“I hope that The Vagina Monologues is a point of departure – it’s not a panacea, it’s not the only play, it’s not the definitive play. It’s a play, it’s an offering.”

Those are the words of Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, spoken in the wake of the controversy that has arisen over the decision by the campus theatre group at Mount Holyoke College to abandon its annual production of The Vagina Monologues in favor of a newly written student work that is, in their judgment, more inclusive of a wider range of women’s experiences than Ensler’s influential work from 1996.

In a story first reported by CampusReform.org, writer Yvonne Dean-Bailey quoted from a campus-wide e-mail by Erin Murphy, representing Project Theatre on the school campus, regarding their decision.

At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman…Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive.

As the story broke wide, many seized upon the school’s recent decision to begin accepting students who identify as women as being at the root of the decision by the theatre group. Some commenters to the spate of articles, all derived from the Campus Reform story, spoke of censorship. Mount Holyoke, in a statement, responded, saying in part:

A story/post in the online publication Campus Reform included inaccurate and incomplete information regarding the student-led decision to cancel a student-run production of the “Vagina Monologues” at Mount Holyoke College. The story also incorrectly connects the play’s cancellation with the College’s transgender admission policy.

The Mount Holyoke College student organization Project: Theatre notified the student body on Jan. 14 of its decision to cancel the play “Vagina Monologues” after evaluating input from peers about the production.

The students’ decision to cancel the play was made independently of the College’s transgender admission policy.

As a women’s college with a long tradition of educating women leaders, Mount Holyoke College supports and encourages students to take the lead in establishing and governing their own organizations.

In the initial rush of stories, no one spoke with Ensler about her work and the decision by the Mount Holyoke drama group. A story published last night by The Guardian was the first to reach Ensler, and also included a bit more from Murphy, although she did not agree to release to full text of her original e-mail to them. Because I have known Ensler casually for several years, I wanted to hear more from her, and we spoke this morning. I also tried to reach Erin Murphy at Mount Holyoke (using the student activity contact form on the college’s website as well as LinkedIn), but without success. Some articles have reported on various tweets coming from other students on the campus who oppose the decision to no longer produce the play, but I have opted to not cull from Twitter searching.

Playing off the title of her newest play, I asked Ensler whether the decision by the Mount Holyoke students was a case of O.P.C. – Obsessive Political Correctness.

“I think there’s so many issues running through all this,” said Ensler. “I don’t want to label it as such because there are genuine concerns that people are having that I want to be very thoughtful about.

Eve Ensler (Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

“This is my perspective on it: The Vagina Monologues is a play. It’s one play. It was never meant to speak for all women and it was never a play about what it means to be a woman. It was a play about what it means to have a vagina. It was very specific. I don’t think I ever said that the definition of a woman – that a woman is defined by having a vagina. I think we have to be able to live in a world where talking about our vaginas is legitimate, due to the fact that three and half billion women have them.

“I wish the play was irrelevant. I wish we had reached a state where women are liberated and safe and not under this kind of ongoing oppression of violence and degradation and inequality. But that hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think we’re close.

“I think that it’s also really important that trans and transgender people have voice and have access to voice and have plays and ways of articulating their concerns and their issues. Ten years ago there was an all trans production of The Vagina Monologues and I spent quite a bit of time with trans women and we actually went away for a weekend and we shared stories and experiences and as a result they asked me to write a piece for them called ‘They Beat The Girl Out Of My Boy’ which I did and which has been an optional monologue. It was included in the V-Day performances of The Vagina Monologues for the last 10 years and trans women and trans men have been performing The Vagina Monologues for 10 years. So I feel like there has been inclusion.”

My own reaction when I read about the situation at Mount Holyoke was that the students had every right to make any decision they wished about what to produce, but that perhaps they hadn’t needed to be so negative about Ensler’s work, instead simply moving on to the new work they plan to create. Ensler’s response to how it was handled?

“I believe it’s Ken Wilber, in this wonderful book called Up From Eden, who says this really, really brilliant thing. He says that every time we evolve in our brain, our human consciousness, to the next level, we make a terrible error of not integrating the stage before, so that our evolution, our brains do not become wholly integrated.

“My feeling is that there have been many places in the world who have been doing The Vagina Monologues for years who then felt there are other voices we want to give voice to. There are other stories we want to give voice to and they took the momentum of The Vagina Monologues and the experience of that and that spurred them to create their own pieces. But they didn’t feel the need to annihilate The Vagina Monologues in the process.

“I think I have to say that we have to live in a climate and in a world where women with vaginas feel safe and free and open about articulating the stories about their vaginas. That has to remain a possibility and something that we cherish and celebrate in the same way that I would honor transgender people giving voice to their own realities. I think there’s something about the ‘either or-ness’ about it that I find problematic.”

Later in our conversation, Ensler observed, “I think we have to be careful as we’re evolving and exploding more and more voices that we don’t silence other voices. That’s the thing we always have to be very concerned about and having our attention paid to. It isn’t one thing or the other. We’ve come to the point where we want to now integrate and want other voices. That is fantastic. Go and write a play that does that. Celebrate that. I encourage that. I’ve been celebrating artists my whole life who are giving voice to new strains and pushing the edge and challenging the givens and the status quo.”

*  *  *

For perspective on perceptions of The Vagina Monologues, I asked Jill S. Dolan, Annan Professor in English, Professor of English and Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and Director, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University, for her thoughts.

“First, let me say I admire the cultural work Ensler’s play did,” Dolan wrote to me.  “When it was first performed, seeing this white woman, barefoot on a stool in a pool of light, wearing a long dress, sitting in front of a microphone, talking about vaginas in such an explicit way, felt very radical.  Not so much because what she was saying was radical, especially not to those of us who came of age with feminism, and were accustomed to a kind of frankness about women’s bodies, but because she was telling these stories Off Broadway, in a theatre venue where these stories hadn’t been told.  When the show took hold, and performances expanded to include other women, the same fascination (and, let’s be frank, titillation) continued to make it popular.  It’s still performed in regional theatres all over the country (and probably, the world).

