When bad curation leads to charges of reverse discrimination

May 31st, 2025 § Comments Off on When bad curation leads to charges of reverse discrimination § permalink

On its face, to those who believe in authentic representation of race and ethnicity on stage, a white woman playing Harriet Tubman is absurd if not grotesque. It would follow then that the same woman suing a library for reneging on her contract to do just that is nothing short of outrageous.

Unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical construct. Writer and actor Annette Hubbell was engaged by the Rancho Santa Fe Library in San Diego County, California to perform vignettes from her “Women Warriors” program in 2024. A contract was issued for Hubbell to portray Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe, two Black woman and one white woman. Then, according to Hubbell, shortly before the performance was to be given, the library asked Hubbell to swap out Bethune and Tubman for other famous women, white women, in her repertoire, reportedly because it would not be appropriate for her to portray the Black historical figures.

Hubbell, on record to KPBS ingenuously claiming, “It never occurred to me that that might even be an issue,” refused to make the switch to other characters in her portfolio, which include Elizabeth Fry, Corrie Ten Boom and Gladys Aylward, and the performance was canceled by the library. It is unclear whether Hubbell was paid her fee regardless.

In December 2024, former San Diego city attorney Jan Goldsmith published an op-ed in the San Diego Union Tribune recounting the incident and declaring support for Hubbell. He wrote, “It is hardly equitable, respectful or inclusive to ban an actress from honoring in a performance an historical character because they are of different races. The apparent assumption is only an actress of the character’s race can understand and convey that character’s feelings. That is simply untrue.” Goldsmith noted that this was not blackface portrayal and therefore not offensive. He’s also a bit of personal publicist for Hubbell, having previously profiled her for the paper.

Following this, the conservative leaning Pacific Legal Foundation took up Hubbell’s cause, leading to a lawsuit claiming that Hubbell is a victim of racial discrimination. Filed at the beginning of May in the US District Court Southern District of California, the suit seeks compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorney’s fees, and “an award of nominal damages in the amount of $1.00.”

Awareness of the case is only going to escalate, with Hubbell and one of her attorneys appearing live this morning on CNN to reiterate their claims. It will throw the topic of authentic representation and reverse discrimination back into headlines, and it is unlikely that the ensuing dialogue will be terribly constructive in terms of understanding the issues at hand.

Hubbell has now spoken out trying to make parallels with other works where artists of certain races play characters of another.

Writing in her own Union Tribune op-ed, days after filing her lawsuit, in which she described herself as not by nature being adversarial, she wrote, “There’s nothing unusual about actors portraying historical figures of differing races. The most prominent example from recent years is the hit Broadway musical ‘Hamilton,’ in which a cast of primarily non-White actors portrays the revolutionary era with energy and warmth. I raised that point with library officials, who dismissed the issue by saying, “That’s historically different.” They couldn’t explain how it was different. Would they cancel a ‘Hamilton’ show for using actors of the ‘wrong’ race? Of course not.”

Boiled down to basics, the same laws that prevent discrimination against people of color can and have been used to claim reverse discrimination in various arenas, leading to such results as the striking down of affirmative action efforts at universities. It has proven difficult to make allowances for circumstances, intentions and nuance, which is what Hubbell and her attorneys will now seek to capitalize upon. Even Hamilton, early on, ran into trouble over casting notices which sought “non-white” actors and they have had to alter their language and efforts accordingly in order to comply with the letter of the law.

What’s likely to get lost here is that, in Hubbell’s own telling, she offers a menu of vignettes from which presenters can choose and the library allegedly requested Bethune and Tubman, only to change their mind as awareness sank in and the performance approached. If the library had done its due diligence, if the various departments that weighed in closer to the performance had been involved at the start, Hubbell might have been asked to do different characters from the beginning and what now is being decried as censorship would never have arisen. Someone, somewhere along the way at the library really dropped the ball with that initial selection – were they paying attention? – and now the library, and champions of authentic representation, will likely pay the price. This case too easily fits into the narrative advanced by four months of vigorous attacks on anything that conservative firebrands can claim to be a result of legitimate and necessary equity, diversity and inclusion efforts, which they seek to vilify and eradicate.

Even if the suit is successful, it’s unlikely to open the doors to a wave of white actors playing BIPOC characters in major arenas. That said, it’s impossible not to wonder whether the furor here could yield a Kennedy Center booking for Hubbell so that Richard Grennell and his cohort can stick another thumb in the eye of those who decry his partisan reframing of that institution. For those, like me, who believe that DEI initiatives remain essential, this is a reminder that the work must not be a hurdle to be cleared later in the programming or producing process, but something inextricable from the start, to avoid gaffes that may create or reinforce unfortunate precedent when it comes after the fact.

When an endowment is not an endowment

May 27th, 2025 § Comments Off on When an endowment is not an endowment § permalink

The National Endowment for the Arts does not deserve a premature burial, but it’s fair to say things aren’t looking good for it, at least in its current form. While the NEA as it has existed for the past 60 years is being hollowed out by design, it’s entirely possible that not unlike the people inhabited by a collective of alien pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the building and the name may live. But in doing so, it will be a shell taken over by something entirely different.

Having watched the NEA survive some four decades of attacks on its existence, surviving thanks to support from both sides of the aisle, it is startling to think that this could be the true turning point, and that Donald Trump will do what Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich and their ilk could not. If it remains at all, it will be as a sham vehicle through which the administration will fund its favored projects, such as non-Equity shows at the Kennedy Center and Trump’s sculpture garden of who he deems to be heroes.

Around the country, not-for-profits proudly and rightly declare that they will not kowtow to the draconian regulations that still might afford them access to federal funds. They post their stands as white on black texts on social media coupled with calls for the public to make up the difference in money lost. No doubt anyone who has supported arts or humanities programs have seen these stances and requests in recent week. Long-serving, dedicated staffers depart the NEA this week in response to the gutting of the agency.

