“In America, where we have diverse populations, even if you’re in a community theatre, I think it’s better to not do the show rather than do it in yellowface or blackface.”

“The show” in question is Avenue Q, the 2004 Tony Award winning send-up of Sesame Street. The speaker is Robert Lopez, the co-conceiver, co-composer and co-lyricist (with Jeff Marx) of the musical; Lopez is also an award recipient for his work on Broadway’s The Book of Mormon and Disney’s film Frozen. Lopez was responding to questions provoked by a recent article in the Cincinnati Enquirer by David Lyman, a freelance writer covering arts and culture for the paper, entitled “Yellowface: The New Blackface?” Lyman’s article was instigated by the casting of the role of Japanese immigrant Christmas Eve in the Warsaw Federal Incline Theater production of Avenue Q, which closed this past weekend.

In the piece, Lyman wrote, “It probably shouldn’t have surprised me when I saw the Warsaw Federal Incline Theater’s production of Avenue Q and found the character of Christmas Eve – “I am Japanese,” she declares at one point – played by an actress who looked white. (More on this later.) Showbiz Players did the same thing when it produced the show in 2012.” Lyman went on to write, “While casting an ethnically appropriate Asian actor may be more difficult in Greater Cincinnati than in Seattle, it is not impossible.”

Lyman was prompted to examine Avenue Q due to a Facebook colloquy begun by Cincinnati actress Elizabeth Molloy on February 7, ten days before the production began its run. It began:

How is it 2016, and I still have to explain to people that yellowface is wrong?

I mean, everyone knows that blackface is a no-no, right? (RIGHT?!). So why is it so difficult to extend that same logic to other races? Do I really have to point out that yellowface is just as terrible, just as insulting, just as disrespectful, and just as mean as blackface?

In an interview, Lyman said he did not know Molloy well, but saw her remarks because mutual friends shared them on Facebook. Lyman said that as a freelancer, he does not review every show in the area. “This [Avenue Q] was one I probably was not going to see,” he notes, but as a result of Molloy’s post, “I thought, ‘Well OK, I need to change my plans and I did.” Lyman notes that he paid for his seat.

In his article, Lyman wrote:

So is it essential that an actor look Asian? Or is it enough that a person’s heritage somehow reflect an Asian heritage? [The actress] doesn’t look particularly Asian. But according to Rodger Pille, director of communications and development for Cincinnati Landmark Productions, the Incline’s parent organization, [the actress] said that her great-great-great-grandmother was Ma’ohi, from the island of Tahiti.

“Once we knew that she did have some of that descent, we felt we could move forward with the casting,” says Pille. “That was enough for us. We didn’t want to be the arbiter of what percentage Asian she was.”

He has a point. Theaters shouldn’t have to check genetic code before they allow a person to audition for a particular role. But they should be sensitive and use common sense.

Please note that the name of the actor has been omitted above, and will not figure in this article. The responsibility for the casting lies with the theatre and production’s director. The goal here is to explore the ramifications of the casting in Cincinnati, not to in any way shame a performer who had a chance for paid work in what is surely a limited range of opportunities in the city. Warsaw Federal Incline Theater is a professional non-Equity company, described by several people as the top non-Equity theatre in the area, with sufficient influence that several individuals contacted for this article declined to be interviewed out of concern for alienating the leadership of the company.

As Lyman’s article spread nationally, it reached Erin Quill, a staunch advocate for authenticity in racial casting and, as it happens, the original understudy for the role of Christmas Eve in the Broadway company of Avenue Q. She has written her own commentary about the situation on her blog, “The Fairy Princess Diaries,” but also responded to questions resulting from Lyman’s article via e-mail. She wrote:

CE [Christmas Eve] is an immigrant from Japan. First generation. There is an obligation to showcase the character in such a way that honors the writers’ intentions. CE is Japanese. It is in the script.

I think it is fair to say that in this particular case, with a reviewer being so distracted by concerns of ‘whitewashing’ while he viewed the show in Cincinnati that he felt he had to write extensively about it – I think the Creative/Production Team did not do their job. They may be good people, but good people make bad decisions all the time.

Actors don’t cast themselves. As Ann Harada tweeted me the other day ‘Sometimes people need time for learning’ – and this is really what it is –learning where the line is drawn for an audience to buy into the show. According to that review –this casting is problematic. I for one, am glad that diversity is being discussed in Cincinnati theater, I hope it continues.