“I much admired Ensler’s industry in making the show the center of V-Day activism. She did a lot to raise awareness on campuses about violence against women, and the play became the center of an activist project that was easy for students to latch on to, because it came pre-packaged. Ensler licenses the play with very specific rules about how it’s to be performed and who its local activist collaborators should be. I think this is where the tensions began around the play and the production—Ensler’s control came to be seen as too constraining.

“But in my own critical reading, The Vagina Monologues were always only partial. Ensler’s play represents her work interviewing women around the world about their lives and their relationships to their bodies via social interdictions, but the monologues aren’t verbatim (Anna Deavere Smith-style), nor are they ethnographic to the extent that she uses the interviews in edited form. Ensler says the monologues are ‘based on’ her interviews, but she filters them through her own perspective as a white Western woman.  That’s where much of the criticism lies; that the whole show is, in a way, a white Western woman’s perspective on female experience.  She’s been criticized for being imperialist; for being a western feminist who presumes to ‘save’ women of other cultures and experiences; and for being tone-deaf to cultural difference and women’s agency.”

I asked Dolan whether The Vagina Monologues might be losing relevancy because it doesn’t represent enough different constituencies.

“The issue about trans inclusion is really just the latest salvo here. Because Ensler is very particular about how The Vagina Monologues are staged and produced, I know of many colleges and universities that simply bootleg the show and rewrite it as they see fit. The best thing about The Vagina Monologues phenomenon, from my perspective, is that it’s clarified the importance of telling women’s stories, or telling stories of those who aren’t part of the ‘mainstream’ on particular college campuses. That people gather annually to participate in or to hear these stories has made it an important rite of passage for many students.  I know of students who were absolutely radicalized by participating in The Vagina Monologues production on campus (or by doing their own version). That’s hugely important activist theatre work.

“That said, I think students are realizing that the occasion of the show might actually give them permission to tell their own stories, or to seek out other ways of putting together activist performance work. And that’s a very good thing.  Is it a period piece?  Well, most plays are . . . and Ensler has tried to revitalize the show by adding new monologues every year.  That said, I do think The Vagina Monologues movement might have crested, partly because the play is showing its age. It’s just not as radical anymore to stand in public and talk about vaginas . . .  That’s what’s changed.”

*   *   *

Ensler has written an essay for Time magazine, coming out Monday, on the decision by the Mount Holyoke students, and she raised it in our conversation as we discussed the issue of representing more constituencies.

“I’ll share with you something that I wrote in the Time piece, because I think it’s connected to this: ‘Inclusion doesn’t come from refusing to acknowledge our distinctive experiences and trying to erase them in an attempt to pretend they do not exist. Inclusion comes listening to our differences and honoring the right of everyone to talk about their reality free from oppressing, bigotry and silencing. That’s real inclusion’. I think we have to create a world, where people with vaginas and people without them who identify as women, all of us get to address our oppressions, dreams, desires, and secrets and that we keep creating a landscape where there’s room for everyone.

So, I wondered, is Ensler concerned about the play’s perception today and future popularity, as highlighted by the decision of the Mount Holyoke Project Theatre?

“First of all, I think that looking at the dialogue that’s going on, I don’t really think that’s happening. There are 715 productions of The Vagina Monologues that are about to happen right now around the world and there are every year. My feeling is if it’s time for a new play or new plays to come into being that have new voices, that should happen. I don’t feel like anybody has to do my play. It’s great if they want to do it and it’s great if they don’t. It’s been 20 years.

“But I also want to say that I do think that women talking about their vaginas and articulating what happens to and about and around their vaginas is something that’s going to remain important to women. And if that changes, it will change. I actually think that the dialogue that’s being generated around this is good. We have to keep looking at everything and examining everything. I wrote that play 20 years ago. The world was a very different world then. Now people write plays that reflect this world.

I asked Ensler whether, if invited, she would attend the new piece being created by the Mount Holyoke students.

“Of course I would,” she replied, “and I would totally celebrate the new work.”

This post was updated on January 19 to include a link to Eve Ensler’s essay for Time magazine.

Ari Roth

I have never attended Theater J in Washington DC. I have become increasingly aware of its work as controversy over that work has risen in recent years, while at the same time I have become aware of the high regard in which the company and its longtime artistic director, Ari Roth, are held by many theatre professionals I admire and call my friends. That Roth was fired this week after nearly two decades is simultaneously shocking and wholly unsurprising, as the theatre seems to have been on a collision course with the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, of which Theater J is a resident program (as opposed to a tenant), for some time over work that some in the Jewish community perceived as anti-Israel and therefore not deserving of a place in a JCC.

I cannot judge the work itself, because I have neither seen nor read it. I cannot be seen as impartial, at least by some, because I am a theatre professional who regularly speaks out against censorship, and because I am a Jew who does not believe that my religion requires unquestioning support of the State of Israel and its political, social and military policies. I do believe in the importance of Israel for the Jewish people and its right to exist, but I also believe in the rights of Palestinians to their own homeland as well, and the right and necessity of both populations to live in peace.

So rather than opine at length, I choose to share with you excerpts from many stories about Theater J, with links to the full reports, which in turn link to yet more. I decry the pressure that Theater J has been subjected to and the manner of Ari Roth’s firing. I believe that Roth’s artistic vision will ultimately be best served at his planned new company Mosaic Theater Company – a name I love for its ability to invoke both the Moses of biblical times, as well as the ancient art form of arranging multi-colored tiles to create art, suggesting the coming together of many fragments to make a larger and more cohesive whole. As for what happens to Theater J now, I hope it doesn’t become a home for only feel-good Jewish stories, but manages to sustain itself as a place that challenges those who attend and fosters debate among them, characteristics that I was taught from a very early age were a central part of Judaism.

From “Theater J incident illustrates larger dialogue on Israel at Jewish institutions” by Peter Marks in The Washington Post, August 6, 2011:

Andy Shallal, an Iraqi-born Muslim, was deeply proud of the open conversation channel he had maintained with Ari Roth, longtime artistic director of Theater J, a highly regarded branch of the D.C. Jewish Community Center. Together with another local theater lover, Mimi Conway, they’d created the Peace Cafe, an after-play forum, complete with plates of hummus and pita bread supplied by Shallal’s popular Busboys and Poets dining spots, that had become a mainstay of Theater J’s programming.