That makes this a moment when it’s worth examining why the Endowment has proven, at long last, so easily and quickly compromised. For that, we turn to the term “endowment” or more specifically the root of it, “endow.” Dictionary.com defines “endow” as “to provide with a permanent fund or source of income,” and an “endowment” as “the property, funds, etc., with which an institution or person is endowed.” As an example, as Harvard has come under a barrage of attacks on its policies and independence, we have heard so much about their financial underpinning: their $53 billion endowment, which spins off income through investments that supports the work of the college, allowing such programs as financial aid for those in need.

Unfortunately, in the common use of the word, the National Endowment for the Arts is a misnomer. It is not a fund drawn upon each year to support arts programs and institutions. Rather, it is a federal agency, funded through the federal budget each year for its operations and grantmaking. It is that annual appropriation which has made the agency so vulnerable, since each year a budget must be passed in Washington. For many years the NEA has been a favored target for performative ideological cost-cutters looking for supposed waste. The most progressive, even outré, projects funded by the NEA have long made it a locus for the censorious, railing against works like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, important art but not really representative of the majority of what receives NEA funding, which covers a wide range of organizations in cities and towns, from adventurous to the most family friendly. Over its lifetime, the NEA is estimated to have distributed $5.5 billion in grants.

At the same time Trump, Musk and their wrecking-ball crew were undermining the NEA, NEH and CPB, major philanthropies were steering funding away from the arts as well. As Helen Shaw wrote in her galvanizing article for The New Yorker in April, “When the need seemed greatest, several private philanthropic foundations pulled out the rug. Three of the largest arts funders in the United States—the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—stopped supporting many components of the arts infrastructure in New York that they helped create. Their reasons were various, but the upshot was the same: extreme turbulence, which has affected organizations big and small.”

With the NEA hobbled and the foundations looking to direct their funds elsewhere, this begs the inevitable question: now what? Yes, every arts not-for-profit can redouble their fundraising efforts, and perhaps in this first fiscal year without NEA funding people will step up – screenwriter John Logan gave $40,000 to Berkeley Rep’s new works center to make up for lost NEA funding – but will the increased giving of recent months be a solution that can be relied upon year after year, or one-time thing?

While federal funding will always be a goal, and perhaps in four or eight years we might see the government funding agencies revitalized, since they are but a rounding error in the federal budget, maybe it’s time for the establishment of a true arts endowment – a foundation dedicated solely to the support of US arts and culture, independent of the government and established in such a fashion that future generations could not turn its attention to other needs. It would, inevitably, grow slowly, but as generational wealth passes into new hands, perhaps some of that largesse could be deposited into an entity with a culture-based mandate and articles of incorporation which prohibit a change – save for the inclusion in the future of new forms of arts expression – to other uses.

There’s no question that if successful, especially in the initial years, funds would be given to this foundation, this endowment, that would not be immediately available for arts organizations. But in this moment of contraction, perhaps that’s the best time to weather a change for the long-term goal of a sustaining arts endowment distinct from political pressures and the vagaries of who is in office. If we continue to simply hold out hope for a revitalization of the NEA, we will miss this moment to recalibrate the means of funding the arts, if we don’t take matters into our own hands when the federal government remains to easily manipulated when it comes to our fate, we may be consigned evermore to a constant and likely Darwinian contest for funds, donor by donor, organization by organization, as the vehicles to which we have been accustomed by support are destroyed in the name of partisan ideology and simply left to fend for themselves by the very organizations which helped so much of the current arts landscape come into being.

Maybe this idea is a stretch, but we’d better start coming up with options while waiting for what now seems inevitable.

Silencing the Witches in Georgia High School “Crucible”

May 22nd, 2025 § 0 comments § permalink

A circle of girls dance in silhouettes against a bright red backdrop.
In silhouette against a red backdrop, girls dance in a circle.

When the seniors graduate tomorrow at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge GA, approximately 90 miles north of Atlanta, the sporting events will all be over and the yearbook published. But for the drama students at Fannin, there will be words left unspoken, because last weekend, following the first of two planned performances of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the show was shut down, with students and parents being informed that the second performance would not be permitted. Over the course of the next 48 hours, the reasons given for the cancelation would change, but the show remained shuttered and, with the school year over, there’s no possibility of the second performance taking place.

In accounts from multiple students and parents, the Friday evening performance went off without incident. But on Saturday morning, word of the cancelation began filtering out. Angela Grist, a parent with two students in the play, described the Saturday morning in her house as, “The kids all got messages stating that, what the kids were told initially, was that somebody in the audience didn’t like the context of the play and said that it was demonic and disgusting and that it was immediately shut down. I got up and the kids were just so upset. I mean my daughter’s crying, my adopted son is close to tears telling me what happened. I reached out to the school and got no reply at all.”

Abigail Ridings, the senior who is president of the drama club and was directing the production, told a similar story. “I walked into my mom’s bedroom Saturday morning, the night after our first show, and she told me that the show had been canceled, that she just got off the phone with my principal. He said that certain people had to ‘repent after watching the show,’ as a joke, and that it was canceled due to parent complaints.” Asked about the specific nature of the complaints as explained to her mother, Ridings elaborated saying that the play was “too evil and disgusting and things like that.”

And so it seems that the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledge American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust.

The students and parents rapidly tried to see about offering the second performance at another local venue, but while there were offers on the table, concerns grew that it wasn’t permissible, because the license for the show was specific to the high school and that moving the performance might violate the contract. Instead, the students ended up pulling together a showcase of their talents using other material, which was performed that weekend for those who didn’t get to see The Crucible, as well as for those who did.

But that was not the end of the incident, because come Monday, the school issued a statement about the cancelation that was wholly different than what students and parents were initially told. In an unsigned statement on school letterhead, with five staffers including Dr. Scott Ramsay and athletic director Jeremy King listed among the leadership, the statement began:

“After Friday night’s performance of The Crucible, we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play. Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script. These alterations were not approved by the licensing company or administration. The performance contract for The Crucible does not allow modifications without prior written approval. Failing to follow the proper licensing approval process for additions led to a breach in our contract with the play’s publisher. The infraction resulted in an automatic termination of the licensing agreement. The second performance of The Crucible could not occur because we were no longer covered by a copyright agreement.”

