The shutting down of a high school play at East Newton High School in Granby, Missouri last week may have set a new low in bad timing for such incidents. The show was not canceled after casting, during rehearsals, just prior to opening night or following the first performance. No, at East Newton the show was canceled roughly 10 minutes into the second act on its first night. Why? Because two parents, watching the show, demanded that their child be pulled off the stage.

The reasoning? As one of the parents claimed on Facebook, “The play consisted of extreme amounts of cursing, drug use and sexually explicit content. There was language speaking about dildos, pornography, virgins and cherry popping. A student flipped off a teacher.”

With the cast member taken from the stage, a hasty explanation of the remainder of the show was offered. The school would not permit the show to have its second performance, even if a replacement actor had been found in time.

What was the show with this offensive content? A stage adaptation of the widely-loved John Hughes coming of age film The Breakfast Club, released 32 years ago. But therein lies another problem, namely that there is no authorized stage adaptation of The Breakfast Club. The production at East Newton was a wholly homegrown affair, save for the source material itself.

It’s impossible, unless one saw the truncated performance or was involved in the production, to debate whether the material was or was not appropriate for high school production. To what degree the words or actions on the East Newton stage were simply transcribed from the screenplay and copied from the film, or were altered, amended, edited and so on, may never be widely known. The film itself was one of only two of the “golden era” John Hughes to be rated R by the MPAA (the other being Trains, Planes and Automobiles).

The drama teacher, new to the school this year, told Arts Integrity that, regarding authorship, “A local teacher edited the show.” He also acknowledged the lack of rights, writing, “We were unable to obtain rights, the show has never been released as a play. I did a lot of research and found that there is no one to obtain the rights [from]. So we did some creative donation to make it closer to legal.” Asked to explain what “creative donation” meant, he replied, “We weren’t really charging admission. We put out a suggested donation to the drama club.”

As is often the case when shows are shut down by school officials, a campaign to get it restored began quickly, with a former drama club president, now a college student, leading the charge. He rallied support on social media, instigated a lengthy Facebook chain, coined the hashtag #LetThemPlay and even shared a tweet from the school superintendent showing a senior citizen audience attending what apparently was an extra performance or dress rehearsal. He noted that there were no red flags raised about the show’s content then, only when the parents complained – and cited the fact, corroborated by the drama teacher, that all of the students involved in the show had been required to get written permission to participate in the show from their parents in advance.

Another teacher at the school posted to Facebook that she was responsible for the adaptation. She wrote on Facebook about the school principal seeing part of a performance, or possibly a rehearsal, two evenings prior to the suddenly shortened one, noting that while that presentation was also cut short, in that case by a tornado alert, the principal recommended cuts to the text in order to address content issues, which were willingly implemented.

The situation generated coverage in the local media, but as of now, there are no plans for additional performances of The Breakfast Club on or off the East Newton campus. It leaves one sympathetic to the students and even their supporters, because they were denied the opportunity to see their work come to fruition. The principal commented to the local press that with additional changes, the show might yet be brought back. But continuing on with the show would sustain the copyright violation. This is an unwinnable scenario.

The lesson here is one of failed communication all around. It’s possible to applaud the school administration for the initial impulse to trust and work with the drama teacher and his wife to come up with a good show for the students, however all of those parties failed to understand the basics of copyright and licensing, since no script was available. That shouldn’t be taken as permission to go ahead and cobble together your own adaptation, but rather to either create a wholly original work, or to legally license preexisting material. The fact that a Hollywood movie company is unlikely to discover a scofflaw adaptation in a small town (and indeed, several other “original” stage adaptations of The Breakfast Club can be found via a careful Google search) makes no difference. Neither does asking for a donation instead of charging a set admission. What happened in Granby absolutely qualifies as public performance of dramatic material.

That parents apparently signed a permission slip approving their child’s participation in a school show and then rescinded that permission mid-performance suggests that either the form didn’t indicate why permission was being sought or that the parents weren’t paying sufficient attention to that information. While it’s impossible to assess from afar how school appropriate (or not) the play was, these parents had to know that by removing their child mid-show, they were effectively ending the evening for all concerned, cast, crew and audience alike. The school’s rapid decision not to allow the second performance served to back the parents’ assessment.

There are multiple adults who shoulder blame for what happened at East Newton. In recounting this situation, names have been omitted, since everyone here has lost out in one way or another. There’s no need to provide an easy route for shaming any of the parties –though the former drama club president’s efforts were admirable, if underinformed about the full scope of the issues at hand. Local news accounts can be found for those eager to push into the details or to verify this account.

It seems more important that all of the parties involved walk away with some lessons for the future. Teachers and administrators need to learn what is and is not permitted with regarding adapting existing works or licensing scripts for performance, and they should share that understanding of responsibility with their students. That this teacher-adapted version of a screenplay was willingly adjusted according to administration requests shouldn’t in any way suggest that existing, properly licensed scripts can be edited at will by those in authority. Permission slips should make clear their purpose when utilized, to insure parents understand what they’re approving for their children, to avoid even later than eleventh hour reversals. Parents should understand how their actions for their children can have a domino effect on many other students, and consider how it affects everyone in that moment, not solely what it means to them and their child.

Finally, this should also not be an excuse to suspend or terminate the drama program at East Newton, or to subject it to undue ongoing scrutiny beyond that appropriate for any school activity, but rather prompt all concerned to make it stronger and indeed to hopefully present material that is something more than G rated. After all of the attention this generated locally, the East Newton Drama Club should be allowed to build on that awareness it in the future, all concerned should do better next time, and East Newton students should be assured they can appear in shows that speak to their own experiences, perform shows in their entirety, and bask in applause when it’s all said and done.

As for The Breakfast Club? The Blu-Ray can be purchased for under $7 online.

When incidences of high school theatre censorship arise, the point at which they occur, and when that breaks out beyond school walls, can be central to efforts to reverse the decision. At other times, one finds webpages like the one above, from Danville Area High School in Pennsylvania in late January.

The recent debate in Cherry Hill NJ over Ragtime is an excellent case in point. The decision by the school administration to alter all “offensive” language in the play, without permission from the licensing house or the authors, arose while the show was in rehearsals, six weeks before performances were to begin. The school publicly announced its plan to alter the play’s text, to placate those who objected to words within it, which if enacted would have caused the school to lose the rights to perform the show at all. A broad lobbying effort ensued to make the case that Ragtime was much more than the handful of slurs that are essential to the work, and advance its message of acceptance and inclusion. It had sufficient time to have an effect, echoing other such efforts in recent years in Plaistow NH over Sweeney Todd and Trumbull CT over Rent. Ragtime opens in one week.

But even as the initial decision adverse to Ragtime was being reversed, productions in Fresno CA and Danville PA were irrevocably ended, with school officials forcing a student-directed production of Sartre’s No Exit to end after the first of its three performances, and the school edition of Avenue Q canceled in favor of James and the Giant Peach, to be performed in April.

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Poster design by Dominic Grijalva for No Exit at Buchanan High (via Facebook)

Homophobia was cited as the cause of the cancellation of No Exit in Clovis CA, at Buchanan High School in late January. Jared Serpa, the student directing the show as his senior project, as part of the school’s drama program known as Bear Stage, made the charge in an online video, citing a complaint by a member of the audience at the first performance and a conversation he had with a faculty member which specifically identified the gay character as being problematic, should a parent bring a young child and have to explain why one woman was trying to kiss another. The remaining performances were immediately shut down.

“Talk with your children about reality,” urged Serpa in his video. “Don’t put them in this bubble and darkness … because you couldn’t find the courage to talk to your own child about the fact that people are different.”

Speaking to The Fresno Bee, Clovis Unified spokesperson Kelly Avants denied the charge of homophobia, saying “We own the fact that it should never have even been approved as a senior production in the first place. Being a K-12 institution, the expectation of our drama programs is that every production they do is to be age-appropriate content.”

An online fundraising campaign, to move the production off campus, quickly raised more than $1,000. But that move isn’t happening.

After conversations between Serpa and the school, subsequent to the canceled performances, they reached what was described as a mutual decision not to go forward with the show on or off campus. Serpa described it as letting the show “peacefully die,” in a second Twitter video. Serpa cited the pressure the situation was putting on his cast, comprised primarily of students who were not seniors, and his intent to use the money raised for No Exit to be the seed money for an independent theatre company that could tackle, in his words, “gritty art, gritty theatre.”

A joint statement, credited to both Clovis Unified School District and the No Exit Team, yet reading very much as an institutional statement, said in part:

In the case of the Jean-Paul Sartre play No Exit, the show’s language; dark themes of hopelessness, hell and mutual torment/torture; conversations about the murder of an infant, being shot in the chest nine times and infidelity; and multiple sexual advances and requests made by the characters all add up to content that as a whole we do not believe is appropriate for a high school audience.

It would be expected that the school administration would have reviewed the show’s content and, long prior to opening night, asked the senior student to select a different show with more age-appropriate content. Unfortunately, the content was not fully known to the administration until the first production.   It was at that time that a determination was made that the show could not “go on” given the mature themes and content more appropriate for a college or community audience.  One indicator of the mature nature of No Exit’s content is the fact that the play only appears in our curriculum in the college-level Advanced Placement Senior English course. This is a course that requires parent notification of the reading lists and provides an opt out option should a parent want alternate content for their student.

