & Antiques will close on Monday, Honoré said that she does plan to reopen, after resting up from the stress of the past few months and getting a new business of hers, a furniture store, fully up and running. Saying that she has three times as many books warehoused as she was able to display in the shop that’s closing, she said she’d be back in a larger space. She felt some distance would put an end to the many people who were coming into her store to discuss the dispute with OSF, but not making purchases, noting that business only began to pick up when she announced she was closing.

As for further dialogue in Ashland through a town hall, which at one point was considered for Saturday, October 29, Julie Cortez of OSF said in an e-mail, “We are in discussion with the members of SOEDI (Southern Oregon Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Collaborative) about the best date to hold this community conversation, and we will keep people informed of what plans are made.” It’s too bad that the community still has to wait to process this situation together, openly, but hopefully they’ll get there soon in a way that helps everyone involved, directly or as observers, to fully appreciate and respect what’s being said and shown and read, on stage and off.

Amber Riley, Shanice Williams and company in The Wiz. (Photo by Virginia Sherwood/NBC)

Last week, more than 11 million people in the US watched a live broadcast of the musical The Wiz, an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that came almost 30 years before Wicked. Created for a black cast, it won best musical at the Tony Awards in 1975. The Wiz (2015 edition) was the third annual live musical from producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, following The Sound of Music in 2013 and Peter Pan last year. The Wiz was, by consensus, vastly superior to the previous two, and I happen to agree; in fact, I tweeted that opinion only 75 minutes into the three-hour broadcast. As has always been the plan, The Wiz production is now expected to run on Broadway in the 2016-17 season, although it’s unlikely the stage version will manage to field a cast like the broadcast did. Among the performers were Mary J Blige, Queen Latifah, Ne-Yo and, in a cameo role, Common.

Mind you, the early days of US television, when most broadcasts were live, were filled with adaptations of plays, and some distinguished works first written for TV, like Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful or Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight were later adapted for both the stage and as films. Remarkably, what seems to be driving the new popularity of live staged TV are social media, which value the immediacy of sports, awards broadcasts and, yes, theatre, because as they unfold in real time – with all of the spontaneity and potential for gaffes intact – they create the opportunity for shared experiences online. Indeed, audience members can chat away with one another throughout these shows without disrupting anyone else; they can even let their cellphone rings without causing an interruption in the performance.

This blurring of the stage and screen is happening at an accelerating pace in a variety of ways. While NT Live has forged new paths for the streaming of theatre to cinemas around the world (though they’re only really live in the UK and nearby time zones), the US has been much slower to adopt the model, due in part to more restrictive, and therefore expensive, union agreements. That said, just last night, the Off-Broadway production of the intimate musical Daddy Long Legs was streamed live online for viewing anywhere, which is an important development that will surely be closely watched as a test case. Can the embrace of video technology add value to a property or production even when it’s offered up gratis?

This week has also seen the daily release of new videos from the second series of My America short films from Centerstage in Maryland, where artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah has been exploring the intersection of film and theatre by commissioning original short plays from an array of writers. The new series has been shot guerrilla-style on sites where racial violence has taken place, essential spots in the new civil rights movement. But it blurs the traditional lines between the mediums by shooting plays in real-life settings specifically for video viewing; it’s theatre that won’t play in a theatre.

Just as the word television is becoming more a term for a specific viewing appliance, as opposed to the content itself, what we consider theatre may have to evolve as well. Purists will say that The Wiz was a Broadway text and score produced for video, not theatre – in no small part because there was no audience present – and that despite the credentials of the participating authors, My America is essentially a film series.

But perhaps we should be worrying less about the labels and looking more at impact: The Wiz may have inspired an interest in theatre among young people who may never be able to attend the show’s promised Broadway run; the Daddy Long Legs stream may help promote a chamber piece into the musical theatre repertory; live audiences could not have attended a play performed outside the burned out chemist shop that went up in flames during the Baltimore riots.