Suddenly, the demonic and disgusting content had been magically transformed into a copyright violation. Three students stated that no words of the text had been changed in any way. The only possible material in the production that might have given the licensor pause was that the production began with a wordless scene of the young women of Salem dancing in the woods at night, enacting what is described by dialogue in the text, an interpretive choice that was unlikely to have been in violation of the license since it altered not the text, the spirit nor the intention of the show. Would it have been advisable to have checked with the licensor? Yes. Was it flagrantly out of bounds? I think not.

It’s important to note that the production was proceeding without the supervision of the drama teacher at the high school, who had departed two weeks earlier – some said he was forced to resign, others said fired – leaving the students to complete work on the show themselves. It left them without the natural advocate for the show and conduit of information with the administration. However, the remaining rehearsals, with the purportedly offending staging, had been repeatedly performed with administrative personnel present in a supervisory role.

It’s rare, barring something egregious, that a school would take it upon itself to shut a show down over their own perceived violation of copyright without consultation with the licensing entity, in this case Broadway Licensing/Dramatists Play Service. It’s highly unlikely that after a single performance on a Friday night, someone had made a complaint to Broadway Licensing and the company itself had contacted the school so quickly to lodge an objection, so that the school would make a decision within ours to cancel to avoid any further ostensible violation. And if indeed the reason for the cancelation was the wordless opening, the school failed to offer the students the opportunity to proceed without the supposedly scofflaw scene in place. So the timing is questionable and the solution draconian. 

Parent Angela Grist said that she reached out to Broadway Licensing herself and, in communication with a staffer she identified as “Stephanie C.” Grist said, “She told me that everything that I told her did not sound like copyright infringement.”

Separately, another parent, Amber Cather Herendon, in a phone call commemorated by a video she posted online, spoke with a person she identified as another customer service rep at Broadway Licensing. That unnamed person, while careful to note that the Miller estate is very careful about permitting alterations to the text, said that their company’s director was aware of and exploring the incident further, but that, “We are not traditionally one to shut productions down, even if we are under the impression that copyright is being infringed on. At the very least we will reach out and say ‘hey, we understand that X is happening or Y is happening. We may have to shut productions down, but it would not be as abrupt as this production seems to be.” They went on to say, “Again, we’re not sure who provided the authorization to shut the production down. We certainly wouldn’t have done that completely. At the very least we would have just requested that the [unintelligible] be formally submitted so that we could determine if that is something we could alter.”

I have reached out to both the principal at Fannin County High as well as representatives from Broadway Licensing for comment and clarification and this post will be updated should they respond. But with two separate parental accounts, one recorded, it seems that the school’s administration decided, after content complaints, to use the wordless opening scene, an interpretive choice, as a pretext for shutting the show down, after bowing to complaints about the show’s actual content, namely the words of Arthur Miller and his characters.

Cast member Aiden McBee said of the copyright claim, “The timeline doesn’t make sense, if they learned it was copyright after the fact.” McBee went on to say, “They say they understand and appreciate the arts, but I just don’t believe it, because to appreciate the arts you have to understand. The Crucible is a message of authority and of distrust, which is quite ironic. I just want clear communication.”

Student Caden Gerald, who played John Proctor in the show and who said he was one of eight graduation seniors in the production, posted a five minute video recounting the incident and his feelings. He said, Some people noted, on Blue Ridge Facebook groups and on Instagram, that the show was demonic and disgusting – a show that called out a real issue of McCarthyism, a show that does not ridicule anything religious.” He continued, “I personally believe that this is a disgusting example of excellent PR training, an example of deflecting accountability and blame.”

Channeling the oratory of his character, Gerald said, “John Proctor is being forced to sign away his friends because of one cry against them. To draw parallel to real life, I ask you to ask yourselves, how may you teach us students to walk like men and women in this world when you sell us to lies and opinion, deflecting blame to our good names that we have made. Us students have not lived long enough to make great names of ourselves before you have started to tarnish them – names of us, children and young adults. How may we walk in this world when you have forced us to be sat?”

All three students quoted here, and parent Angela Grist, believe that the school owes the students an explanation and several demanded an apology for the events that shuttered the show. The silence from the school may be designed to run out the clock, with school over and graduation complete in less than two days. The community of Blue Ridge, and the cast and families of The Crucible, deserve more.

P.S. In Miller’s All My Sons, during the opening scene, characters discuss a fierce storm the night before that felled a nearby tree. In Simon McBurney’s 2008 Broadway production, the play began with a wordless scene in which a storm was depicted onstage and audiences saw the tree felled by wind and lighting. The scene is only described in dialogue, it is not part of the text.

How the Blacklisting Starts

May 8th, 2025 § 0 comments § permalink

Perhaps you’ve already read the headlines about how members of the cast of Les Misérables, slated to play at the Kennedy Center next month, are opting out of the performance that President Trump plans to attend, which is tied to a fundraising event for the Center, where he has declared himself chairman. The stories thus far suggest that performers have been given the option to take the night off if they wish, while a CNN headline blares that they are boycotting the performance, which would suggest less accommodation and more precipitous action.

Whatever the precise circumstances, this reflects the politicization of art by outside forces – in this case the federal government – since the new administration came in, in line with the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Humanities Endowment and public broadcasting now underway. Even where the administration’s wrecking ball has been stayed by judges, such as with the reinstatement of reporters at Voice of America, we learn that the famously non-partisan VOA will now start carrying news reports from the specious OANN. That Les Misérables, a story about fights for justice large and small, is one of Trump’s favorite musicals suggests that he is drawn to the scale and grandeur but completely incapable of appreciating the politics buried within the show itself. The central story is about a good man forced to petty crime to feed his child and an implacable foe whose campaign to punish the man is wholly out of proportion with the infraction.