In the past, we have had multiple productions that featured characters or storylines that included LGBT or Q characters. That alone would not be a reason for us to stop a show.

But while No Exit was silenced, it did not go unremarked upon. Writing in the Bee, Donald Munro said of No Exit:

It is a bleak, brilliant, existential torture-rack of a play that shakes you out of your daily stupor of denying mortality and makes you ponder life’s gaping and unconquerable questions.

Which makes it perfect for older high school students just itching to dive into murky philosophical waters.

But don’t worry. Clovis Unified is keeping us safe from a classic drama written in 1944.

The one other piece of news coverage appeared, somewhat inexplicably, in The New York Daily News, recapping much of what the Bee initially reported, but bringing the situation to ore national attention. Indeed, Serpa cited the national focus as part of the pressure surrounding the production that led him to abandon his plans for an off-campus production, ending what he had originally described as a four-year quest to stage No Exit. Consequently, after a single performance, No Exit was trapped in its own eternal existential hell, remembered only by those who managed to catch that first performance before the hammer came down.

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Image from news report by ABC affiliate WNEP 16

While No Exit managed one performance, officials at Danville Area High School In Pennsylvania canceled Avenue Q shortly after the cast had been announced. The school superintendent Cheryl Latorre told the Daily Item, “It is the school version, but there is a lot of foul language in it and things that are so controversial. Not that that isn’t the real world. It’s just not the time for the program here. I just don’t think it’s something our little ones should attend.”

She went on to say, ““I just don’t feel it’s a fit for us at this time. We want a production to fill the auditorium.”

John Brady, the drama advisor who was to stage Avenue Q, quit his position as a result of the decision. The school’s other drama advisor will direct the replacement production. Reporting in the Daily Item indicates that Brady did receive approval for the show, which was withdrawn once school administrators subsequently read the script.

One student, commenting to the Daily Item, suggested that the school’s decision was a case of wanting to avoid controversy, as fundraising is in process for a new $12 million school auditorium. An editorial in the Daily Item, while acknowledging that the decision was being made later in the process than is advisable, sided with the school.

*   *   *

So what exactly might be found objectionable in these plays?

Before the joint statement was issued, Kelly Avants from Clovis Unified described No Exit, which is part of the school Advanced Placement curriculum, to TV station ABC 30 as follows:

“There’s language. There are themes of child murder. There are themes of people getting shot multiple times. There’s a great deal of sexual content from a number of different perspectives.”

Yes, No Exit has dark themes, but it is neither graphic nor salacious. Any play set in hell, and considering the implications of eternity there, must engage with the sins that sent people down. Yes, the school edition of Avenue Q is at times suggestive, but the show’s fully transgressive nature has been dialed back significantly. It retains just enough so that it remains a parody of Sesame Street rather than a replica of it for slightly older audiences.

The school edition of Avenue Q, has been almost entirely stripped of the “foul language” invoked by Danville superintendent Latorre. Of the words that remain, the only phrases which presumably might trouble educators are “gonorrhea,” “undescended testicle,” “sucks,” “skanky,” “ass” and “crappy.” Some songs are gone entirely – such as “You Can Be As Loud As the Hell You Want” and “My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada” – while Trekkie Monster’s “The Internet is for Porn” has been recast as “My Social Life is Online.” Mrs. Thistletwat in now Mrs. Butz. The characters do consume alcohol and sleep together, but the latter is entirely offstage.

However, contrary to Latorre’s statement, Avenue Q is not the real world. The puppets should be a tip-off. It’s about how young people adjust to the real world. It’s about growing up. Also, by saying she wanted the production to fill the auditorium, was she making a judgment about how well a show would sell, as opposed to its value to the students? The motivations seem muddled.

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In the school edition of Avenue Q, Rod remains a closeted gay puppet, and the terms “gay,” “queer” and “homosexual” remain part of the script. Certainly none of those latter terms should be considered as in any way offensive in this day and age, unless deployed somehow as epithets. In No Exit, one of the four characters is a lesbian, though that word doesn’t appear in the text (at least in 1946 Stuart Gilbert translation consulted for this article). In examining the fates of both the Clovis and Danville productions, it’s hard not to notice that both of these canceled shows contain gay characters – even though the statement from CUSD assured the public that “LGBT or Q” characters had been portrayed in the past on their stage. The Bear Stage No Exit included cross gender casting, with a female student in a role written as a man; that student self-identified as being part of the LGBTQ community.

Another similarity between the two cases is the rhetoric used for justifying the termination of the shows. In Danville, the superintendent said, “I just don’t think it’s something our little ones should attend.” In Clovis, the spokesperson gave the rationale that, “Being a K-12 institution, the expectation of our drama programs is that every production they do is to be age-appropriate content.”

In the latter case, the reasoning is obfuscation, since most public school districts cover both elementary and secondary education. But Buchanan High School is for grades 9-12, with students of an age where the school edition of Avenue Q is equivalent to network TV comedies and PG or PG-13 movies. It is not a frontier schoolhouse with a single classroom that teaches students of all ages.

The invocation of little ones and kindergartners reveals an all too common rationale: that high school theatre must be entirely family friendly, that it must remain benign and inoffensive in order to serve as a community relations, rather than an educational tool for the students participating. The idea that high school presentations should be acceptable for primary schoolers is infantilizing.

As it happens, it’s very likely that young children might miss the residual innuendo in the school edition of Avenue Q. They surely wouldn’t even understand the implications of No Exit, and indeed might be bored by it. But those shouldn’t be reasons for denying students in their mid-teens the opportunity to work on popular, current work (even in a tamed form) or intellectually rigorous pieces that they may well be studying in their classrooms if they are engaged and excited by them. That Clovis requires parental consent for advanced placement students to study No Exit is evidence of how risk averse schools have become. That same overcaution is demonstrated by the fact that the school board in Danville had to vote to approve of James and the Giant Peach.

There’s no question that the discipline, commitment, teamwork and talent required for theatre is at the core of every production, regardless of the content of the work. But walling off a vast amounts of the repertoire from high school theatre in order to avoid any thorny issues or marginally strong language, lest absolutely anyone object, serves to erase any intellectual rigor from the students’ experience, whether curricular or extracurricular.

In addition, making the choice of school plays subject to the approval of superintendents and school boards will likely serve to insure that only the safest, middle of the road shows can be done, denying drama teachers and their immediate supervisors the right to make decisions best suited for their students, who are certainly not children and may well flourish even more fully when facing a challenge. But that challenge should come from the material they are allowed to enact, not from arbiters who, under the guise of protecting students and appealing to the most people possible, deny student opportunity in order to protect themselves.

This is a revised and updated version of a prior post from earlier today, which has been withdrawn, because it suggested, based upon news accounts, that the UW theatre department had been singularly targeted. This incorporates additional information provided by Todd London, executive director of the UW Department of Drama.

At a time in the life of America when The New York Times has been compelled to create a column called “This Week in Hate,” some localized instances of actions that are overtly oppositional to a culture that embraces all people, regardless of race, religion, sexuality, gender identity or disability, can still run the risk of being seen as too small bore for widespread attention and revulsion. But if they are not called out, if the public is not made aware, then there is the ever-present risk of such actions becoming normalized, simply a part of modern life with which we must live.

Given that neo-Nazi signage was plastered on theatre doors at the University of Washington on Wednesday night, while a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It was underway inside, it cannot be permitted to be treated as merely some ill-judged prank, but as a threat – made under the cover of anonymity. That it is not the first such incident on the campus makes it no less ugly or upsetting. In fact, as executive director of the UW Department of Drama Todd London made clear in a conversation with Arts Integrity, the postings on the doors that gave access to the Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre, were seemingly “entirely random and happening all over campus that night.”

The surreptitious postering came to light through a Facebook posting by student Tamsen Glaser, who plays Jaques in As You Like it. As a public message, it began to be widely shared on social media by Thursday morning.  Glaser’s message read, in part:

In the middle of the first act of “As You Like It”, we smell spray adhesive from outside. Our stage manager looks outside, and these posters are being attached to the doors. Of our theatre. With spray adhesive. 8 of these posters, all on the doors. Residue is still there, though the posters are not thanks to our team.

The local accounts make clear that university police officers responded quickly upon report of the incident, and The Stranger reported that Todd London has asked for additional campus police presence for the rest of the run of the show. London told Arts Integrity that support is being provided. The Stranger quotes London as follows:

“We want them to feel safe so they’re not spending their deepest energies worrying when they should be focusing that on performing,” he said. “It’s pretty simple: We want them to be protected and for them to feel free.”

Speaking with Arts Integrity, London countered earlier reports which indicated that the theatre had been specifically targeted, saying, “Everything about it, everything we have learned, everything the police have learned, while terrible, hateful, was apparently random, from everything we can tell.”

All of these responses appear admirable, appropriate and necessary. However, the account from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, specifically in regard to comments by the campus police, suggests a diminishment of the incident.