Quill went on to write,:

I believe that as we are now 15 years (gulp) down the road- you can always find a person to play the role that would be appropriate. You cannot sell me on the idea that ‘no one came in’ – and if that IS the rare instance – make a phone call and see who is out there that is available.

Saying ‘we could not find any’ is laziness.

Ann Harada, referred to by Quill, originated the role of Christmas Eve, in workshop, Off-Broadway at The Vineyard Theatre and on Broadway. Regarding the Warsaw Federal Incline production she wrote via e-mail:

I do understand the limitations of casting certain roles, but then, why do the play? I have a hard time believing they’d use a White Othello instead of just not doing Othello. That being said, I always wish I’d seen the international productions of Q like in Denmark, God knows who played Christmas Eve and Gary [Coleman] in that one.

I’ve met a few white Christmas Eves in my time, mostly adorable young girls who played her in high school. Whatever. Which is why we can’t get upset at the actress who was cast, it’s not her fault. It’s interesting and a little hurtful that her heritage was deemed “exotic” enough to pass for Japanese but ultimately it is a decision we have to lay at the feet of the producers and creative team.

In response to whether the character of Christmas Eve, with her heavily accented English, could be perceived as a stereotype, Harada wrote:

I was concerned that the role would be viewed as a stereotype but I felt it was integral to the points made in the show that the character have an accent. I know several people who expressed their dismay to me about the accent and my response was ” you don’t get it”. If I felt Christmas Eve was a stereotypical character (submissive, shy lotus blossom, good at math, that sort of thing) it might be one thing but she was so obviously tough, smart, educated and aggressive that I felt she was a fully rounded person. People do have accents. It doesn’t make them less smart or interesting or valid than people who don’t have accents.

Except for a few specific lines, the script of Avenue Q does not write in an accent or dialect for Christmas Eve. While it does drop articles and reverse pluralization of words, lines like “Ev’lyone’s a ritter bit lacist” are the exception in the text, rather than the rule. That was very intentional, said Lopez, though he warned of overdoing it. Lopez, incidentally, describes himself as “half Filipino, half a medley of Irish, English, Canadian, Latvian and other stuff.”

“I think that’s the way the performer would prefer to read the script, so that’s how we presented it,” Lopez explained. “I think there’s a description that says she speaks with a heavy accent and that’s not something that we’re trying to micromanage exactly. It’s on a performer by performer basis. I’ve seen it done even by professionals and it’s made me uncomfortable and I always give a note about it. Because there’s a line – and it’s not just a racial sensitivity thing, it’s a comedy sensitivity thing. If you play something cheap, if you play it for cheap laughs, instead of playing the truth behind it, it will always be offensive. Bad comedy always offends me in all forms. Avenue Q has that pitfall because it’s puppets. In many ways it’s cartoony, but on the other hand it’s also real, it’s also about real life. Unless the actors play the truth of the characters, the show is just a shadow of itself.”

It’s worth noting that among its various transgressive elements, which includes a gender switch in casting which calls for a actress to play the role of Gary Coleman, early workshop iterations, including its five performances at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, saw a white actress in that role. Lopez said that the original intent was meant to be merely another example of the show’s irreverence. He credits the show’s commercial producers with prompting Lopez, Whitty, Marx and director Jason Moore to cast a black actress when the show moved to full production. Lopez said he would not support a return to the casting of a white actress in that role. [In full disclosure, at the time of the 2002 workshop, I was executive director of The O’Neill Center, and while I found the casting choice very strange when I learned of it, I did not make any objection to it. In the same situation today, I would let my voice be heard speaking against the choice.]

This past Sunday, during a Democratic presidential debate, CNN moderator Don Lemon cited the Avenue Q song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist,” which indicated that 13 years after its Broadway debut, the show’s messages remain current.

“Sometimes I wondered about that song and sometimes I think that people don’t get the spirit in which it’s meant,” said Lopez. “It’s certainly not intended for us to relax our standards as far as the way we treat other people. The only way we can move forward is if we acknowledge where we are. So the song in that sense is relevant.”

In the wake of his article about the Warsaw Federal Incline production, David Lyman said that while he was surprised to see few responses in the article’s comments section, he had gotten “dozens of communications” in its wake via e-mail and on social media.