Buried within the news reports of the latest Kennedy Center contretemps comes the intemperate reaction of Richard Grennell, installed by Trump seemingly as the Vichy leader of the Center. Informed of cast members choosing to absent themselves from the performance when the president attends, Grennell made a statement about wanting to “out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire.” This is, without question, a new blacklist – names that the government doesn’t want hired if they won’t perform for the king, exposed in such a way as to make future employers think twice about engaging them and exposing them for a rabid subset of MAGA supporters to harass and intimidate.

In the current Broadway show Good Night and Good Luck, and in the movie upon which it is closely based, audiences see the story of Edward R. Murrow’s efforts to expose the perfidy of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunt against supposed communists in the 1950s. What the film and play don’t really show is the impact of those witch-hunts on the creative community – screenwriters forced to work under assumed names if they could work at all, actors who couldn’t be cast in films, artists turning against one another and outing their friends and colleagues to McCarthy’s minions, led by the rapacious Roy Cohn, later a Trump mentor.

Yet that is what Grennell believes is the proper treatment of actors who won’t assent to amuse the monarch, and he doesn’t even need a Senate hearing room to do it. Today, thanks to social media, all he needs to do is activate the center’s social media, or take to Truth Social, to make life hell for these conscientious objectors. In doing so, he will heighten the tension within the Les Misérables troupe, possibly provoking even more performers to opt out, in an “I am Spartacus” moment of solidarity.

When arms of the government publicly threaten people with exposure – and Trump’s bloodless coup at the Kennedy Center makes all official actions there part of the government – the witch-hunts have begun. From some actors choosing to sit out, we need more people to stand up, because we no longer have a Joseph Welch with the humanity, the dignity and the sanity to say “Have you no sense of decency” or even a government or a country that might be sufficiently chagrined to step back and come to its senses.

In Celebration of Theatre Kids

April 30th, 2025 § 0 comments § permalink

There are those who wield the term “theatre kid” as a pejorative. It bespeaks a certain teenaged volume of expression, a distinctive depth of passion shared perhaps a bit too wantonly, a tendency to hug and cry at random moments of joy, a habit of breaking into song or monologue at restaurants after rehearsals, a predilection for listening to the showtune de jour on endless repeat, bookshelves filled not with YA novels but scripts of plays as yet unseen to be read aloud without provocation. And so on.

To this I say, decades past my high school years: ich bin ein theatre kid.

I’m not sure the term was in vogue back in my day, or if it was, it was apparently spoken behind my back. I was certainly aware of being part of the drama club-chorus/choir axis, which also included the high school band/orchestra. We knew we weren’t the jocks and did not wish to be. My high school was large enough that we existed within our own not-small niche, and if some of us were bullied or ridiculed, it tended to have more to do with simply being nerds or geeks than any specific disdain for our theatrical pursuits.

The theatre kid term is on my mind these days for various reasons, in part because instead of being problematic, two authors have recently taken it as their own as book titles, for two very different adventures in theatre. John DeVore’s 2024 book Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off-Broadway is his account of a young man’s adventures in the downtown scene. Jeffrey Seller’s just published Theatre Kid: A Broadway Memoir, is obviously more uptown, coming from the producer of “Rent,” “Avenue Q,” and “Hamilton.” Clearly should I ever write a memoir (unlikely), the most obvious title has been taken, singularly and plurally.

Even more important to my ruminations on the term is the presence of theatre characters on stage in New York right now who are either theatre kids or theatre-kid adjacent. One might assume that this is because the playwrights are themselves theatre kids, but I think there’s something a bit deeper, namely the place that theatre kids occupy both in life and in the imagination, a singular archetype that is representative of many kids who find an affinity for an art, and for others who share their affinity, banding together under the guidance of Thespis and whichever ancient god cared for the stage crew as well.

Hawkins, Indiana, noted for its supernatural ruptures thanks to Stranger Things, finds its resident theatre kid via the character of Joyce Maldonado, embodied on TV screens as an adult in Netflix’s TV series by Winona Ryder. But on Broadway in the show’s stage prequel Stranger Things: The First Shadow, by Kate Trefry, a teenaged Joyce is the manic, shouty director of the Hawkins High drama group. She is no egocentric Rachel Berry clone, since her focus is on producing and directing, not starring; she’s closer to Max Fischer, the ambitious auteur of Rushmore, though even he starred in his copyright-flaunting mini-epics. But one does get the sense that Joyce could grow up – demons and demogorgons notwithstanding – to join New York’s experimental scene, because she eschews Oklahoma! in favor of a surreptitiously staged production of Dark of the Moon, designed to shock the Hawkinsians expecting a bright golden haze on the meadow.

A more complex theatre kid portrayal appears in Adam Gwon’s new musical All The World’s a Stage at Keen Company. At the center of the show stands Ricky Alleman, a new teacher in a semi-rural Pennsylvania town, closeted when it comes to his workplace in the play’s mid-90s chronology. While we quickly learn that he frequents local theatres and is an acolyte of the ascendant Tony Kushner, Ricky is a once and always theatre kid, but the archetype of the show is Sam Buckman, described in the cast of characters as a “tomboy with theater kid energy. Wry, impulsive, figuring herself out.”

Sam is determined to get out of her small town by winning a college scholarship at the regional Thespian Society monologue competition and, upon discovering Ricky’s affinity for the stage, she dragoons him into being her coach, all the while scheming – like Joyce – to pull a bait and switch. She won’t perform the anticipated Shakespeare, but rather a selection from Kushner’s then still-new, still-startling Angels in America. It seems that among their other traits, theatre kids, at least when dramatically portrayed, are sneaky little devils, challenging authority in pursuit of artistic dreams.

The third character in the current triumvirate is only studying a work of theatre, not preparing to perform in it, though, like a pro she nails a cold read of scenes from The Crucible. Shelby Holcomb is, ultimately, the central character upon whom the plot turns in Kimberly Bellflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, the whiz at textual analysis, the dramaturg-in-the-making who upends classroom discussion of Arthur Miller’s work by looking at it from the perspective of a modern woman, not a 1960s pedagogue or drama critic, informed by her personal experience. Make no mistake: Shelby has drama kid energy, causing one of her contemporaries, after Shelby’s bombshell return to classes after a mysterious “sabbatical” out of town, to exclaim, “She’s a lot,” eliciting the reply, “She kind of always has been.” One senses that if Shelby has it in her power to substitute another text into the curriculum, she would be astute enough to realize that her English class, as constituted on Broadway, might be better served by studying Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves or, if things were to get truly metatheatrical, Kimberley Bellflower’s John Proctor is the Villain.