“It was the latest in a string of incidents in which pro-Nazi fliers have been posted throughout the campus, UW police say,” wrote reporter Lynsi Burton. She concluded her account as follows:

UW Police Cmdr. Steve Rittereiser told seattlepi.com that posters of that kind have been displayed throughout campus, but that their appearances seem to have increased since Inauguration Day.

They’re “not all that unusual” to see, he said.

They’ve been spotted in Red Square and other areas of campus, as well as on numerous campuses across the country.

On-campus posters are supposed to be approved by a school body, but there’s no real enforcement of the rule, Rittereiser said.

He said police pay attention to posters people find objectionable and that people are welcome to report them to police, but that people are also welcome to simply remove them as they see them.

Is it merely “objectionable” that anonymous posters seek to direct those who see them to a website that proclaims, among other viciousness, “Gas the kikes”? Isn’t “not all that unusual” another way of saying typical, average or standard?

To remove posters like those that appeared on the theatre doors, and elsewhere on campus, on Wednesday night in Seattle is not censorship, it is not a denial of freedom of speech. Rather it is an appropriate response to an act of targeted vandalism, an act of intimidation, part of a seemingly ongoing campaign focused on the University of Washington, by a group that claims a national bootprint.

How do the arts respond in these situations, how can they? When the adhesive is not fixed, while the paint is still wet, the people who are part of the production can react in the moment to eradicate the hate (and god bless inventive stage crew and technicians, who can surely do so even when messages have had the time to set). But each and every incident must be called out, loudly, as a form of warning and opposition.

Even if the weapons of the arts are rubber knives, as Kate Fodor has suggested in her new monologue, they can still be wielded with purpose and effect, and need to be, on stage and off. The show, all shows, must and will, go on. The arts (which are by no means alone in this targeting) cannot allow themselves be intimidated or silenced, or actions against them normalized, on stage and off.

Beginning one week after the November presidential election, New York’s Primary Stages commissioned a collection of over 70 pieces written by a diverse array of playwrights from their artistic community. Each artist crafted a short monologue from the perspective of a character in America on the morning of November 9^th. The resulting works will be presented twice, under the collective title Morning in America, November 9, 2016 9 AM, on February 18 and 19. Kate Fodor’s Rubber Knife is but one of pieces that came out of this call to the writing community.

Kate Fodor’s plays have been produced across the US and around the world, including at Steppenwolf, Playwrights Horizons, Primary Stages and London’s Courtyard Theatre. She has received the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens Award, the National Theater Conference’s Barry Stavis Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting.

*    *    *

RUBBER KNIFE by Kate Fodor

A 20-year-old theater major at the University of Illinois addresses the audience.

He wears dark sweats and a plain white t-shirt. Bare feet. He holds a hunting knife.

A lot of students live in this apartment complex. A bunch of theater geeks like me and my roommates. Some pre-med girls on the fifth floor who have a mason jar full of kidney stones on top of their TV — but they’re pretty nice. And these two guys on the ground floor who are like scholars of dickishness and assholery, majoring in ignorance. Guy who harrassed my friend Kayla in the parking lot when she came over. And of course they have a big Trump bumper sticker stuck to their front door.

I’ve been looking forward for a long time to seeing those dudes’ faces this morning.

(He rubs his eyes, still holding the knife.)

We stayed up for the whole thing last night and we’re tired and not feeling all that good. And of course those fucking dudes are out there in the parking lot yelling USA, USA — which my roommate swears is them yelling JEW-S-A because the premeds upstairs are Jewish. I hope that isn’t true, but either way, I really need them to fucking stop.

(He looks down at the knife in his hand, then back at the audience.)

Don’t worry. I wouldn’t kill them. I can’t. It’s a rubber knife. We have stage combat this morning.

(He bends the tip to show them.)

The head of the theater department, Cathy Davis, is waiting for us when we get to stage combat. I guess she felt like she had to come and say something. In loco parentis. You know, just a few words to explain why it’s all right that the world has revealed itself to be full of shit and evil. We circle up.

Cathy tells us Rehearsal Room B in the Theater Arts building is exactly the right place for us to be this morning. People are crying. My friend Cha Cha takes my hand, other people are holding hands too. Cathy says the fight is on and the fight will need us. She says artists matter more than ever now. Because that’s what she has to believe.

Everybody says what they feel — I mean, I don’t, but a lot of people do.

My great-grandfather flew planes in World War II. I follow this woman on Twitter who raised money for water in Africa by rowing across the Atlantic solo — naked, actually, but that’s not why I follow her. It was because of chafing, like she had to at a certain point not have the clothes. Hillary fucking Clinton — not that I wouldn’t have preferred Bernie, because I would have — was advocating for migrant farm workers when she was my age.

The fight needs us, Cathy, really?

We take a bathroom break. A girl from the musical theater program is on the rehearsal room floor in the fetal position, crying. I get it. I want to do that, too. And I also want to kick her really hard as I go by.

My friend Ted is practicing his monologue from Henry V:

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars

And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’

Our stage combat teacher, Miriam, says, OK, come on. She’s maybe 5’ 2”, with dreadlocks, skinny and smiley, not someone you’d think was a blackbelt in karate. She looks tired, but she doesn’t say anything about what happened last night. She opens up her suitcases. There are swords, spears, hammers and knives, and we get to choose our weapons.

END

© 2017 Kate Fodor

There is no question that there are racially charged words in the musical Ragtime, just as there were in the novel upon which it is based. In telling the story of black characters, of Jewish characters, of Irish characters at the turn of the 20^th century, these words are integral to portraying the racism and bigotry that were rampant in that era. The artists who created the show – Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens – and the many who have since staged and performed it, understand the ugliness that is inherent in that language and have not deployed it lightly.

In the two decades since Ragtime debuted on Broadway, it has been produced countless times and in countless venues. A most affecting concert version was performed this summer on Ellis Island, the very site where many immigrants entered the United States for the first time.

A production at Cherry Hill High School East in New Jersey, scheduled for March 10, is now facing censorship over the racial epithets embedded in the script. While the school says it is prepared to go forward with the show, it will do so by making unauthorized alterations in the text. In a statement, the school district said:

The Cherry Hill High School East community is approaching the production of this show from a learning disposition. Within our educational community we have been engaging in a dialogue regarding the offensive language in the show. We are indebted to the Cherry Hill African American Civic Association as well as individuals in our community for joining us in this discussion regarding the use of bigoted language in the script. After a very open and productive meeting between representatives from the East Staff and the Cherry Hill African American Civic Association, we confirmed the decision to remove offensive language from the enacted script. In addition, all students at Cherry Hill High School East will participate in learning activities stemming from Ragtime in an effort to use our history to further expose the ugliness of racism. We apologize for any negative impact that the potential inclusion of the racist language had on members of our community and we are thankful that we have educational leaders, student leaders, and community leaders with whom we can partner when concerns arise.

There will be a board of education meeting this evening in Cherry Hill where this topic will be addressed as well, albeit on an agenda that currently runs to 28 pages.

What the district has failed to address in any of its statements, or in interviews with NJ.com or the Philadelphia Inquirer, is that by making any changes to the script, they are in violation of both copyright law and the licensing agreement for the show. It is not the purview of anyone to alter a dramatic work without the author or authors’ approval, whatever their rationale. If it is the intention of the school board to affirm the school’s stated position, their legal counsel would do well to inform them that the school is predicating its action on a legally untenable premise and could well result in the loss of the right to produce the show.

Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell in the original Broadway production of Ragtime

That said, it is important to understand that while schools shouldn’t endorse hate speech or action against any group, the enacting of our unfortunate racial history is not the same as propagating the language that was part of it. (This recalls a similar situation in Connecticut in 2011 over Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and the use of the n-word.) Informed of what is taking place at Cherry Hill High School East, Brian Stokes Mitchell, who was a Tony nominee for creating the role of Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime and won the Tony as Best Actor for Kiss Me Kate, in addition to receiving The Isabelle Stevenson Award from the Tonys for his charitable work on behalf of The Actors Fund, spoke to Arts Integrity about the importance of Ragtime and its language.

“It needs to be acknowledged,” said Mitchell, “that whether the people who complained are African American or white, I understand why they would be upset, given the tenor of the times and what’s been in the news. If this was an African American family, we must acknowledge that these words at this time represent a very old wound that has been freshly scraped open. There is a renewed feeling among some people that they can say terrible things against ethnicities, against women, against the LGBTQ community. For those in communities that have been historically marginalized, there is now the real belief that there is a segment of the population that feels newly empowered to be offensive. I understand and acknowledge that.”

“But,” he continued, “that is what the show is about. It is about terribly ugly things that happen to people and how they surmount that. Our country has an ugly history with race.”

“To take the ugly language out of Ragtime is to sanitize it,” Mitchell declared, “and that does it a great disservice. People should be offended by those words. But it’s not done in a way that glorifies the people saying it. Rather, it allows the show to take people on a journey. It’s Coalhouse’s journey, it’s Sarah’s journey, it’s the journey of the 20^th century and it’s still our journey today. The n-word is still thrown around without empathy.

“Ragtime is about how we get through ugliness, how we talk together, work together, get through it together. The show takes us to the next steps. That’s what our country needs to do.