Describing the response as “uniformly supportive,” Lyman characterized the messages as saying, “I’m glad you brought this up. It’s about time somebody wrote something like this. I’m impressed. I’m proud of the paper for doing that.” He contrasted this with the responses he received several years ago when he called out a University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music production for using the original script of the musical Peter Pan, complete with archaic representations of Native Americans and still featuring the song “Ugg-a-Wugg.” He said that in his review, he expressed the opinion, “’Well shame on them. They shouldn’t be doing that. This is the wrong century for that.’ That did not go down well. I got a fair amount of negative feedback on that one.”

Lyman also noted that he had not heard anything from the Warsaw Federal Incline Theatre itself since his article came out. For this article, multiple attempts were made, via phone and e-mail, to contact executive and artistic director Tim Perrino as well as communications/development director Rodger Pille, of Cincinnati Landmark Productions, the parent organization behind Warsaw Federal Incline. Neither responded to any of the inquiries. That gives Lopez, Harada, Quill, Lyman and even Elizabeth Molloy, who began the conversation, the final words on the subject, namely that when casting roles where race is specified, the roles should be filled by actors of that race.

But Lopez, in considering the subject of the show’s continued relevance, struck a conciliatory note while making clear what the lessons should be from and for Cincinnati, as well as any future productions of Avenue Q.

“I think that the dialogue has widened,” observed Lopez. “I think people are more comfortable sharing their opinions. I think as the conversation widens to include to everybody’s point of view, we all benefit from learning what offends people and learning what in fact their point of view is. I think we all learn from that, but unless we all talk about it, you don’t learn. In some ways, unless you cast a white Christmas Eve, you don’t learn that that’s wrong, you don’t learn that that’s not OK with people.”

Even though Avenue Q is closed, David Lyman notes that the issue of authenticity in racial casting retains great currency, not only in Cincinnati, but at this particular theatre. “Warsaw Federal incline Theatre is doing Anything Goes in June,” notes Lyman. “What are we going to see there? We’ve got these two Chinese guys. Are they going to make any effort to find Asians? I don’t know. We’re going to find out.”

Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts and director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts.

When a student-devised piece of theatre begins as The Politics of Dancing, an examination of relationships springing from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and is ultimately produced as This Title Has Been Censored, something is amiss. When a student production scheduled for multiple performances in a college theatre department’s mainstage season ends up as a single workshop performance with rudimentary tech given during a final exam period, something is strange. When an original work of theatre begins to address gender roles and is immediately downsized, something is troubling. When these actions were prompted because an inchoate project was judged by departmental leadership based solely on a few preliminary scenes reviewed  four months before the work was to be finished, something seems wrong.

But those are all aspects of what transpired over the past several months in the theatre department of Oklahoma State University. The Politics of Dancing, which had been announced as part of the school’s 2015-16 mainstage season in the Vivia Locke Theatre, which seats some 500 patrons, was to have been presented in February; the rest of the season included A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer, and The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Instead of The Politics of Dancing, the school produced John Cariani’s Almost, Maine.

So what exactly happened to The Politics of Dancing? In October, Professor Jodi Jinks, who holds the school’s Mary Lou Lemon Endowed Professorship for Underrepresented Voices, shared a few short scenes from the work the students had begun to create with the head of the department, which both she and the students say weren’t necessarily representative of what the finished work would be like, given the evolving nature of any devised theatre.

“Professor Jinks allowed us as an ensemble to explore what we wanted. It kind of naturally flowed in that direction,” said student Jessica Smoot via e-mail. “Honestly I think it just came from the fact that you can’t properly explore romantic relationships without understanding gender, and since it is such a hot topic these days it became a much more fascinating subject to explore.”

Student Joshua Arbaugh said, also via e-mail, “The focus of the show never switched from ‘general relationships.’ Gender was only one subject that the show was going to touch on. There was never a time that we as a group decided that the show would be about gender. However, gender and gender roles play a big part in relationships so we devoted a healthy amount of time early in our devising process to explore the many facets of gender in our research and our work. We had no idea that this would displease anyone and did not believe that it was a divergence in our declared ‘focus’.”

Prof. Jinks says that she shared some very early drafts of Dancing on October 19 and two days later department chair Andrew Kimbrough met with the students involved in the production and, in Jinks’s words, “dropped the bomb, or gave the option.”

“We could change the direction we were heading in and create something for our [mainstage] audience, or the students could say what they wanted to say and move to the studio,” explained Jinks.

The audience, as described by students in their meeting with Kimbrough, was “over 50, white and Republican,” according to Jinks in an interview with the campus newspaper The O’Colly.  Kimbrough told The O’Colly, “I believed the students’ assessment of the audience was accurate.” From The O’Colly:

The theater department advertised the play as a production that “examines the mating rituals of our planet’s most advanced and complicated species,” according to a department brochure.