If Joyce takes a backseat to the supernatural shenanigans of Henry Creel and the Upside Down, if Sam’s story is still perhaps secondary to that of Ricky, if Shelby’s audience is limited to that of her classmates and not an audience of parents and students in the auditorium, there is no doubting that theatre kid energy is a driving force within these shows. That these three instances are all female characters should not be construed to suggest that only young women are theatre kids; the same energy can be found in young men of the same age (or in my case, any age), because theatre kids can come in any gender, any setting, any sexuality, any physicality, or any era.

What binds them is their too muchness to some, their boundless enthusiasm for drama and the dramatic that some of us recognize like a secret handshake when we spy it on stage or in a classroom or making too much noise at the next table in a restaurant. At this season of theatrical awards-giving, we may be focused on the theatre kids who professionalized their affinity, but what we should always celebrate are the countless theatre kids who make theatre as well as those who attend it, because without them, there would be no theatre.

[Photos, from left to right: Eliza Pagelle as Sam in “All The World’s a Stage” at Keen Company, photo by Richard Termine; Sadie Sink as Shelby in “John Proctor is the Villain” on Broadway, photo by Julieta Cervantes; and Alison Jaye as Joyce in “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” on Broadway, photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.]

When Off-Broadway is Invisible

April 24th, 2025 § 0 comments § permalink

Show of hands – who out there has read about the new play Irishtown at Irish Rep? How about the musical All The World’s a Stage at Keen Company? I ask because I saw both of these shows a couple of weeks ago and having seen little in the way of features or reviews – at the latter, I asked Keen’s artistic director when the show would open only to be told it had, three days earlier – I wondered what was at play.

Playbill and Broadway World’s review round-ups show only three or four reviews for each show, even though they say they are updated as reviews come in. Review aggregator “Did They Like It?” shows nothing on either, though they still feature Off-Broadway reviews for Blue Man Group, which has closed, as well as summaries of English and Prayer for the French Republic in their Off-Broadway runs, even though both later reached Broadway. Show Score, an audience-based aggregator does acknowledge these shows, but with just over 50 opinions formed for All The World and only six for Irishtown.

I raise this because it’s representative of what’s happened to attention for some Off-Broadway shows, those that are neither produced by large organizations like The Public, MTC or Atlantic, or newer trend-setting companies like Bushwick Star or Ars Nova. There’s no meaningful Off-Broadway coverage in the Daily News or the Post unless there’s a big name attached, and the Times’s attention is clearly variable beyond Broadway.

Having long ago decided to forego the critical route, I mention these shows simply because I saw them and I’m glad to have done so. In each case, I was motivated to attend for different reasons: with Irishtown, because it features a friend of four decades in its cast of five and because a comedy seemed like a good idea these days; with All The World, I’d read that it involved a high school drama competition, and school theatre is a particular interest of mine.

It concerns me that these shows are so unremarked upon, because it suggests that there’s less interest by the larger media in drawing a spotlight to work on smaller stages, that what was once a lively feature and critical array of thought and opinion has stratified and left a gaping hole. Admittedly all media (including independent media) struggles with budgets and can only allocate so many resources, but where does that leave new work that not only needs support while on New York stages, but also needs to recognition that may allow it to land on stages around the company. With casts of five for Irishtown and four (plus four musicians) for All The World, these are the types of works that might find favor on regional stages, or at colleges, if only people manage to read about them.

I don’t single out these two works in some stealth way of circumventing my own critical silence, but merely as exemplars, because I managed to see them at a time when so much attention is being directed to the welter of Broadway openings that characterize every April. I am entirely aware that there’s works I’ve missed and perhaps not even heard of, because I have limits on both time and stamina, and because I must make choices about what might land in my own paid writing. With no particular outlet to discuss this topic, I turn to this long Facebook post, even as I think about whether starting to blog again more regularly might be useful in supporting the theatrical ecosystem.

I have no bold conclusion nor specific exhortation, except to say that I’m concerned for the health of the Off-Broadway sector (and some will point out that Keen Company, in a 99-seat house technically adheres to the perhaps outdated definition of Off-Off-Broadway) if no one knows the work is out there – and when produced by fully professional companies, equally deserving of attention and assessment, to take its place in the theatrical conversation. And this post itself is meant as a conversation starter.

UPDATES: Five days after I posted this to Facebook, the NY Times posted a review of All The World’s a Stage, in its penultimate week. The critic described it as “an unassuming, 100-minute marvel.” 16 days after this was posted to Facebook, the NY Times posted a Critic’s Notebook that included Irishtown.

[Left: Elizabeth Stanley, Eliza Pagelle, Matt Rodin and Jon-Michael Reese in “All The World’s a Stage” by Adam Gwon at Keen Company, photo by Richard Termine. Right: Kevin Oliver Lynch, Saiorse Monica Jackson and Kate Burton in “Irishtown” by Nicola Murphy Dubey at Irish Repertory Theatre, photo by Carol Rosegg]

In New Jersey, Stopping a Play About The Power of Listening

February 14th, 2024 § Comments Off on In New Jersey, Stopping a Play About The Power of Listening § permalink

Two men sitting facing each other at a table, one in a suit, the other, bald-headed and tattooed, wears a tee-shirt and orange prison issued pants.
Blake Stadnik and Matt Monaco in a scene from Rift, or White Lies by Gabriel Jason Dean, directed by Ari Laura Kreith, at Luna Stage in New Jersey. Photo credit: Valerie Terranova.

There is a sad irony in hearing that a play about repairing relationships and rescuing people from racist ideologies through listening was shut down at a New Jersey high school less than 10 minutes into its performance, with silencing standing in opposition the act of hearing. The play’s title? Rift, or White Lies.