[Edit, January 27: A 31-word quote from Mitchell that originally appeared here has been removed at his request, as he felt it was unclear when set down in writing, particularly after seeing it taken out of the entirety of the piece and used as his sole comment on the matter. He has offered a deeper clarification of his thoughts which appear at the end of this post.]

Mitchell observed that, regarding the school making alterations, “Changes are an infringement of copyright. It would be very unfortunate if because of this choice, the show can’t be done.”

Mitchell recalled a visit he made to Columbia High School in South Orange NJ in 2015, where he spoke with students about the show. Citing a question from the student who was playing the story’s most bigoted character, Willie Conklin, who expressed his discomfort at having to use the n-word, Mitchell said he reminded the student, “It’s not you saying it. It’s the character.”

In a follow-up letter to the school, Mitchell wrote:

I had been out of RAGTIME for a year when it played its last performance at the (then) Ford Theatre on 42nd Street. I wrote a letter to the company saying that although it was sad to see such a magnificent Broadway show close, the good thing was that RAGTME would no longer be the exclusive property of Broadway professionals. Now it would live where it really belonged – in the hearts, minds, hands and mouths of community theatres, college theatres and high school theatres EVERYWHERE.

Mitchell also recounted a six-page, single spaced letter he received from a young white man in Florida during the show’s original run. Saying that it was page after page about this man’s ordinary existence, leading Mitchell to wonder why the letter had been sent at all, he said that in the very last paragraph, the man that, after seeing Ragtime, “I realized I’d been a racist all my life and didn’t even know it.”

“You cannot have that experience if the language is toothless,” said Mitchell. “If you take that out, there’s nothing to have repercussions against. You have to take the ugly with the beautiful.”

While school officials have made a decision, it is not irrevocable. If there is the opportunity for further conversation—with the school, with the school board, with parents, with students, with the Cherry Hill African American Civic Association—Mitchell has offered to participate (and can be reached through the Arts Integrity Initiative). Because, he says, “They should do it [Ragtime, original language intact], be uncomfortable with it, and talk about it. One of the great things about this show is the discussion it engenders.”

Update 1/24 2 pm: To express support for an uncensored production of Ragtime at Cherry Hill High School East, click here to sign a petition.

Correction 1/24 3 pm: This post previously referred to the character of “Willie Conklin” as “Willie Calhoun.”

Addendum, 1/27 2:45 pm: Brian Stokes Mitchell has offered further thoughts and clarification on his remarks on the situation in Cherry Hill in writing, and they appear here in their entirety:

The original comments I made were in response to the High School’s desire to alter Ragtime’s script (specifically the excision of certain racial slurs) that could possibly lead to the loss of the right to perform the show due to copyright infringement issues. In addition, I was making a point about how the contextual use of those racial slurs sets up the trajectory of the characters in the show. It is the ugliness in Ragtime that gives the cathartic power to its tragically beautiful ending.

That being said, I want to acknowledge that I don’t know the specific issues that the parents who brought up the complaint are having. I also don’t know the opposing arguments of the parents who wish to do the show with the racial slurs intact or what the school district officials are facing. I do know that I am glad that this conversation has been initiated and engaged by the community and I am heartened to learn that the local NAACP is also involved in the process. I deeply respect and understand that there is concern about the brutality and offensive language in the show, particularly given the divisive nature of our present political climate. Although these are difficult times we are living in, I have faith that the conversations the Cherry Hill community is poised to have and their dedication to the welfare and development of their children will guide them on the best path to take.

What I can attest to is my personal experience with Ragtime and its cathartic and transformative power on an audience. I have experienced firsthand how Ragtime specifically (and I think art in general) has an amazing ability to heal by opening hearts and minds to the plight and concerns of fellow human beings whose lives and experiences might otherwise be marginalized, dismissed, or made not to matter.

Despite living in a time of overt racism, sexism, fear and xenophobia, the various characters of Ragtime each find their own individual sense of empowerment, understanding and interconnectedness. Together they confront something that is ugly, negative and dispiriting  and ultimately transform it into something beautiful, positive and inspiring.

I think those are good lessons to teach and to learn.

I sincerely wish the community of Cherry Hill the greatest success as they grapple together with the very issues that we face together as a nation.

In some ways, it might make more sense if I wrote this post about some of my least-read pieces of 2016, because I value almost everything I write equally and never quite know why some get widely read and others just seem to be of only marginal interest to others. I of course prefer to blame social media and its vagaries, but in some cases it might be the photos I chose, the headline I drafted or the relative idiosyncrasy of the subject.

Because this year was the first during which I was writing for not one but two sites – my personal site and ArtsIntegrity.org, there are really two lists here, a top ten for the former and a top five for the latter. While I list each set by date published, rather than “popularity,” I am pleased to say that between the two sites, my total number of views this year was a 50% increase over last year. My concerns over cannibalizing my own readership proved unfounded.

You can access any posts you haven’t read, or wish to re-read, by clicking on the titles below. Thanks to everyone who read, shared, commented, liked or retweeted anything I had to say this year.

HESHERMAN.COM

January 25 Something Unpredictable With “American Idiot” in High School Theatre

This proved to be a two-part story, with a teacher claiming that the school had shut down his attempt to present the Green Day musical, which it had, only to ultimately find that the teacher had never secured the rights or any permission to make changes in the script that he had been trumpeting.

February 6 Is A Play of Plays Making Fair Use of Playwrights Words?

When a small performance in a Seattle bookstore, using only male dialogue from the ten most produced plays in the prior year, began to get cease and desist notices, I pondered the possibility that the collaged new script might fall under the fair use provisions of copyright law.

April 9 88 Years on 88 Keys: Tom Lehrer, The Salinger of the Satirical Song

The popularity of this post surprised me, but it also made me very happy. Apparently there’s so little written about the great Tom Lehrer that even my cursory overview proved to be catnip to his fans, and perhaps reached a few new converts as well.

July 8 Lin-Manuel Miranda: “Life’s A Gift, It’s Not To be Taken for Granted”

There’s no question about the appetite for all things Lin-Manuel and Hamilton, and traffic to this post came so fast that it shut down my site for a day and a half. He’s such a thoughtful guy, and what he had to say is so much more than simply fan service.

August 2 The Frightened Arrogance Behind “It’s Called Acting”

A challenge to those who push back against authenticity in casting when it comes to race and disability.

September 3 Wells Fargo To Arts Kids: Abandon Your Dreams

A foolish ad campaign caused no small amount of consternation in the arts community. But Well Fargo was in fact guilty of even more serious offenses in 2016.

September 8 When Deaf Voices Are Left Out Of “Tribes”

Another piece about authenticity in casting, about an Iowa production of Tribes that made no real effort to seek a deaf performer for the leading role.

October 13 In New Musical About Amputee, Faking Disability

In Canada, runner Terry Fox, a leg amputee, became a national hero before succumbing to cancer. So why on earth did a musical about him essential create a puppet leg, rather than find an actor who is an amputee?

November 9 A Post-Election Plea, To The Theatre and its Artists

When I began my commute the morning after the election, I had no intention to write anything, but over the course of one subway, this piece formed itself in my mind, and I wrote it in about an hour. I look at it now, and I don’t entirely recognize it as mine. It just poured out of me.

December 4 The Incredibly True Origins of Mike Hot-Pence, Times Square Icon

When I happened upon an activist using his looks to raise funds for progressive causes in Times Square, I caught lightning in a bottle, and over the course of the next two weeks, news of Mike Hot-Pence literally traveled around the world. This is the post, and the photo, that started it all.

ARTS INTEGRITY.ORG

March 9 A White Christmas (Eve) is Nothing to Celebrate on “Avenue Q”

The Character of Christmas Eve in the musical Avenue Q is specified as being from Japan. But while companies always manage to find a black actress for the role of Gary Coleman in the show, they seem to have no problem employing yellowface for Christmas Eve. This is but one example.

June 10 In Wake of Profiles Theatre Expose, A Few Points To Know

The Chicago Reader deserves enormous praise for their expose about a culture of harassment at the now defunct Profiles Theatre. Focus on the story was such that even my ancillary post, which primarily served to address the rights to their next planned production, proved of interest, and I kept updating as the situation played out to the end.

June 17 A Canadian High School Tries Too Hard to Get the Rights to “Hamilton”

A Canadian high school shouldn’t didn’t have the rights to give a performance that included six fully staged numbers from Hamilton, let along charge for it. But when they went after major media attention, and got it, their videos got shut down.

July 15 In A Maryland County, Taxing School Theatre In Pay To Play Plan

In Baltimore, a school board imposed a $100 per student fee to participate in school plays, even though the district doesn’t provide funding for the self-sustaining productions. I took an early look at the still evolving situation, and expect to return to it in 2017.

August 15 Quiara Alegría Hudes (and Lin-Manuel Miranda) on Casting “In The Heights”

In Chicago, a controversy over the casting of a non-Latinx actor as Usnavi in In The Heights. This post involves very little writing by me. It records for posterity a statement from bookwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes that was originally shared on Facebook by Victory Gardens Theatre artistic director Chay Yew, and because some questioned Lin-Manuel’s position, I confirmed that he was 100% with Quiara – not that I really had any doubts, but to silence those who did.