“I was seeing an evolution of work that was, one, not on the topic that was proposed, (and) two, that tended to be one-sided in its address of transgender issues,” Kimbrough said.

Kimbrough said he visited the class and requested that if the students continued with “The Politics of Dancing,” they keep in mind the type of audience they would be performing for.

“Even though they were moving in a new direction, they were never asked to abandon the topic but simply to proceed from the vantage of mid-October with our current audience in mind,” Kimbrough said. “And I believe when you’re running a business, this is the No. 1 rule. You must create work that has your audience in mind.”

After a weekend of consideration, according to Jinks, the students decided to move the production to the smaller studio. “Ultimately,” said Jinks, “they decided to perform the play they originally wanted to write.”

But that plan hit a snag when Jinks and the students were later informed that their production in the studio would have no production support, because the technical departments, in her description, “could not do two things that close together or at the same time,” with the substituted mainstage show cited as a conflict.

“They were offered the studio and thought they could do that,” said Jinks. “That was the option they were presented, and slowly, bit by bit, it was removed.”

Regarding Kimbrough’s position on the project, Arbaugh wrote, “The idea of him bullying our work until he was ‘comfortable’ with it was too great a cost. However, none of us would have chosen to lose departmental support and our spot in the season. We were all blindsided by the decision and I would say it’s because we gave the ‘wrong answer’.”

Arbaugh continued, saying, “The Politics of Dancing was supposed to be a true test of all our talents. We, as students of the theater, were to use everything we had learned in this in this endeavor. When it was cancelled, it was like a big door was slammed in all of our faces saying, ‘who you are is inappropriate and what you have to contribute has no value.’ So self-esteems suffered and even now there is anxiety in the department.”

So why did the show become This Title Has Been Censored?

“As a class,’ wrote Smoot, “we found that using the source materials we were initially assigned (A Doll’s House and the “Politics Of Dancing” song) were becoming more of a hindrance to our creativity, so we scrapped them from the show. This, along with the struggles we had faced through the process, made the show look completely different from what it was initially intended to be – but that can be expected with devised theatre! We wanted to rename the show in a way that acknowledged the struggles in the process. The final product still discussed gender, but in a much more personal way that drew from many of our personal experiences and life moments interspersed with current events revolving around gender.”

At the show’s single performance, Jinks wrote the following in the program:

During the first few weeks of this current semester the Devised Theatre class was developing a different play than the one you will see today. It was called the The Politics of Dancing and it was to be performed in the Vivia Locke in February of 2016. The devised class would build it and perform it, with me serving as facilitator and director. Over a year ago I made preliminary choices to jump start the process with the class. We were to deconstruct Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House and build a new piece by looking at Ibsen’s work through the lens of gender identification, transgenderism and gender politics – subjects which are omnipresent in the media of late. However other lessons (struggles) interrupted that process.

Jinks believes that some of the problems that arose came from many in the theatre department being unfamiliar with company-created theatre.

“I was working with faculty who have no experience with devising, but I thought we were addressing those needs, “ she said, noting that there was “some rigidity, some pushback even before it was canceled.” Jinks said she discounted that response, calling it “irrelevant.”

“It was so early in the process, the play could have gone in any direction. We had four months. They canceled it because the idea was threatening.”

Jinks described a series of meetings with the dean, the provost, the faculty council and the Office of Equal Opportunity between November and early February.”

“I was met with a wall of silence and denial,” she said, “I’d like them to tell me why it isn’t a denial of academic freedom of speech.”

In February, Jinks met with Kimbrough and the provost.

“I gave both men my action requests, “ she said. “One, Andrew was to acknowledge that an error was made in canceling The Politics of Dancing. Two, Andrew would apologize to the department – faculty, staff and students. Three, the department would write policy so that this doesn’t happen again. Four, there would be a recusal from professional advancement discussion by Andrew over me.”

“Andrew said no to one and two,” she continued. “He did say he would apologize for not having everyone in the same room at the same time to discuss the issue.”

Jinks has been at Oklahoma State University for five years, four of those on a tenure track. She will be up for tenure review in two years.

*   *   *

Dr. Andrew Kimbrough was contacted by e-mail and asked for an on the record interview regarding this situation. His entire reply was as follows

I’ll be happy to speak to you once our challenge is fully resolved and behind us. I’m learning a lot, and would appreciate more professional response. Thanks.