Currently in production at Luna Stage in West Orange NJ, playwright Gabriel Jason Dean’s Rift is the story of two half-brothers’ encounters while one is incarcerated, and their meetings after a long silence resulting from the convicted brother’s embrace of white supremacy. It is a strongly autobiographical story, echoing that of Dean and his own half-brother, who, as Dean explains in a playwright’s note, was sentenced to life in prison plus 40 years for murder and other felony charges in 2000.

The presentation at Montclair High was only to be of one scene of the play, its third, accompanied by discussion of the issues within it. Luna Stage artistic director Ari Laura Kreith, who commissioned and directed the production, said that the company approached several schools about bringing students to the show, but the offer to bring the show to Montclair High was a unique offer, as the school doesn’t typically have the funds to arrange school buses for field trips; the company also solicited outside funds to cover their expenses for taking the two-actor play to Montclair. Montclair High accepted Luna Stage’s opportunity, with a local news outlet reporting that it was targeted for students in the school’s Center for Social Justice program (CSJ) and the Civics and Government institute (CGI).

In an email chain with Montclair educators in advance of the school presentation, Kreith included a detailed synopsis of the play, as well as a content note regarding the scene which included: “White supremacy, physical violence (including a discussion of violence and staged injuries—no physical violence takes place on stage), mention of sexual violence (discussion/not staged), prison, discussion/examples of racism and sexism.”

Kreith was on hand for the Montclair presentation of Rift’s scene three, and verbally provided the same notice previously given to teachers in writing for the assembled students and teachers. Recalling the day, Kreith said, “I introduced the whole piece as being about a character who had become a white supremacist while in prison, and that the other character has choosen not to speak to his brother for 12 year and then resumes contact.”

Referencing Dean, who was interviewed with her, Kreith continued, “I talked about you in 2020 and your sense that maybe the moral thing to do was not to shut your brother out, but to attempt to re-engage and try to see what could be accomplished by listening and talking. I definitely talked about how he became a white supremacist in prison that the piece was about your journey to try and to shift that.”

Despite the advance cautions, Kreith describes a series of rapid events unfolding in the span of perhaps ten minutes once the scene began by her account, the timing corroborated by the participating actors. An email request to Jeffrey Freeman, the school’s principal, for an interview received no response.

Very quickly after the start, Kreith says that someone came to get her saying the performance needed to stop and bringing her straight to the principal. According to Kreith, one teacher believed that the actors had spoken the n-word from the stage and raised an alarm, though the play does not contain the epithet. When the teacher spoke with Kreith and Freeman and was assured they had misheard, they seemed satisfied.

Nonetheless, when Kreith returned to the auditorium, she almost immediately witnessed a different faculty member getting on to the stage in order to stop the show. Matt Monaco, playing the character referenced in the script as the “inside brother,” recalled the moment saying, “Blake [Stadnik, playing the outside brother] and I are in the middle of the scene. It’s getting to the point where we are starting to get into a deep conversation about James Baldwin. The scene ends in a type of catharsis. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get there. But we were working our way towards that and the teacher jumped on the stage and is filled with some passion and concern. She says, ‘I’m sorry, we need to stop.’ Blake and I exited the theater out into the hallway.”

Stadnik described the moment adding a personal detail, saying “I’m actually legally blind. When I’m on stage, really, the only person I have any semblance of seeing is Matt. So I’m very focused on him. But you can kind of feel when the audience is there with you. You could tell that there were several students – I mean, many actually more than several – who were sitting forward, engaging. When it was stopped, I was just confused. I wanted to make sure that because I can’t see it, I wanted to make sure everyone was okay, because we are dealing with some intense topics. And if anyone has experienced these sorts of things in real life, I wanted to make sure that they weren’t having any sort of traumatic event.”

Monaco concurred with his impression of the student response, saying, “I was feeling quite moved and touched by the active listening. I’ve performed for high school students before and this was a completely different experience. They were engaged. And I even looked at some of them, eye to eye. They were in it.”

Monaco said that the teacher who had mounted the stage continued to speak after the actors had exited into the hallway, but that only partially hearing what was being said, and prompted by a student who came into the hallway to express upset over what had happened, he felt compelled to return to the stage.

“I was driven to walk out there,” he describes, “and just apologize for any confusion or concern that may have entered the room. I apologized to her. I said, ‘I’m sorry for barging in here. I just want to tell everybody what this play’s about, where this was going.’ I couldn’t leave that way. I had to go back out there and explain what this what this play is about and where we were headed before we were silenced.”

Kreith said at that point she and the actors were told they must leave and did so. It’s her understanding that conversation may have continued in the auditorium, but she and the actors were not privy to it.

Subsequent to the presentation and its abrupt cutoff, Luna Stage has offered complimentary tickets to any Montclair High students wishing to see the entirety of Rift, and she says that several have begun to take her up on her offer. The two actors, Kreith and Dean, in conversation, were clearly struggling with the experience.

Kreith immediately attributed the problems to a lack of communication. She believes that while the email chain arranging the presentation included a number of teachers, not all of those who brought their students on Monday were part of that communication.  Kreith suggested that the cutoff came from “a moment of panic.” They agreed that what has happened must be an opportunity, as the presentation intended, to open up communication both on the topic of the play and for opportunities like their presentation to remain available at the high school.

After listening to the actors and director recount the experience, Dean, who was not present at the school and relied on various reports, including one on a local news site, said his perspective on the incident had changed.

“I’ve moved from my anger to having sympathy for this person. This person who’s an educator who is –in the time that we’re living in, in the in the in the world that we’re living in – struggling with what kinds of conversations can I am I allowed to have with these kids? The idea of suddenly having to contend with white supremacy, childhood abuse, trauma – all of that puts that body in a place of fear puts, that body in a constricted place, rather than an embracing place. So I can understand that. But at the same time, if we could have gotten to the end of the scene, perhaps some catharsis could have occurred.” Both Dean and Kreith were emphatic that what transpired should not provoke a situation where teachers or administrators are demonized or penalized, only that something positive come out of a difficult moment.