BONUS

Although it was published in early December of 2015, my conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda about race in the casting of both In The Heights and Hamilton continued to be widely read in 2016, so much so that had it been new, it would have ranked in this year’s Top 10 from hesherman.com – just as it was last year. It may well be evergreen, though I hope to revisit the subject with Lin once again, most likely in early 2018, after the London opening of Hamilton.

Photo of Lin-Manuel Miranda © 2016 Howard Sherman

To start at the end, or at least where we are today: Michele Roberge, executive director of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on the campus of California State University, has resigned, effective yesterday. Why? Because the school’s president, Jane Close Conoley, insisted upon the cancelation of Roberge’s booking of the comedy N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, a show that has toured extensively for more than a decade to performing arts centers on and off college campuses. In fact, it played to a sold out house of more than 1,000 seats last year at the Carpenter Center. When Conoley raised a red flag earlier this year, Roberge made it known that if Conoley forced the cancelation, she would resign on principle. And so when the axe fell, she did.

Like any show that has been touring for more than a decade, N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, which was written by Steven T. Seagle and Liesel Reinhart with the men who originally performed it, Rafael Agustin, Allan Axibal, and Miles Gregley (who are respectively black, Latinx and Asian) has a raft of reviews and feature stories available on their website attesting to the work’s broad appreciation. Despite its seemingly inflammatory title, Charles McNulty, reviewing it in 2007 for The Los Angeles Times, called it “wholesome entertainment,”  going on to write, “Yes, racial slurs and profanity can sometimes be good for you – especially when they’re deployed to make a point about the pervasiveness of prejudice and its denigrating unabridged dictionary.” Other coverage has included a feature in The New York Times and an extended interview with National Public Radio’s Michele Norris.

When N*W*C was planned for last year at the Carpenter Center, Conoley, responding to concerns expressed by Naomi Rainey, president of the local branch of the NAACP, defending the piece, writing:

It is my hope that this performance will elicit conversation about issues of race, prejudice and inequality that the NAACP works so hard to confront. As president, it is my goal to push the envelope on matters of race and prejudice to ensure The Beach remains a safe haven for freedom of expression on this vitally important topic.

So why can’t the production be seen again? In lieu of an interview request or the opportunity to respond to questions via e-mail, Conoley writes:

Last year I welcomed the same performance to the Carpenter Center. My thoughts then were that it would generate thought-provoking conversations about race relations. The university and ASI subsidized students so that many were able to attend for free.  I personally visited with many of our student cultural organizations to prepare them to use the performance as a prompt for meaningful discussions. Faculty members and student services staff members supported special activities before and after the performance.

Following the performance I evaluated whether or not it achieved that goal. Involved faculty and staff members and students shared feedback that the performance did not lead to the desired conversations.  They further expressed a desire to find another performance vehicle to generate deep and much needed discussions about race and ethnicity.

When approached again to support NWC as a centerpiece of campus conversations, I indicated that while the performance could certainly go on as planned, I would not replicate the campus support I’d made available last year and did not have faculty or staff interested in doing curriculum planning around the performance.

I did not intend my decision as a form of censorship. As an academic, my decision was based on my evaluation of the academic value of the performance for our students.  The Carpenter Center could have hosted the show without additional involvement from the University, but chose not to.

Conoley’s characterization of the Carpenter Center directly conflicts with Roberge’s telling. In a letter sent to donors and patrons of the Center, she wrote, “President Conoley required us to cancel our upcoming performance of N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk. I could not accept this egregious form of censorship.” According to Roberge, the instruction to cancel the show was delivered to her by the dean of the College of the Arts, Roberge’s direct supervisor, at Conoley’s direction.

In her resignation letter, dated late August, Roberge wrote to the dean of the College of the Arts, Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, saying:

The decision by President Conoley to cancel our upcoming performance of N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk runs counter to my steadfast belief in the protection of freedom for artists and my personal integrity as a performing arts presenter. This is an egregious act of censorship, especially ironic as it targets the home of The B-Word Project.

The B-Word Project: Banned ,Blacklisted and Boycotted, was a specially funded initiative held at the Carpenter Center in 2011-2012 focusing on censored works. It featured seminars and performances on the topic, and included the so-called “NEA Four” – Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller – whose 1990 grant applications for support from the National Endowment for the Arts were personally vetoed by NEA chairman John Frohnmeyer, contravening the NEA’s practice of peer review. It also included work from Bill T. Jones’s dance company. Roberge describes all of the work as “very sexual.”

Conoley was not president, or part of the CSULB community, during The B-Word Project. 

*   *   *

Regarding last year’s concerns about N*W*C from the NAACP, Roberge noted in an interview on Thursday that, “Nobody picketed. Nobody protested. In fact there was nary a peep from the NAACP when we announced this year’s show.”

Speaking about her original decision to present N*W*C said she conferred with the dean of the College of the Arts. “We wanted to spark conversations about race,” she says, “and it did that, beautifully.”

In the wake of the first presentation, Roberge says that there were some who didn’t believe the n-word should be heard on campus and didn’t feel it was the Carpenter Center’s place to open up a conversation about race. She notes “other racially charged incidents on campus which absolutely had nothing to do with the show,” and her belief that this heightened concerns regarding racial issues on campus. Referring to President Conoley, Roberge say, “I think those incidents frightened her.”

Roberge notes, “In conversation with the artists, we offered to postpone the show until after the election, and offer a lot of contextualizing educational activities – panel discussions with the ethnic chairs, films, lectures – so that interested students could attend those and have more of a context for how this show came about. But the president was not interested in that and said, ‘No, I don’t want the show.’”

Roberge says that over the summer, the dean of the College of the Arts was instructed by the president to speak with nine people, both on and off campus about N*W*C. “I was instructed not to speak with anyone about it,” she says. “The dean spoke with me about it and told me that all nine advised the president not to do the show. Nobody advocated for the show and they would not allow me to tell my side of the story and only one of them is nominally involved in the arts.”

Has Roberge ever been required to submit her programming for approval to anyone in the university administration? “The answer is no,” she says. “I was hired to curate the presented season at the Carpenter Center and oversee all of the rental activity as well. That being said, while I don’t have to get approval from anybody, every year when I have the season ready to go to our marketing director I schedule a meeting with the dean of the College of the Arts, who’s my boss, and I tell her about every show that I want to bring, so that she’s not surprised by anything. When we did N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk for the first time last year, I was very clear early in the process that this is what I wanted to do and she was 100% behind it.”

Asked whether there’s any policies regarding freedom of expression on campus, Roberge professed to know of none, adding, “There are no campus policies that limit freedom of expression.” She also references the presence of The Center for First Amendment Studies on the CSULB campus.

In a statement provided to the OC Weekly, Rafael Augustin of N*W*C, after expressing appreciation for Roberge’s efforts, wrote in part:

Please let it be known that we believe in the need for change as advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement and stand in solidarity with their commitment to achieving freedom and justice for all black lives.

We cannot ignore, however, that this occurrence also stands as critical juncture in the path of free speech on the campus of a public educational institution in perhaps our most liberal state. The same act of censorship that today may seem to protect a community may be used next time as justification to silence a community in desperate need of a voice.

*    *    *

Returning to President Conoley’s statement that she did not intend her decision as a form of censorship, but rather as a result of the academic value of the performance for students, it’s important to note that Roberge was not faculty, but staff. Her role was not primarily to program for academic purposes, but to find work that would appeal to the campus community and the Long Beach community at large. If academic import is the criteria, one wonders what the pedagogical rationale is for such presentations as Four by Four: A Tribute to The Beach Boys, The Four Seasons and The Bee Gees or illusionist Jason Bishop, both on the Carpenter Center schedule this year. Or what about This is Americana! Live Comedy Slide Show Performance Celebrating Classic and Kitschy American Life & Style! Rather, it seems that the academic reasoning is being deployed specifically to silence N*W*C.

It seems clear that N*W*C did provoke conversations about race, but those that affected its now-canceled return engagement were held behind closed doors, and while students were off-campus. Will the nine people consulted about N*W*C hold sway over other bookings at the Carpenter Center in the future? Will Conoley now decide to personally sign off on programming? Will a search for Roberge’s successor be hindered by what has taken place over this show, or will the choice be made in such a way to drive all programming to the middle of the road, rather than engaging in the kind of envelope-pushing Conoley professed to support in her letter to the NAACP last July?

Having refused interviews from every media outlet that has requested them, up to and including the Los Angeles Times, Conoley is walling herself off behind statements rather than engaging and explaining her rationale. We don’t even know whether she saw the show. She made a decision and while citing conversations but not sharing them in any detail, imposed it with little transparency, and sees little need to defend it further. As the final authority on that campus, she directed conversations about the work of the Carpenter Center to take place without the participation of the center’s director, and so far as anyone knows, she did not consult with cultural experts directly familiar with the production from off-campus or the many other universities where the show has played. Yes, campus conversations about race have evolved since the show was first produced, but was that the root of the problem?