And in the US, it’s worth noting that the largest national audience for musical sequences from Broadway shows isn’t on the annual Tony Awards broadcast – it’s found in the first hour of the broadcast of the venerable Thanksgiving Day Parade from New York, which is seen by more than 20 million people. Just because it’s not performed in a theatre, does it stop being theatre?

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

Not to dash anyone’s dreams, but I think it’s fair to say that the majority of the hundreds of thousands of students who participate in high school theatre annually will not go on to professional careers in the arts. The same holds true for the student musicians in orchestras, bands and ensembles. They all benefit from the experience in many ways: from the teamwork, the discipline and the appreciation of the challenge and hard work that goes into such endeavors, to name but a few attributes.

But for some students, those high school experiences may be the foundation of a career, of a life, and it’s an excellent place for skills and principles to be taught. As a result, I have, on multiple occasions, heard creative artists talk about their wish that students could learn about the basics of copyright, which can for writers, composers, designers, and others be the root of how they’ll be able to make a life in the creative arts, how their work will reach audiences, how they’ll actually earn a living.

I’m not suggesting that everyone get schooled in the intricacies of copyright law, but that as part of the process of creating and performing shows, students should come to understand that there is a value in the words they speak and the songs they sing, a concept that’s increasingly frayed in an era of file sharing, sampling, streaming and downloading. Creative artists try to make this case publicly from time to time, whether it’s Taylor Swift pulling her music from Spotify over the service’s allegedly substandard rate of compensation to artists or Jason Robert Brown trying to explain why copying and sharing his sheet music is tantamount to theft of his work. But without an appreciation for what copyright protects and supports, it’s difficult for the average young person to understand what this might one day mean to them, or to the people who create work that they love.

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All of this brings me to a seemingly insignificant example, that of a production of the musical The Wiz at Skyline High School in Oakland, California back in 2011. Like countless schools, Skyline mounted a classic musical for their students’ education and enjoyment, in this case playing eight performances in their 900 seat auditorium, charging $10 a head. These facts might be wholly unremarkable, except for one salient point: the school didn’t pay for the rights to perform the show.

The licensing house Samuel French only learned this year about the production, and consequently went about the process of collecting their standard royalty. Over the course of a few months, French staff corresponded with school staff and volunteers connected with the drama program, administration and ultimately the school system’s attorney. French’s executive director Bruce Lazarus shared the complete correspondence with me, given my interest in authors’ rights and in school theatre.

I’m very sympathetic to any school that wants to give their students a great arts experience, and so the drama advisor’s discussion in the correspondence of limited resources and constrained budgets really struck me. Oakland is a large district and Skyline is an inner-city school; I have no reason to doubt their concerns about the quoted royalty costs for The Wiz being beyond their means. But their solution to this quandary took them off course.

Skyline claims that they did their own “adaptation” of The Wiz, securing music online and assembling their own text, under the belief that this released them from any responsibility to the authors and the licensing house. While they tagged their ads for the show with the word “adaptation,” it’s a footnote, and if one looks at available photos or videos from the production, it seems pretty clear that their Wiz is firmly rooted in the original material, even the original Broadway production. Surely the text was a corruption of the original and perhaps songs were reordered or even eliminated. It’s also worth noting that Skyline initially inquired about the rights, but then opted to do the show without an agreement.

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OK, so one school made a mistake over three and a half years ago – what’s the big deal? That brings me to the position taken by the Oakland Unified School District regarding French’s pursuit of appropriate royalties. OUSD has completely denied that French has any legitimate claim per their attorney, Michael L. Smith. In a mid-October letter, Mr. Smith cites copyright law statute of limitations, saying that since it has been more than three years since the alleged copyright violation, French is “time barred from any legal proceeding.” Explication of that position constitutes the majority of the letter, save for a phrase in which Mr. Smith states, “As you are likely aware, there are limitations on exclusive rights that may apply in this instance, including fair use.”