The Luna Stage cohort has, to date, not been told exactly why the performance was stopped, but what is evident from their retelling is that while the school admirably chose to bring in work that raised important issues, it appears to have not properly contextualized that work in advance for students and teachers, resulting in misunderstanding and silencing. The school now has a responsibility for transparently addressing what occurred and making certain that the shutting down of ideas, on the page or in performance, doesn’t become an accepted part of their pedagogy. Better internal communication between the administration and teachers is essential.

Nonetheless, even in truncated form, Rift made a connection that showed the students were more than mature enough to handle the content. Kreith shared one email she received from a student, which read in part, “I saw part of the performance yesterday while in school and was very disappointed when it was abruptly stopped. I feel like the play reflects the reality of the world we live in, I thought the actors were great, and overall I really enjoyed the part of the performance we got to see. A group of us would like to see the show Sunday at 3:00pm. I don’t know exactly how many people yet, but I thought I would just reach out to make sure there are seats available. Apologies on behalf of my teachers for cutting your performance short and thank you for allowing us the opportunity to see what we missed.”

While his half-brother may not know about the incident at Montclair High, he is fully embracing of the play. Dean related, “He sent the guys an opening night message, to say, thank you, thank you for this work.”

As for his brother’s white supremacist beliefs, Dean says, “He has moved away from it. He’s moved away from the ideology, and he’s moved away specifically from acts of violence in prison. The rift that existed between us has been mended as a result of this project, of writing this play. The play leaves us with ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,’ but he knows about it and has been changed by it as have I.”

Dramatic Works Swept Up in Florida Book Bans

December 28th, 2023 § 0 comments § permalink

At the far right of the frame, a kneeling man in a suit embraces a standing woman in a white dress while in partial shadow, as beams of light stream in from the upper left corner.
Clive Owen and Jin Ha in the 2017 Broadway revival of M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang (Photo by Joan Marcus)

“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.

A Bright Golden Haze on “Oklahoma!” in Sherman TX

November 14th, 2023 § 0 comments § permalink

School board meets in Sherman TX on November 13 (YouTube screenshot)

On November 13, following close to three hours of public comment by more than 60 individual speakers, each allotted up to three minutes to speak – the vast majority of whom vigorously supported the drama students and questioned the process by which decisions were being made in the Sherman school system – and more than two hours of closed session, the board of the Sherman TX Independent School District voted unanimously that the original script and cast of the musical Oklahoma! should be allowed to proceed at the high school.

This follows a week and half in which the school’s administration initially informed parents and then students that no student would be allowed to perform any role where a character’s gender that did not align with the gender the cast member were assigned at birth. While this affected as many as 20 students according to statements at the meeting, the decision was widely interpreted at being focused specifically at Max Hightower, a trans male student who had had been cast as the secondary character of Ali Hakim, a role from which he was now being removed.

That decision, announced on Friday November 4, was followed on Monday, November 7 with a statement that the school was now reviewing the text of Oklahoma!, one of the most popular musicals in US high schools for more than a half-century, for material which was inappropriate for high school performance.

On November 11, late on a Friday afternoon, the school announced that there was an alternate Oklahoma! script that would be performed, one which would be acceptable for all ages. That was in fact a cut-down one-hour version of the musical which was intended for pre-high school performances and audiences with short attention spans. A statement to this website from Concord Theatricals , which licenses Oklahoma! for performance, confirmed that the district had applied for the rights to the alternate version, but did not say that such rights had been granted.

Coming after more than five hours of meeting time that went well past 10 pm, the following resolution was adopted by the school board by unanimous decision: “As the board has not adopted a board policy regarding the casting of students in theater productions or performances, I move that the board direct the superintendent to reinstate the original script of the musical Oklahoma at Sherman High School and cast that was assigned as of November 2, 2023.”

School board president Brand Morgan then went on to read a statement on behalf of the school board as follows, “We want to apologize to our students, parents or community regarding the circumstances that they’ve had to go through to this date. We understand that our decision does not erase the impact this had on our community. But we hope that we will enforce to everyone, particularly our students, we do embrace all of our board goals to including addressing the diverse needs of our students and empowering them for success in diverse and a complex world. The board is committed to uphold its ethical duties to including being continuously guided by what is best for all students in our district.”

The more than five dozen speakers at the meeting ranged in age from high schoolers to grandparents, and included speakers who identified themselves as lifelong Sherman residents, residents who had moved away and returned later in life, students matriculated at Austin College in Sherman, parents and siblings of current students and more. Several speakers identified themselves as gay, queer and trans.

The Austin College students each spoke to their personal experiences, but all shared and reiterated the same concluding statement when it came their turn: “I demand that the school board upholds its self-reported goals V & VI by supporting LGBTQ students. I demand the school board allow Sherman High School to perform ‘Oklahoma!’ and all future shows in its original form with students cast in roles they earn. I demand the board maintains SISD theatre department as a welcoming and inclusive space.”

A number of speakers cited statistics about rates of suicidal ideation and suicide among gay and trans young people and charged the school administration and board with ignoring such concerns. One speaker bluntly asked, regarding the school’s gender policies, “Are you telling me that instead of writing biographies in playbills you would rather be writing obituaries?”  

One Austin College student who spoke at the board meeting, identifying themselves as a trans male, stated that theatre is a safe space but that Sherman itself is not. They went on to say that by standing up at the meeting, “I am risking coming out to my entire homophobic family because this is a hill I will die on.”

This does not, however, mean that all discussion on the matter of future productions and casting is necessarily over. One school board member asked for additional conversation on the matters raised at the meeting, stating, “I would like to request a special called meeting Friday at noon of this week here at the central office boardroom to continue this discussion with the board and with legal counsel.” Board president Morgan said that such discussion would be scheduled within 72 hours.

No announcement has yet been made regarding the performance dates for Oklahoma!, originally scheduled for next month.

“Oklahoma!” Sanitized For Your Protection in Texas

November 11th, 2023 § 0 comments § permalink

The Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little Ladies of River City, Iowa ain’t got nuthin’ on the district administrators and school board of Sherman, Texas.