As it stands, Conoley has lost a 14-year veteran of the university who stood up for her principles, while silencing perhaps the most provocative performance of the season, which happens to be a theatrical work by artists of color around issues of color. She has done so without a full explanation of her concerns and reasoning. She may not want to be seen as a censor, but it’s hard not to arrive at that conclusion.

To start at the end, or at least where we are today: Michele Roberge, executive director of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on the campus of California State University, has resigned, effective yesterday. Why? Because the school’s president, Jane Close Conoley, insisted upon the cancelation of Roberge’s booking of the comedy N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, a show that has toured extensively for more than a decade to performing arts centers on and off college campuses. In fact, it played to a sold out house of more than 1,000 seats last year at the Carpenter Center. When Conoley raised a red flag earlier this year, Roberge made it known that if Conoley forced the cancelation, she would resign on principle. And so when the axe fell, she did.

Like any show that has been touring for more than a decade, N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, which was written by Steven T. Seagle and Liesel Reinhart with the men who originally performed it, Rafael Agustin, Allan Axibal, and Miles Gregley (who are respectively black, Latinx and Asian) has a raft of reviews and feature stories available on their website attesting to the work’s broad appreciation. Despite its seemingly inflammatory title, Charles McNulty, reviewing it in 2007 for The Los Angeles Times, called it “wholesome entertainment,”  going on to write, “Yes, racial slurs and profanity can sometimes be good for you – especially when they’re deployed to make a point about the pervasiveness of prejudice and its denigrating unabridged dictionary.” Other coverage has included a feature in The New York Times and an extended interview with National Public Radio’s Michele Norris.

When N*W*C was planned for last year at the Carpenter Center, Conoley, responding to concerns expressed by Naomi Rainey, president of the local branch of the NAACP, defending the piece, writing:

It is my hope that this performance will elicit conversation about issues of race, prejudice and inequality that the NAACP works so hard to confront. As president, it is my goal to push the envelope on matters of race and prejudice to ensure The Beach remains a safe haven for freedom of expression on this vitally important topic.

So why can’t the production be seen again? In lieu of an interview request or the opportunity to respond to questions via e-mail, Conoley writes:

Last year I welcomed the same performance to the Carpenter Center. My thoughts then were that it would generate thought-provoking conversations about race relations. The university and ASI subsidized students so that many were able to attend for free.  I personally visited with many of our student cultural organizations to prepare them to use the performance as a prompt for meaningful discussions. Faculty members and student services staff members supported special activities before and after the performance.

Following the performance I evaluated whether or not it achieved that goal. Involved faculty and staff members and students shared feedback that the performance did not lead to the desired conversations.  They further expressed a desire to find another performance vehicle to generate deep and much needed discussions about race and ethnicity.

When approached again to support NWC as a centerpiece of campus conversations, I indicated that while the performance could certainly go on as planned, I would not replicate the campus support I’d made available last year and did not have faculty or staff interested in doing curriculum planning around the performance.

I did not intend my decision as a form of censorship. As an academic, my decision was based on my evaluation of the academic value of the performance for our students.  The Carpenter Center could have hosted the show without additional involvement from the University, but chose not to.

Conoley’s characterization of the Carpenter Center directly conflicts with Roberge’s telling. In a letter sent to donors and patrons of the Center, she wrote, “President Conoley required us to cancel our upcoming performance of N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk. I could not accept this egregious form of censorship.” According to Roberge, the instruction to cancel the show was delivered to her by the dean of the College of the Arts, Roberge’s direct supervisor, at Conoley’s direction.

In her resignation letter, dated late August, Roberge wrote to the dean of the College of the Arts, Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, saying:

The decision by President Conoley to cancel our upcoming performance of N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk runs counter to my steadfast belief in the protection of freedom for artists and my personal integrity as a performing arts presenter. This is an egregious act of censorship, especially ironic as it targets the home of The B-Word Project.

The B-Word Project: Banned ,Blacklisted and Boycotted, was a specially funded initiative held at the Carpenter Center in 2011-2012 focusing on censored works. It featured seminars and performances on the topic, and included the so-called “NEA Four” – Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller – whose 1990 grant applications for support from the National Endowment for the Arts were personally vetoed by NEA chairman John Frohnmeyer, contravening the NEA’s practice of peer review. It also included work from Bill T. Jones’s dance company. Roberge describes all of the work as “very sexual.”

Conoley was not president, or part of the CSULB community, during The B-Word Project. 

*   *   *

Regarding last year’s concerns about N*W*C from the NAACP, Roberge noted in an interview on Thursday that, “Nobody picketed. Nobody protested. In fact there was nary a peep from the NAACP when we announced this year’s show.”

Speaking about her original decision to present N*W*C said she conferred with the dean of the College of the Arts. “We wanted to spark conversations about race,” she says, “and it did that, beautifully.”

In the wake of the first presentation, Roberge says that there were some who didn’t believe the n-word should be heard on campus and didn’t feel it was the Carpenter Center’s place to open up a conversation about race. She notes “other racially charged incidents on campus which absolutely had nothing to do with the show,” and her belief that this heightened concerns regarding racial issues on campus. Referring to President Conoley, Roberge say, “I think those incidents frightened her.”

Roberge notes, “In conversation with the artists, we offered to postpone the show until after the election, and offer a lot of contextualizing educational activities – panel discussions with the ethnic chairs, films, lectures – so that interested students could attend those and have more of a context for how this show came about. But the president was not interested in that and said, ‘No, I don’t want the show.’”

Roberge says that over the summer, the dean of the College of the Arts was instructed by the president to speak with nine people, both on and off campus about N*W*C. “I was instructed not to speak with anyone about it,” she says. “The dean spoke with me about it and told me that all nine advised the president not to do the show. Nobody advocated for the show and they would not allow me to tell my side of the story and only one of them is nominally involved in the arts.”

Has Roberge ever been required to submit her programming for approval to anyone in the university administration? “The answer is no,” she says. “I was hired to curate the presented season at the Carpenter Center and oversee all of the rental activity as well. That being said, while I don’t have to get approval from anybody, every year when I have the season ready to go to our marketing director I schedule a meeting with the dean of the College of the Arts, who’s my boss, and I tell her about every show that I want to bring, so that she’s not surprised by anything. When we did N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk for the first time last year, I was very clear early in the process that this is what I wanted to do and she was 100% behind it.”

Asked whether there’s any policies regarding freedom of expression on campus, Roberge professed to know of none, adding, “There are no campus policies that limit freedom of expression.” She also references the presence of The Center for First Amendment Studies on the CSULB campus.

In a statement provided to the OC Weekly, Rafael Augustin of N*W*C, after expressing appreciation for Roberge’s efforts, wrote in part:

Please let it be known that we believe in the need for change as advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement and stand in solidarity with their commitment to achieving freedom and justice for all black lives.

We cannot ignore, however, that this occurrence also stands as critical juncture in the path of free speech on the campus of a public educational institution in perhaps our most liberal state. The same act of censorship that today may seem to protect a community may be used next time as justification to silence a community in desperate need of a voice.

*    *    *

Returning to President Conoley’s statement that she did not intend her decision as a form of censorship, but rather as a result of the academic value of the performance for students, it’s important to note that Roberge was not faculty, but staff. Her role was not primarily to program for academic purposes, but to find work that would appeal to the campus community and the Long Beach community at large. If academic import is the criteria, one wonders what the pedagogical rationale is for such presentations as Four by Four: A Tribute to The Beach Boys, The Four Seasons and The Bee Gees or illusionist Jason Bishop, both on the Carpenter Center schedule this year. Or what about This is Americana! Live Comedy Slide Show Performance Celebrating Classic and Kitschy American Life & Style! Rather, it seems that the academic reasoning is being deployed specifically to silence N*W*C.

It seems clear that N*W*C did provoke conversations about race, but those that affected its now-canceled return engagement were held behind closed doors, and while students were off-campus. Will the nine people consulted about N*W*C hold sway over other bookings at the Carpenter Center in the future? Will Conoley now decide to personally sign off on programming? Will a search for Roberge’s successor be hindered by what has taken place over this show, or will the choice be made in such a way to drive all programming to the middle of the road, rather than engaging in the kind of envelope-pushing Conoley professed to support in her letter to the NAACP last July?

Having refused interviews from every media outlet that has requested them, up to and including the Los Angeles Times, Conoley is walling herself off behind statements rather than engaging and explaining her rationale. We don’t even know whether she saw the show. She made a decision and while citing conversations but not sharing them in any detail, imposed it with little transparency, and sees little need to defend it further. As the final authority on that campus, she directed conversations about the work of the Carpenter Center to take place without the participation of the center’s director, and so far as anyone knows, she did not consult with cultural experts directly familiar with the production from off-campus or the many other universities where the show has played. Yes, campus conversations about race have evolved since the show was first produced, but was that the root of the problem?

As it stands, Conoley has lost a 14-year veteran of the university who stood up for her principles, while silencing perhaps the most provocative performance of the season, which happens to be a theatrical work by artists of color around issues of color. She has done so without a full explanation of her concerns and reasoning. She may not want to be seen as a censor, but it’s hard not to arrive at that conclusion.