A second request, noting that his replies to The O’Colly would be the only opportunity for his voice to be heard in this article, received no reply.

Since Dr. Kimbrough asked for more professional response, it seems only appropriate to provide him with some.

My first thought is to say that if indeed you are not already well-versed, Dr. Kimbrough, you should become familiar with the process of devised theatre as an evolutionary process that cannot necessarily be given a label more than half a year in advance and be expected to stick to exactly the original premise. That said, devised theatre must have a place in the OSU theatre department with the full resources of the department, because devised theatre is important both academically and creatively; it is essential that theatre students of today learn about and experience devised, collaborative works to prepare them forprofessional careers.

Please reconsider your statements and overall perspective, Dr. Kimbrough, about the audience being the most important arbiter of what students perform at OSU. Your assertion in The O’Colly, “When you’re running a business, this is the No. 1 rule,” seems profoundly misplaced within an academic theatre program. Students should not be educated according to the perceived preferences of the local consumer marketplace, but rather taught in order to develop their talent, their skills, and their knowledge so that they themselves are competitive in the marketplace of theatre. Indeed, if your position on why we make theatre were voiced by the artistic director of most of America’s not-for-profit theatres, that individual would be questioned by many in the field for abdicating the role of an artistic leader and kowtowing to lowest common denominator sentiments. Yes, there are financial demands on all theatres, and theatre cannot survive without an audience, but those concerns need to operate in balance with the creative impulse. To visit those concerns on students who have paid for a complete theatrical education, with audience satisfaction superseding the education imperative,  seems a corruption of the role of academics.

Dr. Kimbrough, your students have the same sentiments as I do.

Jessica Smoot wrote, “He sees this department as a business, and while that has been very beneficial when building the department, it can become dangerous for the creative integrity of the department, which I think is very detrimental to our department. There are ways to warn people to not come if you’re easily offended – add ratings, label shows as avant garde or fringe – but don’t take freedom of speech from the students. We will spend the rest of our lives having to worry about where the money to support our art will come from. Let us have some freedom while we still have the ability to not worry about finance, so that when producing our work becomes harder, we will be creating better quality work from the start because we have already had a chance to practice.”

Joshua Arbaugh wrote, “How could we possibly predict what every audience member came to see and how do we know whether or not there is a completely different audience that has simply been alienated by these ‘choices’ in the past. When someone says, “We need to cater to our audience.” That person is really saying, ‘what’s going to be the most digestible to the kinds of people I personally want to come to these shows.’ My answer is no, the theater season should not be selected to impress Andrew’s hetero-normative white friends.”

Finally Dr. Kimbrough, while one would hope you would do so in all things, it’s particularly incumbent upon you when your department has an endowed chair for underrepresented voices to always demonstrate genuine concern and respect for the students who embody those voices and the professor directly charged with serving them. When you offered the students the opportunity to pursue their vision in a smaller space due to your concerns over the marketability of a piece which appeared to be leaning towards a consideration of gender, and they were subsequently informed that they would receive no technical support and no promotion, you were effectively suppressing art on that subject, regardless of your intent.

I am very fond of Almost Maine (and its author, John Cariani) and I’ve seen Cabaret numerous times, but I don’t think those are shows which deeply explore gender issues and represent efforts at diversity, as you suggested to The O’Colly. You need to redress the impression you have instilled in your students as quickly as possible, by planning for work which explicitly examines that topic, either on the mainstage or for a sustained run in the studio. In addition, you would do well to endorse a new student devised work on the subject of gender in modern society that you will stand behind as firmly as you do The 39 Steps or As You Like It (which does have a bit of gender bending of its own, rendered safe by being 400 years old).

On top of all of this, Dr. Kimbrough, to speak your language for a moment, if money is an important consideration, your actions may be alienating a presumably important donor. To cite an article in The Gayly:

“Literally, the name of this endowed professorship is ‘The Mary Lou Lemon Endowed Professorship for underrepresented voices,’” said Robyn Lemon, daughter of the late Mary Lou Lemon. “Not allowing these students to perform this play contradicts the very reason this entire professorship was set up.”

The bottom line here is that the education of students must come first at a university, and that education must not be simply current but forward-thinking in its philosophy, its pedagogy and its practice. The Politics of Dancing isn’t likely to be resurrected; its moment has passed. But if Oklahoma State University theatre wishes to stand for excellence, if it wants to both compete for students and for the students it graduates to be competitive, it must make very clear that it embraces students no matter their gender identity, their race, their ability or disability – in short, it must be genuinely and consistently inclusive – and it should use its stages to make that clear to the entire university, the local community and beyond.