The makeshift cafe — established 10 years ago, during the run of a politically charged solo play about the Mideast by David Hare — has been important as an outlet for debate over issues raised in Theater J’s sometimes provocative repertory, especially for an outsider such as Shallal. “It was an emotional experience for me, to walk into a Jewish community center, to grow up as a Muslim, thinking of Israelis as really scary people,” he says. “I walked through that door, and it was a very beautiful experience.”

Then, suddenly, a few months ago, a curtain was drawn. The community center’s then-chief executive officer, Arna Meyer Mickelson, told Shallal that the Peace Cafe could no longer use the facilities of the center, at 16th and Q streets NW. “She said, ‘We appreciate what you’ve done, but we can’t have Peace Cafes at Theater J anymore,’ ” Shallal recalls. “I think she was waiting for the right moment to cut the strings.”

From “Heated Dialogue, Onstage and Off, at Theater J” by Lonnie Firestone in American Theatre magazine, February 2012

Maybe it’s the temperature, maybe it’s the politics—but there’s something about plays from the Middle East. Ask Ari Roth, artistic director of Theater J in Washington, D.C., who has produced more plays from that region than any other theatre artist in America. Roth can attest that the dialogue in plays from this part of the world is “more scalding than subtle. But that’s good, arresting theatre.”

Heated dialogue has become a Theater J trademark, both during the plays and at post-show talkbacks. A focus on Israel and the Middle East is one surefire way to attract passionate audiences (and occasional detractors). Since taking the helm of Theater J in 1998, Roth has been as avid about producing work that engages with Israeli life, culture and politics as he has about producing plays about American Jewish life.

From “Where do Jewish federations draw the ‘red line’ on opinions about Israel?” by Jason Kamaras on JNS.org, September 23, 2013:

Ari Roth, artistic director of Theater J, told JNS.org that “The Admission” is all based on “actual research done by three historians,” rather than implying the “fictitious 1948 massacre” that Young Israel’s Levi described in his letter. “The Admission” was also featured in an April 2013 workshop that was underwritten by the Israeli Consulate of New York, which Roth called an Israeli “hechsher” on the play.

COPMA does not acknowledge Theater J’s slate of more than 35 plays and workshops relating to Israel over the last 16 years, said Roth, who among other plays the group has performed cited “Dai” (“Enough”), which details the experiences of 14 different Israelis in the moments before a suicide bombing.

Theater J also never actually produced “Seven Jewish Children,” explained Roth. Instead, the group held a “critical dissection” of the play, featuring readings of “Seven Jewish Children” and response plays, as well as a talk to start the event that included “what troubled me about the play,” Roth said.

The DC federation, in an April 2011 statement, said it would not fund “any organization that encourages boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel in pursuit of goals to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish State.” Theater J “stands squarely” against the BDS movement, Roth told JNS.org.

“We are all about bringing Israeli art over here, engaging with Israel,” he said. “We are a leading importer of Israeli cultural talent to Washington.”

Hanna Eady, Elizabeth Anne Jernigan, Leila Buck, Danny Gavigan, Pomme Koch, Kimberly Schraf, and Michael Tolaydo in The Admission (Photo by C. Stanley Photography)

From “Theater J Scales Back Show as Pro-Israel Critics Pressure Washington D.C. Troupe” by Nathan Guttman in the Jewish Daily Forward, October 9, 2013:

In an apparent bow to the right in the Jewish culture wars, Theater J, a celebrated theatrical group housed at Washington’s DC Jewish Community Center, will not produce a play set to open this spring that has been denounced by critics as anti-Israel.

The troupe will instead run a workshop on the play and a moderated discussion. . .

The compromise reached between Theater J and the DCJCC will likely not put an end to the heated political debate about the play. Activists from a group called Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art, which organized the pressure campaign, have made clear they will not discuss anything short of removing the play altogether. The group’s chairman, Robert Samet, told the Forward earlier that he would accept only the play’s cancellation.

Carole Zawatsky, CEO of the DCJCC, told the Forward that the decision to cancel the full production was not a result of the outside pressure. “This had nothing to do with COPMA,” she said. “COPMA is trying to shut down the conversation and we are trying to broaden it.”

The DCJCC explained the decision as stemming from their “guiding principle” that plays from Israel should be done in partnership with Israeli theater companies. And since a planned partnership did not materialize, Theater J will not present a full production in Washington. The workshop, Zawatsky said, will include the play’s author, Motti Lerner, alongside other historians, artists and political figures.

The controversy surrounding production of The Admission is only the latest in a series of attacks against the capital city’s Jewish theater company involving plays related to Israel. Theater J rejected the earlier rounds of criticism, insisting on its right to stage the plays in question as a matter of artistic freedom.

This time, however, the debate was deepened by a call from the theater’s detractors to withhold donations from the city’s Jewish federation because of its support for the artistic group.

From a letter by The Dramatists Guild and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund to the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and the DC JCC, January 27, 2014:

We understand that a group that calls itself Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art has been formed to discourage Theatre J’s production of The Admission by advocating a boycott of your organizations and other intimidating tactics. Yes, private citizens have a right to object to the plays you produce by not funding you, and no, their actions do not constitute “censorship” in the strictest sense, but the bullying tactics of this group in order to impose their political worldview on the choice of plays you present must not succeed. As the representative of writers of all political persuasions, religious beliefs, etc., the Dramatists Guild strongly opposes their actions and agenda.

We find it ironic that COPMA’s wish to stifle the play is purportedly in defense of Israel, yet the Israeli minister of Home Security himself has said: “In the past, some plays by Motti Lerner have created stormed discourse … This discourse is taking place in the public sphere and that is where it should be. The State of Israel is proud of the freedom of expression in the arts in it and especially the freedom of expression in the theater.”

Should the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and the DCJCC have a lower standard for the freedom of expression than Israel? Surely if a state under siege since its founding can withstand criticism in the form of drama, so can your audiences.