Margaret Hughes

It is quite possible that, when the English stage was officially opened up to allow women to perform alongside men, most likely in 1660 when Margaret Hughes played Desdemona, some argued against it, on the grounds that young boys had been successfully been playing women for years, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. After all, only 30 years earlier, a French touring troupe met with disdain for daring to employ women, and even once English women were permitted to act, men did not immediately cease playing women’s roles.

Ira Aldridge

When Ira Aldridge became the first black actor to find fame on the stages of Europe, having left America, which offered him no opportunity, there were at first people who took exception to the breaking of the color line, feeling that blackface had been more than sufficient for the portrayal of non-white characters and that a black man speaking the words of Shakespeare was “blasphemous.” One critic wrote that “with lips so shaped that it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English,” while another objected to his leading lady being “pawed about on the stage by a black man.”

Phyllis Frelich

After Phyllis Frelich won a Tony Award in 1979 for Children of a Lesser God, might some have dismissed her honor as resulting from a sympathy vote because she was a deaf woman playing a deaf woman, or that her achievement was somehow less simply because she used sign language, which was how she communicated every day? After all, one critic, praising Frelich, took note of her “affiliction.”

Invented scenarios? Only in part. And certainly none are implausible, at distances of hundreds of years or just a few decades. They are, after all, representations of the breaking of a status quo, the altering of a dominant narrative, and the much too easy ways of diminishing significant achievements at the time that they happened.

The stage remains a place where certain practices, steeped in tradition, persist. Despite being seen by many as a bastion of liberals and progressives, the arts are dominated by white Eurocentric men, whether it comes to the stories being told or the people placed in the positions of authority who are charged with making work happen. While the not-for-profit arts community has begun in recent years to explore equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives designed to give voice to a broader range of gender, race, ethnicity and disability, the field is still dominated by white structures and white professionals “opening doors” to other stories.

That’s not to be dismissive of those efforts, but only a means of contextualizing them and reflecting how nascent they still are in so many places. Let’s not forget, it was only in 2015 that the Metropolitan Opera dropped using blackface on the actor playing the title role in Otello, an original Broadway musical featured an all-Asian cast, an actor with a mobility disability in life originated a role in a Broadway production using a wheelchair. How was it possible that this hadn’t happened sooner?

The changes on our stages, the efforts to assert of a broad range of identity where it was previously denied, is reflective of society as a whole. While it has been 51 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and 26 years since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, there are still legal battles being fought to insure and protect their full and proper implementation. However, in the past decade, with the rise of social media, advocates for change have had the opportunity to make their cases ever more swiftly and directly, without adjudication by the media as to what concerns will be permitted to reach a critical mass of awareness, with people driving the story, not the story driving the people.

As efforts towards fairer and truer representations of racial and ethnic identity in theatre have resulted in particular shows becoming flashpoints – with The Mikado in Seattle and New York, with The Mountaintop at Kent State, with Evita and In The Heights in Chicago, The Prince of Egypt in the Hamptons and so many more – one of the more frequent and derisive responses has been, “It’s called acting.” That is to say, ‘Oh, it’s all make believe,’ all little more than ‘let’s pretend,’ and as such shouldn’t be held to the same scrutiny or standard as say, the make-up of juries or the population of schools. It says that since the discipline is about taking on a persona, the reality of the person doing so shouldn’t be considered, shouldn’t matter. The phrase condescends to anyone who dares think otherwise.

Those who would reduce efforts toward equity in the arts might wish to isolate them as being the result of identity politics or political correctness. The “it’s called acting” claim is, make no mistake about it, an argument for the status quo, for tradition, for the denial of opportunity, for erasing race. It expresses the thinking that gives awards to people who pretend to be disabled on stage and screen, while making it difficult for people with disabilities to attend cultural events, let alone be a participant in creating them. It is the mentality that loves West Side Story, but cries foul when songs sung by characters who speak Spanish are translated into and performed in Spanish.

“It’s called acting” is the response of those who perceive their long-held dominance, their tradition, as threatened, their own position as being at risk. “It’s called acting” sustains systemic exclusion. After all, as the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality looks like oppression.” Privilege abounds in the arts, on stage, backstage and in the seats.

If we lived in a society, a country, where everyone was indeed equal in opportunity, then the arguments for paying heed to the realities of race, ethnicity, gender and disability might be concerns that could be set aside. But that’s far from the case, and if the arts are to be anything more than a palliative, they must think not just of artifice, but also about the authenticity and context of what they offer to audiences.

For the arts to survive, they must move forward, lest they become antiquated. In a society where the balance of ethnicity and race is shifting, it is incumbent upon the arts to at last fully welcome and support all voices and allow them to portray and tell their stories as well as the stories of others, instead of being forced to assimilate into some arbitrarily evolved template. There should to be an acknowledgment of how the lived experience can contribute to the arts, rather than denying its presence or validity, along the lines of the canard, “I don’t see color.”

There is no absolute in the arts, no definitive good or bad, right or wrong. The act of creation and the response to that act exist simultaneously in the eye of the creator and beholder (the audience). Consequently, the arts give rise to phalanxes of arbiters at almost every level – teachers, directors and artistic directors, and critics – who seek to guide and even control training, practice and opinion, each in their own way. When those arbiters have disproportionate influence, or in fact become gatekeepers, they assume a greater responsibility, one that goes beyond themselves into the field as a whole. How they are empowered, what they believe, becomes essential to sustaining – or diminishing – the arts.

When it comes to respect and recognition, diversity and inclusion, there is a new arts narrative being written right now. Within that process there are progressives making change, late adopters who are coming to understand, and reactionaries who want to hold on to the past. If we believe that art has value, so do the ethics and process of making it. Being unaware, or worse still, dismissive of how the arts are changing and how the arts reflect society, would keep the field trapped at a moment in time, one already mired in the past, as the world advances. That’s the road to irrelevance, which the arts cannot afford.

Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

In an era of constrained school budgets, it is not all that unusual – albeit quite problematic in terms of diversity and equity – to find schools charging students and their parents “activity fees” to offset certain expenses, particularly in extracurricular pursuits, notably athletics. When the Board of Education of the Harford County Public Schools in Maryland voted on June 13 to impose a $100 per student activity fee on extracurricular drama programs in area high schools, and raised the fee charged to sports participants to the same rate (having previously been $50), it wasn’t, at a glance, necessarily seen as a targeted attack on the arts. But there’s much more to it, based on statements made by the school board subsequent to both to this decision and a vocal but failed appeal from drama participants and supporters made at the next school board meeting.

“Titanic” at Bel Air High School (Photo by Chuck Bowden)

According to several members of the community apprised of the plan, which has not yet been formally issued, at Harford schools, students will be charged the fee if they want to perform – offstage participants are exempted, creating two classes of theatre kids. Students will be charged the fee per show, so if they appear in a play in the fall and a musical in the spring, for example, it will cost their parents $200. [see update below]

Unlike sports, the school system has only token funding for extracurricular drama – the programs are all largely self-supporting. So young performers are being taxed a regressive tax if they want even a moment under theatrical lighting in front of an audience, and the money generated goes not so much to defray the cost of productions, but rather to shore up a hole in the Harford budget. Interscholastic sports, on the other hand, have a $2.9 million allocation in the county’s school budget. Indeed, the motion and vote to levy a fee on drama came at the end of a board meeting where county swim teams and their supporters successfully lobbied to save their pursuit in Harford Public Schools.

Why target student performers to raise an estimated $50,000? That’s hard to say, because neither local news reports nor direct inquiry by Arts Integrity has yielded any significant explanation from the people who imposed the fee. An e-mail with questions about the decision, e-mailed to Barbara P. Canavan, superintendent of schools, yielded a reply from Jillian V. Lader, manager of communications for the school system, stating, “The decision to require a participation fee from students involved in the extracurricular drama program was made by the Board of Education of Harford County on Monday, May [sic] 13, 2016.” Ms. Lader then directed Arts Integrity to communicate with the board via a contact form on the district’s website, to which there has been no reply after more than a week. Worth noting: Barbara Canavan is not only the superintendent of schools, but also the secretary/treasurer of the board, and as such was certainly party to the decision process regarding drama. Direct e-mails to several of the board members also received no reply.

Students protest before June 27 board of education meeting (screen capture from ABC2 report)

While the school system was keeping fairly mum about the decision, their actions spurred others to become vocal. Ryan Nicotra, who works at Baltimore’s Single Carrot Theatre, attended Bel Air High School in Harford County and lived in the area for, as he put it, “25 of my 26 years,” has organized the unincorporated Harford County Arts & Culture Alliance in the wake of the board’s initial decision on June 13. Working with students, parents and other advocates, Nicotra mobilized some 250 supporters to attend the June 27 board meeting to advocate against the new fee. According to a report in The Baltimore Sun, “More than 50 Harford County students, parents, teachers, alumni, even school board members, pleaded with the Board of Education Monday to rescind a $100 fee to participate in high school drama programs, but their efforts could not sway board members.”

Later in the article, The Sun reported, “[Board Vice President] Voskuhl, a former Bel Air High principal, stressed HCPS is not alone among school systems in the U.S. for charging student participation fees. At the previous board meeting on June 13, he made the motion to double the sports activity fee and to re-establish the drama fee, which along with other non-sports activity fees approved in 2013 were rescinded by the previous board.” So it appears these fees come and go depending upon who is elected.