*   *   *

One last word: as The O’Colly researched its story on this subject, Kimbrough acknowledged that he attempted to have the story quashed. He was quoted saying, “I think it would be in the best interest of the department if there was no negative publicity of this incident.” When there are charges of censoring a piece of theatre by reducing its potential audience significantly and withdrawing support from it, that’s not a very good time to also try to keep the story from being told. As is so often the case, efforts to avoid negative stories only lead to yet more inquiry and more concern. That holds true for decisions to cease answering questions about a subject in the public eye. Theatre is about telling stories and very often, about revealing truths. The story of The Politics of Dancing is incomplete. It is up to Oklahoma State Theatre to bring it to an honest, open, inclusive and satisfying ending for all concerned.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts. This post originally appeared at artsintegrity.org.

When a student-devised piece of theatre begins as The Politics of Dancing, an examination of relationships springing from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and is ultimately produced as This Title Has Been Censored, something is amiss. When a student production scheduled for multiple performances in a college theatre department’s mainstage season ends up as a single workshop performance with rudimentary tech given during a final exam period, something is strange. When an original work of theatre begins to address gender roles and is immediately downsized, something is troubling. When these actions were prompted because an inchoate project was judged by departmental leadership based solely on a few preliminary scenes reviewed  four months before the work was to be finished, something seems wrong.

But those are all aspects of what transpired over the past several months in the theatre department of Oklahoma State University. The Politics of Dancing, which had been announced as part of the school’s 2015-16 mainstage season in the Vivia Locke Theatre, which seats some 500 patrons, was to have been presented in February; the rest of the season included A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer, and The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Instead of The Politics of Dancing, the school produced John Cariani’s Almost, Maine.

So what exactly happened to The Politics of Dancing? In October, Professor Jodi Jinks, who holds the school’s Mary Lou Lemon Endowed Professorship for Underrepresented Voices, shared a few short scenes from the work the students had begun to create with the head of the department, which both she and the students say weren’t necessarily representative of what the finished work would be like, given the evolving nature of any devised theatre.

“Professor Jinks allowed us as an ensemble to explore what we wanted. It kind of naturally flowed in that direction,” said student Jessica Smoot via e-mail. “Honestly I think it just came from the fact that you can’t properly explore romantic relationships without understanding gender, and since it is such a hot topic these days it became a much more fascinating subject to explore.”

Student Joshua Arbaugh said, also via e-mail, “The focus of the show never switched from ‘general relationships.’ Gender was only one subject that the show was going to touch on. There was never a time that we as a group decided that the show would be about gender. However, gender and gender roles play a big part in relationships so we devoted a healthy amount of time early in our devising process to explore the many facets of gender in our research and our work. We had no idea that this would displease anyone and did not believe that it was a divergence in our declared ‘focus’.”

Prof. Jinks says that she shared some very early drafts of Dancing on October 19 and two days later department chair Andrew Kimbrough met with the students involved in the production and, in Jinks’s words, “dropped the bomb, or gave the option.”

“We could change the direction we were heading in and create something for our [mainstage] audience, or the students could say what they wanted to say and move to the studio,” explained Jinks.

The audience, as described by students in their meeting with Kimbrough, was “over 50, white and Republican,” according to Jinks in an interview with the campus newspaper The O’Colly.  Kimbrough told The O’Colly, “I believed the students’ assessment of the audience was accurate.” From The O’Colly:

The theater department advertised the play as a production that “examines the mating rituals of our planet’s most advanced and complicated species,” according to a department brochure.

“I was seeing an evolution of work that was, one, not on the topic that was proposed, (and) two, that tended to be one-sided in its address of transgender issues,” Kimbrough said.

Kimbrough said he visited the class and requested that if the students continued with “The Politics of Dancing,” they keep in mind the type of audience they would be performing for.

“Even though they were moving in a new direction, they were never asked to abandon the topic but simply to proceed from the vantage of mid-October with our current audience in mind,” Kimbrough said. “And I believe when you’re running a business, this is the No. 1 rule. You must create work that has your audience in mind.”

After a weekend of consideration, according to Jinks, the students decided to move the production to the smaller studio. “Ultimately,” said Jinks, “they decided to perform the play they originally wanted to write.”