From “For Jewish groups, a stand-off between open debate and support of Israel” by Marc Fisher in The Washington Post,” May 28, 2014:

The D.C. Jewish Community Center runs a popular music festival featuring klezmer, a cappella, Broadway, liturgical and classical sounds. This year, they invited a Brooklyn feminist punk rock band called The Shondes — Yiddish for “disgrace” — to join the lineup.

Weeks later, the center uninvited The Shondes because the band’s leader had made public statements questioning whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state.

The JCC has staged an “Embracing Democracy” series over the past year, tackling tough issues with speakers on American Jews’ relationship with Israel and the birth of the Jewish state. David Harris-Gershon was asked to speak on his memoir about how he changed after a Palestinian terrorist’s bomb in Jerusalem seriously injured his wife.

But the JCC withdrew Harris-Gershon’s invitation after discovering that he had written a blog post sympathetic to the boycott and divestment movement against Israel. . .

“A wonderful aspect of Jewish tradition is healthy debate,” says Stuart Weinblatt, rabbi at Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Md. “But ultimately, a big tent does have parameters. It’s not inappropriate for the JCC or any institution to ask, ‘Does this play or speaker convey a narrative that helps people understand Israel’s ongoing struggle?’ There are plenty of venues willing to host productions critical of Israel. The Jewish community doesn’t need to be that place.”

“You have to push the envelope, you have to challenge,” says Gil Steinlauf, senior rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation in the District. “This is the essence of what it means to be Jewish: We welcome dissent. And I do see a move away from that welcome in the Jewish community.”

From “DCJCC Cancels Theater J’s Middle East Festival, Prompting Censorship Debate” by Nathan Guttman in the Jewish Daily Forward, November 25, 2014:

Theater J, a nationally acclaimed group under the auspices of the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, is battling a decision by the JCC to cancel its annual Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival. The theatrical festival, which in the past has included works critical of Israeli policy, was asked to accept a rigorous vetting process of artists this year to limit that criticism.

“Increasingly, Theater J is being kept from programming as freely, as fiercely, and expressing itself as fully as it needs,” the artistic director, Ari Roth, wrote to the company’s executive committee in September, in an internal document obtained by the Forward. “We find the culture of open discourse and dissent within our Jewish Community Center to be evaporating.”

Theater J and the DCJCC are not the only institutions caught between donors concerned about negative depictions of Israel and creators arguing for artistic freedom; New York City’s Metropolitan Opera is still reeling from the protests against its decision to produce “The Death of Klinghoffer”; the JCC in Manhattan came under fire in 2011 for partnering with progressive organizations, and in San Francisco, the Jewish film festival was the first, in 2009, to face pressure from donors to change its programming.

“It’s pervasive,” said Elise Bernhardt, former president and CEO of the now-defunct Foundation for Jewish Culture. “At the end of the day, they are shooting themselves in the foot.” Bernhardt said that attempts to censor Jewish art will only deter young members from being involved in the community.

From an e-mail sent by DCJCC Executive Director Carole Zawatsky to the DC JCC board on December 18, 2014:

I am writing to let you know that Ari Roth will be stepping down as the Artistic Director of Theater J. Ari has been a great leader of our theater program for the last 18 years and has grown Theater J into an award-winning and groundbreaking destination for our community. Under his guidance, Theater J has become the premier Jewish theater in the country and has gained national critical acclaim. We are so proud of the heights we have reached with Ari at the helm. While Ari will no longer be the Artistic Director of Theater J, we have offered Ari the opportunity to continue to curate the Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival and use its branding wherever his next endeavor shall be.

To all the people who have worked most closely with Ari to make Theater J the incredible success it is today, I want to assure you of our continued commitment to Theater J’s mission of presenting thought-provoking, engaging theater. While a search is underway for a new Artistic Director, Theater J will continue operating under the leadership of two people you already know well: Managing Director Rebecca Ende and now Associate Artistic Director Shirley Serotsky.

From “Artistic director Ari Roth is fired from Theater J” by Peter Marks in The Washington Post on December 18, 2014:

Ari Roth, longtime artistic director of Theater J, an organization he has built over the past 18 years into one of the city’s most artistically probing and ambitious theater companies, said he was fired Thursday. Roth said notice of his dismissal was delivered by Carole R. Zawatsky, chief executive officer of the DC Jewish Community Center, of which Theater J is an arm. The cause given, he said, was insubordination, violating what he called the JCC’s “communications protocol.”.  .  .

On Thursday night, the DCJCC released a statement quoting Zawatsky as saying: “Ari Roth has had an incredible 18-year tenure leading Theater J, and we know there will be great opportunities ahead for him. Ari leaves us with a vibrant theater that will continue to thrive.”

Roth and Zawatsky, who was hired by the JCC in 2011, clashed repeatedly over some of Roth’s programming choices, particularly as they concerned the Middle East. Earlier this year, Theater J’s world premiere of “The Admission,” a play by Israeli dramatist Motti Lerner about a purported massacre of Palestinian villagers in 1948 by Israeli soldiers, was downgraded by the center from a full production to a workshop. That occurred after a small local activist group’s campaign to stop the play asked donors to withhold funds from the JCC’s parent body.

The group, calling itself Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art, launched a similar effort in protest of a Theater J offering in 2011, “Return to Haifa,” a play that featured Arab and Israeli actors. From the highly regarded Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, Boaz Gaon’s drama — adapted from a novella by a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, later assassinated — portrayed a Palestinian family returning to the home it had fled in 1948 that was occupied by Israeli Jews.

The latest and apparently final dispute was over the fate of Theater J’s Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival, an ongoing series of which “Return to Haifa” and “The Admission” were a part. Last month, the Jewish Daily Forward reported that the DCJCC was eliminating iterations of the festival. Roth said his commenting to the media after the article appeared was the reason given to support the charge of insubordination.