Don’t remember the Pick-a-Little Ladies? They’re the gossipy gaggle of book banning biddies who take time out of their perpetual puncturing of their neighbors’ foibles to rail against the presence of classic works by Chaucer, Rabelais and (horrors) Balzac in the local library.

The Sherman Independent School District honchos are the hypersensitive monitors of morals who have found shocking sexuality and impermissible profanity in the beloved 1943 classic Oklahoma!, widely acknowledged as a turning point in the development of modern musical theatre.

Oklahoma! has been performed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times around the world on stages large and small, professional, amateur and academic. It was the most popular musical on high school stages in the 1960s and 70s and the second most popular in the 1980s and 90s, demonstrating that thousands of teachers, principals, superintendents and school boards have found it to be a wholly acceptable, even ideal, show for their students across decades.

One key difference in the two aforementioned groups: the Pick-a-Little Ladies aren’t real, but instead are characters in another beloved musical, The Music Man, created by Meredith Willson to puncture the hypocrisy of small-town, small-minded self-appointed arbiters of what is right and wrong. The Sherman ISD folks are alive and well imposing their ridiculous regulations on what was heretofore an unassailable standard of the American theatrical repertoire.

When we last left the Sherman ISD crew, they had announced that the already-cast high school production of Oklahoma!, slated for performance in December, was being recast, specifically targeting any student who had a role of the opposite gender from their own. This edict came down in order to displace Max Hightower, a trans boy who had been cast in the secondary role of the traveling peddler Ali Hakim. It seems that the Sherman ISD leaders couldn’t countenance a trans boy acting a role in a comical love triangle, so they invented new rules to stigmatize every gay, trans, non-binary, and queer student under their thumbs, even managing to displace some of the straight kids as well.

But one week after their ham-handed actions raised an outcry from local students, parents and, increasingly, the media, the Sherman ISD brain trust announced late Friday afternoon that they had found a solution to this problem of their own creation. Declaring the script and score of Oklahoma! that has delighted generations on stage and film to have been intended for “older audiences,” they patted themselves on the back for moving forward with an alternate Oklahoma!, “a musical that showcases each student’s talents while also being age appropriate, with no concerns over content, stage production/props, and casting. By utilizing a new version that’s age appropriate, sex will not be considered when casting the new production. Students will be able to play any part, regardless of whether the sex of the character aligns with the sex of the student assigned at birth.” 

How did they achieve such a magical transformation of such trash as one of the important musicals in the history of the form? In a move that would have made the Pick-a-Little Ladies proud, they have opted produce the Oklahoma! Youth Edition, a version of the show so cut down that in contrast to the original, which according to the licensing house Concord Theatricals runs more than two hours, the young people of Sherman will be required to only be on stage for an hour. Yes, the Oklahoma! Youth Edition might be more appropriately called Highlights from Oklahoma! (Minus All the Not Very Naughty Bits).

Taking a closer look at the Concord website, one can easily find that this truncated Oklahoma! being produced at a high school wasn’t designed for high schools. The site states, “In this adaptation for pre-high school students, the content has been edited to better suit younger attention spans.” There’s even one character from the show who has entirely disappeared, as the number of male principals has dropped from 6 to 5. Without immediate access to the Youth script, one can surmise that the missing man could well be the ill-natured (and perpetually ostracized) Jud Fry, that fly in the ointment in the otherwise placid settler community.

What’s evident is that in their rush to eradicate anything that goes against their desire to keep Sherman safe only for cisgendered heterosexuals, they have decided to infantilize the entire student body by giving them the opportunity to perform and see not Oklahoma! but Oklahoma!-lite, a skeletal script reworked to take an impressionable pre-teen from song to song without the slightest spectre of sensuality, and to be sure, it’s pretty slight in most Oklahoma! productions to begin with, sublimated into song and dance.

Heaping a dollop of self-congratulation on themselves in yesterday’s statement, the Sherman ISD spin doctors “thank our community for the care and patience they have shown as we have navigated these difficult circumstances.” There was nothing difficult until these folks decided to make it so and they haven’t demonstrated the slightest care for a significant number of their students, least of all Max Hightower, who found love, acceptance and understanding everywhere except from the Sherman ISD leadership.

As for patience, segments of the community shouted that they can say no from the moment the decision came down one week earlier. The outcry forced the cadre that exerts their will over Sherman students to bumble into another decision which only reinforces their fear of high schoolers encountering anything that doesn’t advance the America seen in such sitcoms as Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best. That happens to the be the very same era in which the film of Oklahoma! was a box office hit. 

With a Board of Education meeting looming in Sherman on Monday evening and the board itself thinking it has tied up everything quite neatly, they are likely to learn during public comments that their alarm over a masterpiece of musical theatre and their disdain for children they’re supposed to be building into smart, compassionate adults has fallen flat. They would do well to listen to the wise words of the character of Aunt Eller in Oklahoma!, mildly profane but also utterly humane, who seeks to quell a community conflict with this lyric, which along with the entire script and score won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944, a declaration that all people are created equal, with equal rights:

I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’
And learn the words by heart the way you should
I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else,
But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!

Update, November 11, 5 pm: In response to questions regarding the situation with Oklahoma! at Sherman High School, the licensing house Concord Theatricals provided the following statement, reproduced in its entirety:

“Equity, diversity, inclusion and freedom of speech are key tenets for Concord Theatricals as champions of authors and artists. We encourage all producing organizations to consider diversity and inclusion in their casting choices. 

Concord Theatricals supports our licensees and all who work on their productions, so long as they adhere to their contractual agreement and do not enact unauthorized content changes.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! is a classic title that has been performed in its entirety thousands of times across the U.S. since it debuted 80 years ago, including in High Schools. Concord Theatricals additionally offers a popular 60-minute Youth Edition designed especially for young performers; we can confirm that Sherman has now applied for this version.”

UPDATE: For the resolution of this situation following a school board meeting, posted on November 14, click here.

Background of lead image photographed at the Museum of Broadway’s Oklahoma! exhibit in New York.

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