But that plan hit a snag when Jinks and the students were later informed that their production in the studio would have no production support, because the technical departments, in her description, “could not do two things that close together or at the same time,” with the substituted mainstage show cited as a conflict.

“They were offered the studio and thought they could do that,” said Jinks. “That was the option they were presented, and slowly, bit by bit, it was removed.”

Regarding Kimbrough’s position on the project, Arbaugh wrote, “The idea of him bullying our work until he was ‘comfortable’ with it was too great a cost. However, none of us would have chosen to lose departmental support and our spot in the season. We were all blindsided by the decision and I would say it’s because we gave the “wrong answer.”

Arbaugh continued, saying, “The Politics of Dancing was supposed to be a true test of all our talents. We, as students of the theater, were to use everything we had learned in this in this endeavor. When it was cancelled, it was like a big door was slammed in all of our faces saying, ‘who you are is inappropriate and what you have to contribute has no value.’ So self-esteems suffered and even now there is anxiety in the department.”

So why did the show become This Title Has Been Censored?

“As a class,’ wrote Smoot, “we found that using the source materials we were initially assigned (A Doll’s House and the “Politics Of Dancing” song) were becoming more of a hindrance to our creativity, so we scrapped them from the show. This, along with the struggles we had faced through the process, made the show look completely different from what it was initially intended to be – but that can be expected with devised theatre! We wanted to rename the show in a way that acknowledged the struggles in the process. The final product still discussed gender, but in a much more personal way that drew from many of our personal experiences and life moments interspersed with current events revolving around gender.”

At the show’s single performance, Jinks wrote the following in the program:

During the first few weeks of this current semester the Devised Theatre class was developing a different play than the one you will see today. It was called the The Politics of Dancing and it was to be performed in the Vivia Locke in February of 2016. The devised class would build it and perform it, with me serving as facilitator and director. Over a year ago I made preliminary choices to jump start the process with the class. We were to deconstruct Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House and build a new piece by looking at Ibsen’s work through the lens of gender identification, transgenderism and gender politics – subjects which are omnipresent in the media of late. However other lessons (struggles) interrupted that process.

Jinks believes that some of the problems that arose came from many in the theatre department being unfamiliar with company-created theatre.

“I was working with faculty who have no experience with devising, but I thought we were addressing those needs, “ she said, noting that there was “some rigidity, some pushback even before it was canceled.” Jinks said she discounted that response, calling it “irrelevant.”

“It was so early in the process, the play could have gone in any direction. We had four months. They canceled it because the idea was threatening.”

Jinks described a series of meetings with the dean, the provost, the faculty council and the Office of Equal Opportunity between November and early February.”

“I was met with a wall of silence and denial,” she said, “I’d like them to tell me why it isn’t a denial of academic freedom of speech.”

In February, Jinks met with Kimbrough and the provost.

“I gave both men by action requests, “ she said. “One, Andrew was to acknowledge that an error was made in canceling The Politics of Dancing. Two, Andrew would apologize to the department – faculty, staff and students. Three, the department would write policy so that this doesn’t happen again. Four, there would be a recusal from professional advancement discussion by Andrew over me.”

“Andrew said no to one and two,” she continued. “He did say he would apologize for not having everyone in the same room at the same time to discuss the issue.”

Jinks has been at Oklahoma State University for five years, four of those on a tenure track. She will be up for tenure review in two years.

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Dr. Andrew Kimbrough was contacted by e-mail and asked for an on the record interview regarding this situation. His entire reply was as follows

I’ll be happy to speak to you once our challenge is fully resolved and behind us. I’m learning a lot, and would appreciate more professional response. Thanks.

A second request, noting that his replies to The O’Colly would be the only opportunity for his voice to be heard in this article, received no reply.

Since Dr. Kimbrough asked for more professional response, it seems only appropriate to provide him with some.

My first thought is to say that if indeed you are not already well-versed, Dr. Kimbrough, you should become familiar with the process of devised theatre as an evolutionary process that cannot necessarily be given a label more than half a year in advance and be expected to stick to exactly the original premise. That said, devised theatre must have a place in the OSU theatre department with the full resources of the department, because devised theatre is important both academically and creatively; it is essential that theatre students of today learn about and experience devised, collaborative works to prepare them forprofessional careers.