From “Ari Roth’s Firing From Theater J Is Part of a Larger Conflict About Jewish Criticism of Israel” by Benjamin Freed in the Washingtonian on December 19, 2014:

But the aggressive pushback that Israel’s critics like Roth and Judis from their fellow Jews isn’t a recent phenomeon, says Alan Elsner, the vice president of communications for J Street, a left-wing Middle East policy organization that calls itself pro-Israel and pro-peace. The group was founded in 2008 because the subject of Israel “had become so toxic that institutions, people, synagogues felt they couldn’t discuss it intelligently anymore,” he says.

Elsner believes the loud, hawkish voices that attack people like Roth are a slim portion of the the American Jewish community, but they do include some wealthy donors flexing their political clout. But those reactions, Elsner says, come at the expense of the Jewish population’s future.

“It’s a formula for driving away young people, driving away people who love Israel, but are not supportive of the settlements, and see the current government destroying the country,” he says. “The right has been in power in Israel with short breaks since 1977, and they’ve pursued building settlements and had three or four wars. The problem is, how do American Jews who support Israel and love Israel engage in a meaningful dialogue with Israel without being cast out of the tent?”

From “Ari Roth’s swift departure from Theater J follows a tumultuous tenure” by Peter Marks in The Washington Post, December 19, 2014:

As Ari Roth, Theater J’s longtime artistic director, recalled it, he sat down over a couple of lunches with Rabbi Bruce Lustig of the Washington Hebrew Congregation and the JCC’s chief executive, Carole R. Zawatsky, in an effort to undo the ire and mistrust that had soured his dealings with his boss.

“We went to marriage counseling,” is how Roth wryly describes those attempts. “We worked on our relationship.”

The meetings apparently came to naught, for on Thursday, Roth was fired by Zawatsky from the job he had held for 18 years, a tenure during which he built Theater J into one of the leading Jewish theaters in the country and one of the most important outposts for plays about Israel and its neighbors. His termination came after he refused to sign a severance agreement that would have given him six months’ salary and required that he keep quiet about the nature of his exit.

The firing, which was greeted with expressions of disbelief and widespread condemnation by everyone from Washington actors, directors and artistic directors to playwright Tony Kushner, was in point of fact the culminating event of a difficult, years-long struggle between Roth’s company and those in charge of the august Jewish institution on 16th and Q streets NW that housed it. Furious over some of his programming decisions — including producing a play based on a novel by a onetime spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and a staged reading of another playlet, Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children,” labeled by some as anti-Semitic — activist groups and others had exerted pressure on the JCC to try to stop them.

The dismissal, though, was not merely the wrenching end to a long-simmering personnel matter involving a headstrong staffer. It was also an illustration of a growing rift in the Jewish community, over what kinds of dialogue concerning Israel can be tolerated at a multipurpose Jewish organization — and whether, in fact, programming perceived as critical of Israeli policies has any place at a center for Jewish culture.

“The work that Ari’s been doing isn’t more or less controversial than it was 10 years ago, but the atmosphere for airing different voices has changed,” said Joshua Ford, who was the DCJCC’s associate executive director until leaving in March. “That’s in part because there’s a perception that Israel is more besieged than ever, and that’s a perception with some reality to it. And part of it is that it’s very, very hard for artists and institutions just to get along in general.

“Artists need to be artists,” Ford added, “and institutions need to answer to more than just their artistic impulses.”

From “Ari Roth, Director of Jewish Theater, Is Fired” by Michael Paulson in The New York Times, December 19, 2014:

Under Mr. Roth’s leadership, Theater J has periodically produced work that has tested the Jewish Community Center. This year, the agency scaled back a production of “The Admission,” which depicted a disputed incident of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians in 1948, and canceled a Middle East festival; in 2010 the theater scuttled a production of a play about Bernie Madoff after objections from Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and writer; in 2009 there was controversy over a play by Caryl Churchill that some saw as anti-Semitic.

Mr. Roth said he was fired after unsuccessful efforts to negotiate an agreement to allow him to do some of his most contested work as a freelancer, or to make Theater J, which is producing six shows this season and has a $1.6 million budget, financially independent from the Jewish Community Center. He said he had recently been reprimanded for speaking to the news media without permission, and that he believed the J.C.C. wanted him gone to eliminate a possible source of concern for donors during a coming capital campaign.

“This was a long time coming, but it was becoming clear that for the theater to fully express itself, not just on the Middle East but on a whole range of issues, there was a growing artistic impasse,” he said.

Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide… at Theater J

At the conclusion of Friday’s evening’s performance at Theater J, the following statement from playwright Tony Kushner was shared with the audience, read by members of the company of Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, Theater J’s current production:

We know it’s been a long evening of theater, but we’d like to take one more moment of your time. We wouldn’t be standing here tonight without the hard work and fierce dedication of our friend and colleague, the artistic director of Theater J, Ari Roth. Yesterday, Ari was fired by the CEO of the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center in consultation with the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of this center. This decision is of grave concern to theater artists and audiences alike. Ari wasn’t fired, as the executive committee has claimed, because of ‘insubordination.’ That is a preposterous and cowardly whitewashing of the truth. Ari was fired because he believes that a theater company with a mission to explore Jewish themes and issues cannot acquiesce to demands for an uncritical acceptance of the positions of the Israeli government regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or to an insistence on silence. Ari was fired because he refused to surrender to censorship; he was fired because he believes that freedom of speech and freedom of expression are both American values and Jewish values. “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide” has 3 more performances. We can’t continue without expressing our shock and dismay at this violation of principles we cherish. Theater artists and administrators across the country are already speaking out in protest. We join them, and we hope you’ll join us. We call on the full Board of the DCJCC to renounce the action its executive committee has taken, and by renouncing it, demonstrate its support for theater that engages with contemporary reality in all its complexity, free of the fear of censors. Thanks for listening, thanks for being a great audience, and Ari, thanks for everything–shabat shalom, Godspeed, and good night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqTCWWaH7r0

In a New York Times Magazine article, “Can Liberal Zionists Count On Hillary Clinton?” published on Sunday, December 21, 2014 and wholly unrelated to the firing of Ari Roth at Theater J, one paragraph struck me as particularly apt to the themes and reality surrounding the theater and its place in discourse about Israel and the Middle East, echoing the observations of others:

“In many segments of American Jewry,” Zemel said, “one is free to disagree with the president of the United States, but the prime minister of Israel is sacrosanct. How patently absurd!” Zemel’s criticism of the current Israeli government pivoted to a discussion of how the Holocaust and that summer’s flare-ups of anti-Semitism in Europe reminded them all that Israel was existentially necessary. “We must love Israel even harder,” he concluded, quoting from the Israeli national anthem. “Od lo avda tikvateinu. We have not yet lost our hope.”