As I’m no attorney, I can’t research or debate the fine points of statutes of limitation, either under federal or California law. However, I’ve read enough to understand that there’s some disagreement within the courts, as to when the three-year clock begins on a copyright violation. It may be from the date of the alleged infringement itself, in this case the date of the March and April 2011 performances, but it also may be from the date the infringement is discovered, which according to French was in September 2014. We’ll see how that plays out.

The passing allusion to fair use provisions is perhaps of greater interest in this case. Fair use provides for the utilization of copyrighted work under certain circumstances in certain ways. Per the U.S. Copyright office:

Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

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Rather than parsing the claims and counterclaims between Samuel French and the school district, I consulted an attorney about fair use, though in the abstract, not with the specifics of the show or school involved. I turned to M. Graham Coleman, a partner at the firm of Davis Wright Tremaine in their New York office. Coleman works in all legal aspects of live theatre production and counsels clients on all aspects of copyright and creative law. He has also represented me on some small matters.

“In our internet society, “ said Coleman, “there is a distortion of fair use. We live in a world where it’s so easy to use someone’s proprietary material. The fact that you based work on something else doesn’t get you off the hook with the original owner.”

Without knowing the specifics of Skyline’s The Wiz, Coleman said, “They probably edited, they probably varied it, but they probably didn’t move it into fair use. Taking a protectable work and attempting to ‘fair use’ it is not an exercise for the amateur.”

Regarding the language in fair use rules that cite educational purposes, Coleman said, “Regardless of who you are, once you start charging an audience admission, you’re a commercial enterprise. Educational use would be deemed to mean classroom.”

While Coleman noted that the cost of pursuing each and every copyright violation by schools might be cost prohibitive for the rights owners, he said that, “It becomes a matter of principle and cost-effectiveness goes out the window. They will be policed. Avoiding doing it the bona fide way will catch up with you.”

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That’s where the Skyline scenario gets more complicated – because their “adaptation” of The Wiz wasn’t their only such appropriation of copyrighted material. In 2012, the school produced a stage version of Julie Taymor’s Beatles-inspired film Across The Universe, billing it accordingly and crediting John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the songwriters. The problem is, there is no authorized stage adaptation of the film, although there have been intermittent reports that Taymor is contemplating her own, which her attorney affirmed to me. In this case, the Skyline production is still within the statute of limitations for a copyright claim.

I attempted to contact both the principal of Skyline High and the superintendent of the school district about this subject, ultimately reaching the district’s director of communications Troy Flint. In response to my questions about The Wiz, Flint said, “We believe that we were within our rights. I can’t go into detail because I’m not prepared to discuss our legal strategy. We believe this use was permissible.”

He couldn’t speak to Across The Universe; it seemed that I may have been the first to bring it to the district’s attention. Flint said he didn’t know whether other Skyline productions, such as Hairspray and Dreamgirls, had been done with licenses from rights companies, although I was able to confirm independently that Hairspray was properly licensed. Which raises the question of why standard protocol for licensing productions was followed with some shows and not others.

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My fundamental interest is in seeing vital and successful academic theatre. So while their identities are easily accessible, I’ve avoided naming the teacher, principal and even the superintendent at Skyline because I don’t want to make this one example personal. But I do want to make it an example.

Whether or not I, or anyone, personally agree with the provisions of U.S. copyright law isn’t pertinent to this discussion, and neither is ignorance of the law. The fact is that the people who create work (and their heirs and estates) have the right to control and benefit from that work during the copyright term. Whether the content is found in a published script and score, shared on the internet or transcribed from other media, the laws hold.

If the Skyline examples were the sole violations, a general caution would be unnecessary, but in the past three months alone, Samuel French has discovered 35 unlicensed/unauthorized productions at schools and amateur companies, according to the company’s director of licensing compliance Lori Thimsen. Multiply that out over other rights houses, and over time, and the number is significant. This even happens at the professional level.