Please reconsider your statements and overall perspective, Dr. Kimbrough, about the audience being the most important arbiter of what students perform at OSU. Your assertion in The O’Colly, “When you’re running a business, this is the No. 1 rule,” seems profoundly misplaced within an academic theatre program. Students should not be educated according to the perceived preferences of the local consumer marketplace, but rather taught in order to develop their talent, their skills, and their knowledge so that they themselves are competitive in the marketplace of theatre. Indeed, if your position on why we make theatre were voiced by the artistic director of most of America’s not-for-profit theatres, that individual would be questioned by many in the field for abdicating the role of an artistic leader and kowtowing to lowest common denominator sentiments. Yes, there are financial demands on all theatres, and theatre cannot survive without an audience, but those concerns need to operate in balance with the creative impulse. To visit those concerns on students who have paid for a complete theatrical education, with audience satisfaction superseding the education imperative,  seems a corruption of the role of academics.

Dr. Kimbrough, your students have the same sentiments as I do.

Jessica Smoot wrote, “He sees this department as a business, and while that has been very beneficial when building the department, it can become dangerous for the creative integrity of the department, which I think is very detrimental to our department. There are ways to warn people to not come if you’re easily offended – add ratings, label shows as avant garde or fringe – but don’t take freedom of speech from the students. We will spend the rest of our lives having to worry about where the money to support our art will come from. Let us have some freedom while we still have the ability to not worry about finance, so that when producing our work becomes harder, we will be creating better quality work from the start because we have already had a chance to practice.”

Joshua Arbaugh wrote, “How could we possibly predict what every audience member came to see and how do we know whether or not there is a completely different audience that has simply been alienated by these ‘choices’ in the past. When someone says, “We need to cater to our audience.” That person is really saying, ‘what’s going to be the most digestible to the kinds of people I personally want to come to these shows.’ My answer is no, the theater season should not be selected to impress Andrew’s hetero-normative white friends.”

Finally Dr. Kimbrough, while one would hope you would do so in all things, it’s particularly incumbent upon you when your department has an endowed chair for underrepresented voices to always demonstrate genuine concern and respect for the students who embody those voices and the professor directly charged with serving them. When you offered the students the opportunity to pursue their vision in a smaller space due to your concerns over the marketability of a piece which appeared to be leaning towards a consideration of gender, and they were subsequently informed that they would receive no technical support and no promotion, you were effectively suppressing art on that subject, regardless of your intent.

I am very fond of Almost Maine (and its author, John Cariani) and I’ve seen Cabaret numerous times, but I don’t think those are shows which deeply explore gender issues and represent efforts at diversity, as you suggested to The O’Colly. You need to redress the impression you have instilled in your students as quickly as possible, by planning for work which explicitly examines that topic, either on the mainstage or for a sustained run in the studio. In addition, you would do well to endorse a new student devised work on the subject of gender in modern society that you will stand behind as firmly as you do The 39 Steps or As You Like It (which does have a bit of gender bending of its own, rendered safe by being 400 years old).

On top of all of this, Dr. Kimbrough, to speak your language for a moment, if money is an important consideration, your actions may be alienating a presumably important donor. To cite an article in The Gayly:

“Literally, the name of this endowed professorship is ‘The Mary Lou Lemon Endowed Professorship for underrepresented voices,’” said Robyn Lemon, daughter of the late Mary Lou Lemon. “Not allowing these students to perform this play contradicts the very reason this entire professorship was set up.”

The bottom line here is that the education of students must come first at a university, and that education must not be simply current but forward-thinking in its philosophy, its pedagogy and its practice. The Politics of Dancing isn’t likely to be resurrected; its moment has passed. But if Oklahoma State University theatre wishes to stand for excellence, if it wants to both compete for students and for the students it graduates to be competitive, it must make very clear that it embraces students no matter their gender identity, their race, the ability or disability – in short, it must be genuinely and consistently inclusive – and it should use its stages to make that clear to the entire university, the local community and beyond.

*   *   *

One last word: as The O’Colly researched its story on this subject, Kimbrough acknowledged that he attempted to have the story quashed. He was quoted saying, “I think it would be in the best interest of the department if there was no negative publicity of this incident.” When there are charges of censoring a piece of theatre by reducing its potential audience significantly and withdrawing support from it, that’s not a very good time to also try to keep the story from being told. As is so often the case, efforts to avoid negative stories only lead to yet more inquiry and more concern. That holds true for decisions to cease answering questions about a subject in the public eye. Theatre is about telling stories and very often, about revealing truths. The story of The Politics of Dancing is incomplete. It is up to Oklahoma State Theatre to bring it to an honest, open, inclusive and satisfying ending for all concerned.