From “An Interview With Former Theater J Artistic Director Ari Roth” on HowlRound.com, December 21, 2014:

If you look around the country, how many plays are there on an annual basis that touch on the Middle East conflict? And then you think it’s such a rich source of drama and there are so many talented people writing about it, why aren’t they touching this subject? I don’t think they should use my example as a cautionary tale, they should use my example as a reason to do more of it. I shouldn’t be one of the only TCG theater artists engaged in this issue. It’s inexplicable to me that we don’t have a dozen other theater companies engaging in this theater subject. It isn’t the third rail, it isn’t that volatile or lethal. There’s not that much paranoid Jewish money that is so concerned about this issue being voiced. I think artists ask themselves how much do they know, how much more could they learn about the conflict and what’s my responsibility to reflect that on our stage? A lot of people could be doing this work and should be.

Via Twitter, a final observation from The Washington Post’s Peter Marks:

*   *   *

Update, December 22, 2014, 1 pm: The artistic directors of a broad cross-section of U.S. theatres have sent a letter regarding Ari Roth’s firing to the Board of Directors of the Washington Jewish Community Center. It reads:

We, the undersigned Artistic Directors, are outraged by the action of the JCC in Washington DC in summarily dismissing the long-serving Artistic Director of Theater J, Ari Roth, on the morning of December 18.

The stated cause was ‘insubordination’, and it is absolutely clear that Roth was fired because of the content of the work he has so thoughtfully and ably championed for the last two decades.

Ari Roth is a capable, brilliant and inspiring leader of the American non-profit theater. The actions of the JCC, in terminating him for blatantly political reasons, violate the principles of artistic freedom and free expression that have been at the heart of the non-profit theater movement for over half a century. Such actions undermine the freedom of us all.

A free people need a free art; debate, dissent, and conflict are at the heart of what makes theater work, and what makes democracy possible. We deplore the actions of the JCC, offer our complete support for Ari Roth, urge the American theater community to protest these events in all possible ways, and call upon the full Board of the JCC to renounce this action of the Executive Committee of the JCC.

Update, December 28, 2014 11 am:

From “D.C. Jewish Community Center head details ‘insubordination’ of Ari Roth” by Peter Marks in The Washington Post, December 26, 2014:

The battle over the firing of Theater J artistic director Ari Roth took another bitter turn this week, with the circulation of remarks by his boss at the D.C. Jewish Community Center, Carole R. Zawatsky, accusing him of “a pattern of insubordination, unprofessionalism and actions that no employer would ever sanction.”

That pattern, Zawatsky charged in a letter sent by e-mail Wednesday to “Members of the Israel arts community,” included an attempt “to force the DCJCC to give up Theater J to his sole control.” She added that after that failed to occur, “he had begun to work on a new venture, while still employed by DCJCC,” and that “despite clear and written warnings” he “continued to disregard direction” from his superiors.

“Ari Roth,” she contended, “was not fired because of his politics or because of outside pressure.”

From “The Facts on the Ground at Theater J” by Isaac Butler in American Theatre magazine, December 28, 2014:

In their own ways, both Zawatsky and Roth’s versions of the story identify the same problems: an untenable relationship between the theatre and the center, mirrored or manifested by their own untenable relationship; a document outlining possible ways those relationships could change; and Roth’s future plans for a new company and decision to leave. But both use these points of evidence for radically different, somewhat incompatible interpretations of the last few years.

And if you assume the politics of Israel-related programming was the cause of Roth’s firing, a few additional ironies seep into the story. For one, Roth is hardly a radical leftist on Israeli politics: He is instead a mainstream, left-of-center, two-state-solution-supporting moderate. He has said, both in his interview with HowlRound and with me, that he willingly embraced the DCJCC’s “red line” about work that promotes BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a movement that tries to use economic and cultural pressure to end Israeli occupation of Palestinian land).

What’s more, the work that actually landed him in hot water in the first place was a staged examination of whether or not a play by the greatest living English-language playwright was anti-Semitic—and then two plays by Israeli Jews attempting to reconcile with the events surrounding their nation’s founding.

But the past is prologue. Leaving aside the trail of events that brought Roth, Zawatsky, Theater J and the DCJCC to this impasse, the question is: What now?

*   *   *

I will continue to add to and amend this post if I discover thoughtful and pertinent information I believe to be constructive to the narrative and the issues.

As the Sony hacking case has played out over the past several weeks, it’s a story that has been relegated mostly to the business pages and, simultaneously, the gossip industry. With no one explicitly claiming responsibility for the breach of the entertainment giant’s computer system, the focus has been more on the corporate ramifications, placing it in business reports, and the stream of buzzworthy stories including the e-mails between Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin and the pontifications of Aaron Sorkin have been fodder for everyone from The New York Times to Entertainment Tonight. That the personal records of Sony employees past and present, including medical files, had been taken and released publicly didn’t seem to figure into the narrative in a significant way; it was just one more data hack (e.g. Target) that only hit home if it had happened to you now or in the past.

Of course, things escalated this week when a direct threat was made against theatres showing the Seth Rogen- James Franco film The Interview. The air of genuine concern rose yet higher when the U.S. government asserted that the hack had been engineered by North Korea in retaliation for The Interview’s depiction of an ultimately successful plot on the life of their dictatorial leader Kim Jong-un.

“Kim Jong-il” in Team America: World Police

Yet if my social media feeds are any indication, the vast majority of people, even this morning, find the whole situation slightly ridiculous and still worthy of snark. In the wake of theatre chains, and finally Sony, pulling The Interview from exhibition, the prevailing response seems to be inordinate attention to the Alamo Drafthouse’s (in Dallas/Fort Worth) decision to screen Team America: World Police, which a decade ago rendered Kim Jong-il as a literal puppet dictator, as well as jokes about Rogen’s affinity for smoking marijuana leading to an international crisis and this really being the fault of NBC for canceling Freaks and Geeks.