Describing a bit of the conversation at the June 27 meeting, Juniper Ernest, a member of the parents’ association for the Bel Air High School drama group and parent of a rising junior and rising freshman at the school, wrote:

“Several of the board members spoke to say that they agreed that the original proposal was in fact a poor and inequitable decision. That it will prove detrimental to students and that they need to provide more opportunities for kids to get involved instead of putting up barriers. One of the board members seemed especially moved hearing from students who expressed what being in a drama company means to them and the impact it has had upon their lives. This board member stated that we can’t keep punishing kids with fees because of our budget deficit.”

“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” at Fallston High School

Nicotra is undeterred by the results of the June 27 meeting. He outlined plans being undertaken by his coalition of students, parents and community members, saying, “In the past two or three weeks, I’ve probably made well over 100 phone calls and probably bought 40 cups of coffee. I have been trying to talk to as many parents and teachers as I can, but also partners at the state and national level, people that work with the state department of education, talking with people who have been on the board before and had some valuable insights into the best approach.”

“From a legal standpoint,” Nicotra continued, “we have a small legal team that’s working on a formal appeal to the state board of education, which is qualified and able to overturn a decision made by a local school board if it is either illegal, arbitrary or capricious. We feel that the manner in which the motion was made, passed and upheld indicates that it was an arbitrary decision. It’s murky whether it was also capricious. It’s not illegal; these fees exist here and elsewhere. But that it would be introduced without public comment, or input or even any sort of justification for budget projections indicates that it was put together very quickly.

“We’re also working to see whether this is worthwhile to pursue an equity suit against Harford County board of education because specifically in Harford County there is a huge poverty correlation with race. The schools in Harford County that would be most directly impacted by this and most hurt would be schools that also have disproportionately high minority rates and minority students.”

Also vigorously advocating against the fee is Bel Air High School student Olivia Bowley, a rising junior. In addition to being one of the more than four dozen people who spoke at the June 27 board of education meeting, she wrote an open letter about the situation to Broadway World, which published it on July 5, in which she expressed her concerns over the new policy.

In correspondence with Arts Integrity, Bowley wrote:

“They are estimating $50,000 revenue from pay to play fees from drama. But to be completely honest, that estimate seems unrealistic. There are 10 drama companies in the county. The Bel Air Drama Company, to which I belong, is the most robust of all of them. Our company averages about 100 kids for the year. Many of the other drama companies are still in their infancy or in a rebuilding state, with very little student involvement.

“What is completely frustrating to us is that we are the only ‘club’ being assessed a fee.  There are dozens of clubs in our high school and drama was singled out as the only one to be lumped in with the sports in the ‘pay to play’ fee.”

Regarding specific costs to the schools for drama, Bowley explained:

“I can only speak to our school – Bel Air Drama Company, until recently was self-funded – we would put on productions with the cost of the ticket sales. The only cost the school would incur – outside of the stipend to pay the drama directors (which I believe is $ 2,400 annually, split between two people) would be any associated HVAC costs, etc. for production weeks.

“That being said, for the first time in 2017, the drama company ticket money raised will go to the school and not the drama company.  Previously, the drama company kept those funds and used the proceeds to absorb the costs of the putting on the productions — set, lights, costumes, etc.  For 2017 and going forward, the school will retain the money and will reimburse the drama company for appropriate expenditures associated with putting on a production.  I can tell you that our drama company charges $10-12 per ticket per production.”

While teachers are often precluded from, or cautious about, speaking against student policy, Robert Tucker, the drama teacher and advisor of extracurricular drama programs at Edgewood High School wrote directly to the school board following the initial passage of the fee. His letter read, in part:

“The benefit of the extracurricular drama activities are numerous and varied. Students involved in the arts regularly exhibit higher order thinking skills. The drama programs challenge students to practically apply every subject they student. Mathematics are applied through designing circuits for lighting plots, or designing a sturdy base for a set element. English is utilized when carrying a scene, history for dramaturgy, even FACS are utilized for the creation of costumes.

“I am very concerned about this proposal for several reasons. Chief among them in equity. Along with Aberdeen, Havre de Grace and Joppatowne, this school serves a population with a lower average income and socioeconomic power. This policy would disproportionately affect the schools with the Rt. 40 corridor, and prohibit those programs where they are needed most. Simply, this punishes those who may be too poor to pay $100.”

While the board of education has not officially issued details of their plan, The Sun has noted that with preexisting fees, students who qualify for free student lunches don’t have to pay activity fees. The net result was an increase in the number of high school students applying for free and lower priced lunches. Inevitably, students who don’t quite qualify get caught in between by both lunch costs and the activity fees.

In an e-mail to Arts Integrity, Tucker described the $100 fee as “staggeringly prohibitive.” He asserted, ”There is evidence that pay to play programs stifle participation in extracurricular activities, especially among the economically disadvantaged.”

“Letters From Sala” at Edgewood High School (Photo by Deborah Johnson)

Tucker also wrote, “Placing a barrier on participation in extracurricular activities puts students in danger. These groups were the original GSA/LGBTA groups for many students my age and older, providing a safe place for people to identify as themselves. Drama clubs still do this in ways other groups do not.”

Advocacy efforts as described by Nictora are still, in many ways, at their earliest stage. But in addition to what he outlines, a petition seeking to have the activity fee for drama reduced or eliminated was started on Change.org, originated by Taylor Casalena, who just graduated from Harford Technical High School. While it began before the June 27 meeting, it remains active for those who want to express their support for Harford drama and to speak against the activity fee.

Juniper Ernest spoke of both the concerns and the resolve that she sees in the community:

“I am thankful that our family will be able to provide our kids with the fee required so that they can participate. We do know many families at Bel Air and other schools, however, who will not be able to participate if the fees remain. That has caused my daughter and I to take action and speak up. We are advocating on behalf  of other students. We believe that the stage should be accessible to ALL kids, not just those who can afford it. We are so disheartened that our Board of Education thinks it is acceptable to put barriers in the way that would prevent kids from participating in something so vital and worthwhile. We feel very passionately that the arts are something that should be supported and celebrated in our schools and we will not stand idly by while our school system makes cuts to arts programs and discourages kids from experiencing the arts by imposing fees to participate.”

On Wednesday, July 13, Harford Property Services, a business in Havre de Grace, announced that it would cover the activity fees for all students participating in the drama program at Havre de Grace High School, a significant commitment considering that the board of education hasn’t fully detailed how the fees would be levied. In a statement provided to The Baltimore Sun, HPS president J.D. Russell said, “Our students and their families should not be burdened with fees in order to gain the benefit of participating in extra-curricular activities. For many families with two or more school-age children, each participating in multiple programs through the school year, the financial weight is too heavy.” HPS is to be applauded, however there are nine other high schools in the district.

Fundamental questions for the Harford Public Schools board of education remain. How did they decide to levy this tax on drama performers only, leaving other arts programs or for that matter any school activities others than drama and sports untouched? Was there proper notice given of the intent to introduce this fee, to allow for community input, or was it an improperly introduced spur of the moment decision to plug a hole in the school budget? Is it the school board’s intent to progressively add other activities to the roster of those paying fees, transferring school expenses directly to parents of the students who are participating or requiring them to raise money on their own to maintain equity for all students? Since this decision originally came in a meeting that lasted until 12:30 am, and where the subject wasn’t on the agenda, the board of education can’t claim transparency. Since no impact study was provided, the board can’t claim any foundation for how this will affect drama in the region’s ten high schools.

They’re not the first governing body with educational oversight to do so, but the Harford Public Schools board is teaching terrible lessons to their students and their community. They’re suggesting that budgetary expedience takes precedence over informed decision and due process. They’re passing the buck arbitrarily, ignoring the multi-faceted value of drama as an educational tool, even if it is classed as an extracurricular activity. It seems as if they just wanted to go home one night after a long meeting, and they decided to stick it to the kids who they assume will pay anything to be on stage. After backtracking on their plans for the swim team, they’re now holding fast when it comes to drama.

Fortunately, the show’s not over – in fact, it may still be in the first act of several more to come. If Nicotra, Bowley, Tucker, Ernest and their many allies in Harford County – and beyond – succeed, the school board may yet realize what a short-sighted, anti-arts, anti-education measure they adopted. Ultimately, members who imposed this tax will have to answer for their decision, if not now, then in two years, when it’s time for the next school board elections, and when many of the kids affected by this action will be eligible to vote. They’ll likely want to vote in people who don’t treat any of the arts as a cash cow to milk for money to pay for other shortfalls and, who don’t channel some questionable vaudeville promoters of old, acting like they want their budgetary palms greased before they’ll let any act on stage.

Note: some of the photos accompanying this article were discovered through public sources, but did not all appear with credits for the performers or photographers. They will be immediately updated, or withdrawn if need be, upon request.

Update, October 11, 2016: Following a visit to Harford County yesterday, Arts Integrity learned that the pay-to-play fee is per student per year, not per production, as previously stated. However, the policy, which can be found here, caps fee for student involved in sports at only two years; no such cap is in place for drama.