At the start, I suggested that students should know the basic of copyright law, both out of respect for those who might make their careers as creative artists, as well as for those who will almost certainly be consumers of copyrighted content throughout their lives. But it occurs to me that these lessons are appropriate for their teachers as well, notwithstanding the current legal stance at Skyline High. There can and should be appreciation for creators’ achievements as well as their rights, and appropriate payment for the use of their work – and those who regularly work with that material should make absolutely certain they know the parameters, to avoid and prevent unwitting, and certainly intentional, violations.

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One final note: some of you may remember Tom Hanks’s Oscar acceptance speech for the film Philadelphia, when he paid tribute to his high school drama teacher for playing a role in his path to success. It might interest you to know that Hanks attended Skyline High and thanks in part to a significant gift from him, the school’s theatre – where the shows in question were performed – was renovated and renamed for that teacher, Rawley Farnsworth, in 2002. Hanks also used the occasion of the Oscars to cite Farnsworth and a high school classmate as examples of gay men who were so instrumental in his personal growth.

I have no doubt that there are other such inspirational teachers and students at Skyline High today, perhaps working in the arts there under constrained budgets and resources. Yet regardless of statutes of limitations, it seems that the Rawley T. Farnsworth Theatre should be a place where respect for and responsibility to artists is taught and practiced, as a fundamental principle – and where students get to perform works as their creators intended, not as knockoffs designed to save money.

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Update, December 3, 2014, 4 pm: This post went live at at approximately 10:30 am EST this morning. I received an e-mail from OUSD’s director of communications Troy Flint at approximately 1 pm asking whether the post was finished and whether he could add to his comments from yesterday. I indicated that the post was live and provided a link, saying that I have updated posts before and would consider an addendum with anything I found to be pertinent. He just called to provide the following statement, which I reproduce in its entirety.

Whatever the legality of the situation at Skyline regarding The Wiz and Across The Universe, the fundamental principle is that we want the students to respect artists’ work and what they put into the product. My understanding is that Skyline’s use of this material is legally defensible, but that’s not the best or highest standard.

As we help our students develop artistically, we want to make sure they have the proper respect and understanding of the work that’s involved with creating a play for the stage or the cinema. So we have spoken with the instructors at Skyline about making sure they follow all the protocols regarding rights and licensing, because we don’t want to be in a position of having the legality of one of our productions questioned as they are now and we don’t want to be perceived as taking advantage of artists unintentionally as we are now. It’s not just a legal issue but an issue of educating students properly.

While everyone I have spoken with about this issue disagrees fairly strenuously with the opinion of the OUSD legal counsel, it’s encouraging that the district wants to stand for artists’ rights and avoid this sort of conflict going forward. I hope they will ultimately teach not only the principle, but the law. As for past practice, I leave that to the lawyers.

Update, December 3, 2014, 7 pm: Following my update with the statement from the school district, I received a statement of response from Bruce Lazarus, executive director of Samuel French. It is excerpted here.

By withholding the proper royalty for The Wiz from the authors, the OUSD is communicating to their students that artistic work is worthless. Is this an appropriate message for any budding artist? That you too can grow up to write a successful musical…only to then have a school district destroy your work and willfully withhold payment?

It needs to be made clear to the OUSD and the students involved that an artist’s livelihood depends on receiving payment for their creative work. This is how artists make a living. How they pay the rent and feed their families. It is simply unbelievable that this issue can be tossed aside with an “Our bad, won’t happen again” response without consideration of payment for their unauthorized taking of another’s property.

Are other students of the OUSD, those that are not artists, being educated to expect payment for their services rendered when they presumably become doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs and the next leaders of the Bay Area? Of course they are. And so it goes for the artists in your classrooms, who should be able to grow up KNOWING there is protection for their future work and a real living wage to be made.

Equal time granted, I leave it the respective parties to resolve the issue of what has already taken place.