Kevin Smith in Live Free or Die Hard

I’ll admit to having paid minimal attention to the hack story until the combination of the threat against theatres and theatre patrons, the yanking of the film and the U.S. pointing its finger towards North Korea reached a critical mass for me. Like many, I’ve probably been lulled by too many years of watching action and espionage films in which there is always some megalomaniac trying to get rich or conquer the world, be it Dr. No or Dr. Evil. As for hacking, it’s always been made to seem a bit romantic and alluring (Sandra Bullock in The Net, Angelina Jolie in Hackers) or all-powerful yet benign (Kevin Smith in his mother’s basement in one of the later Die Hard films).

But now we’ve moved from the world of fictional espionage into a real life amalgamation of terrorism and blackmail. Yes, as many have pointed out, it’s questionable whether North Korea or any malefactor could carry out coordinated attacks in movie theatres across the country. But it would take only one such incident to genuinely terrorize the country, with social and economic ripples far greater than those felt after the movie theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Frankly, even if the perpetrator of the Sony hack was just bluffing, who’s to say that some copycat might not take the opportunity into their own hands in just one community? The very threat of terrorism is what has lifted the scenario into a much more troubling realm, and even if the ransom to be paid was the suppression of one film instead of one billion dollars, the result is that it worked, and set an awful precedent.

Any number of commentators, professional and amateur, have been quick to say that Sony “caved,” that they allowed the perpetrator of the threat to win, but that’s a simplistic response. Already faced with a massive economic hit from the data release, which will most likely continue, could the company risk being seen as insensitive to the threat, could it have taken the risk that there was no real danger? They’ve been in a no-win situation for weeks now, and no matter what choice they had made, it would have been seen as wrong. I’m not an apologist for their decision, but I can at least see them as having been given the proverbial Sophie’s choice.

I deplore what has taken place, which is a form of censorship by blackmail. Instead of providing a ransom to get something back, Sony has had to withhold something to, hopefully, eliminate any possibility of a violent reprisal. Their data is out of their control, never to be reined back in. And our constitutional right to freedom of speech has been infringed upon by some outside entity, even if it was Sony who made the decision to shelve The Interview.

The Death of Klinghoffer at The Metropolitan Opera

Watching a big corporation being hamstrung may seem pretty distant from the world of live performance, but it’s really not. The rhetoric surrounding the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Death of Klinghoffer this fall, due to its supposedly anti-Semitic content, was marked with significant vitriol which never quite reached the level of threat, but still prompted major security measures to be put into place. Those with short memories may have already forgotten the threats against Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, which forced Manhattan Theatre Club to implement a range of protections from those who decried it as sacrilegious. No one found those scenarios funny, and even if protections were being taken against individuals and groups, rather than a government, even if each played in one theatre instead of 2,000, the parallels are there.

Kim Jong-un and Dennis Rodman

As of this morning, our government is reportedly weighing its choices on how to address the North Korean actions, even as some are suggesting that it isn’t North Korea at all, or if it is, it’s North Korea in alliance with other people or governments. There are hawks already taking verbal flight to cry out for retaliation, but its worth noting that while Sony is a Japanese corporation, Japan may be more cautious than we are, since North Korea regularly fires test missiles across their airspace, and who knows what their leader might do if provoked. We may find his flirtations with Dennis Rodman hilarious, but this is a country that has been ruled with a vicious iron hand for decades, a country where citizens have virtually no rights or freedom.

The era of digital warfare has sprung into full view with the Sony hack and The Interview’s suppression. No matter who’s behind it, it has proven that through the control of computers and information, not only with armaments, free will and basic rights can be bent all too quickly. While the hack is real, perhaps the threat is an elaborate hoax. Of the latter, we may never know with 100% certainty. But the question now is how does America guarantee its right to free speech against opponents both domestic and foreign, even when that speech is as inconsequential as I imagine The Interview to be.

Update, December 18, 3:30 p.m.: for those who saw Alamo Drafthouse’s plan to screen Team America in place of The Interview as a stand against censorship, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Paramount has withdrawn that film from release as well, despite the fact that it’s a decade old. This is how the slippery slope carries us all downhill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier this month, the administration at Maiden High School in Maiden, North Carolina tried to put a stop to the student production of John Cariani’s Almost, Maine. With permission slips in hand, the cast chosen and rehearsals just underway, the school announced the show was off. But it’s only off school grounds. The play will go on.

*   *   *

As first reported last week by WSOC TV in two reports [here and here], with additional reporting from Think Progress, Almost, Maine was shuttered because of a single scene, entitled “They Fell,” in which two buddies reach the startling discovery that they love one another – by actually falling down. Repeatedly. There’s no sexual innuendo, no physical contact, and the words “gay” and “homosexual” aren’t spoken. The scene takes up six pages of a 54 page text.

It’s not as if the school didn’t know the play was in the works. Maiden High School junior Conner Baker, who was to direct the production, said that when the administration was asked for permission, they gave it within a day.

“Our teacher advisor spoke to our principal,” said Baker, “who then spoke to the superintendent. We were told through our student advisor.”

She explained that students had to get permission slips with parents expressly agreeing to let their children participate, which hadn’t happened before in her experience. Of the permission slip, she said, “I don’t remember it word for word. It was along the lines of, ‘We have chosen Almost, Maine as our fall play this year. The play includes nine vignettes about love, one of which is centered around two male best friends who realize they are in love with each other’.”

Baker also described parents being required to come to one of two meetings in person to give their approval, also a new requirement. “Whenever a parent came in, I explained to them the content of the play and told them that for their child to audition, they needed to sign the permission slip.” Students also were permitted to audition with the scene in question, but Baker said she didn’t know where that requirement came from. “We were told by our teacher, though I know it wasn’t her decision. I also do not know why.”

After the show was cast and had just begun rehearsals, the word came that the show was off. “We were told by our teacher. They said the community isn’t ready for it. There wasn’t really a big discussion about it.”

*   *   *

Maiden High School’s logo

In spite of all the strictures placed on the audition process – the permission slips, parents coming to meetings – the school’s statement, issued after the news media began to pick up the story, clearly sought to obfuscate the issue, using the ‘approval hadn’t been given’ excuse that crops up so regularly in instances of school theatre censorship. Issued by Principal Rob Bliss (Robert_Bliss@catawbaschools.net) , it read:

“Our faculty and staff are still in review of potential performances to be conducted by our students this fall. At this time, no final decision has been made regarding whether and what drama performances are to be presented this fall. In regards to the request for students to perform the play “Almost Maine,” careful review and consideration was given to the contents of this play. The play contained sexually-explicit overtones and multiple sexual innuendos that are not aligned with our mission and educational objectives.

“As principal of Maiden High School, I have an obligation to ensure that all material, including drama performances is appropriate and educationally sound for students of all ages.”

The consensus in conversations on Facebook between various students was that some adults and churches in the area had made their displeasure known to the school administration, focusing on the gay storyline. None of them appear to have made their concerns known publicly. Yet this prompted the school to pull the plug without giving any hearing to those in support of the play.

*   *   *

Upon learning about the cancelation, one area adult, Carmen Eckard, a former local teacher, sent an e-mail to a number of administrators at the school. She wrote, in part:

“These kids have spent years fostering their love of theatre. In fact, I taught many of them at Startown Elementary, and they loved theatre class! That has blossomed into a real appreciation and dedication, and the decision to cancel a play after rehearsals had begun is extraordinarily disrespectful, and counterintuitive to education.

“Their passion is now spurred, and they will show you how dedicated they are.  I’m sure you’ll quickly realize that a mistake has been made.

“My advice would be to reinstate the play, before Huffington Post picks up this story. It’s just the kind of thing they love, and I’m sure we’ll all appreciate not  being highlighted in national news as a ‘backwards’ town, again.”

She received a response from the school superintendent Dr. Dan Brigman (dan_brigman@catawbaschools.net), who thanked her for writing, but didn’t address Almost, Maine at all, simply saying another appropriate play would be found. [For legal reasons, I am paraphrasing the superintendent’s brief reply.]

It seems a shame that Brigman didn’t heed Eckard’s warning, given the media attention that has resulted  from the cancelation (even reaching up into Maine). As for being highlighted in the national news “again,” while I didn’t ask Eckard what she was referring to specifically, I am assuming it was the 2012 stories about local Pastor Charles Worley of the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden. Worley got lots of press, far beyond HuffPo, for stating that gays and lesbians should be confined behind an electrified fence. Plenty of North Carolinians spoke out against Worley at the time, but his church remains active in the community.

*   *   *

Conner Baker (l.) and Carmen Eckard (photo by Eckard Photographic)

Eckard did more than just write a letter. She got involved.

“As soon as I realized that it was my old students and the play was Almost, Maine, I started looking for ways to help,” she wrote in an e-mail. “By Friday, Connor and I had scheduled a meeting, and people had started contacting both of us, asking for ways to help.”

In my very first communications with Baker and Eckard, both immediately said they hoped to try to do the play off-campus, so I asked them both whether they considered fighting the decision.

Referring to the response she received from the principal, Eckard continued, “The response I received convinced me pretty thoroughly that trying to change the ruling would be a waste of time. It also gives the power in the situation completely to the school board – it’s their decision. The community is extraordinarily conservative.”

Conner Baker said, “I think at first we considered that, but as a group, we just want to do what’s best for us. Our whole reasoning behind speaking out was to be able to do the show.”

While many outside groups and individuals offered their support, Baker and Eckard felt it was best not to be antagonistic as they went forward.

Eckard explained, “The kids said, ‘The main thing we want to do is that we don’t want to alienate the community, we want to keep things positive. We’re going to take our play somewhere else for people who want to see it.’ I think this way will make people happy-ish.”

*   *   *

Before learning that the show might go on off-campus, playwright John Cariani learned of the situation in Maiden and crafted a reply that was posted to the Almost, Maine Facebook page. It read, in part:

“If Maiden High School administrators take issue with ‘They Fell’ because it’s about two young men who are simply stating their feelings for one another, they are calling into question the validity of same-sex love by making it seem wrong and different and other. They are allowing a dangerous cycle of fear and self-hatred among LGBTQ youth to continue, and, consequently, they are tacitly promoting homophobia. This is simply not necessary. Nor is it helpful. We don’t need any more Tyler Clementis or Jamey Rodemeyers and Jamey Hubleys. We need kids to know that it’ll “get better.” Falling in love is tough enough when you’re young. Let’s remove the stigma of falling in love with someone of the same sex…

“By canceling the play, it seems to me that school officials are pleasing parents and pillars of the community rather than serving the students. I think there’s a better solution than to stop the production.”

In a phone conversation, I asked Cariani if he had originally conceived of his play being performed by high schools, where it is enormously popular, landing as number one on the Educational Theatre Association’s list of the most produced plays in high school theatre this year. (You can see a list of upcoming productions by searching on the Dramatists Play Service website’s Page to Stage page.)

John Cariani, author of Almost, Maine

“Not at all,” he replied. “I thought it was a play for adults. The first high school production was Cape Elizabeth High School in Maine. They were a great theatre program when I was growing up [also in Maine, but in another school system]. Their teacher approached me and I thought, ‘High school students can’t do this play.’ But I got to see their production. The teacher helped me to understand that high school kids are on the verge of adulthood, but still optimistic of what the world can do for them and what they can do for the world. That is what makes high school kids, when they do it well, do it super-well.”

Cariani said he knew of a couple of instances in the past where there were efforts to censor or cancel the play. He noted one at Bel Air High in Maryland where the American Civil Liberties Union was instrumental in insuring the play went on. He also echoed Baker and Eckard’s sentiments about how to go forward.

“It’s important that we achieve our goals without being mean,” he offered. “It’s dangerous.”

But, I wondered, given the countless productions around the country, wasn’t it possible that some school might have already done, or might be planning to do, the show and altering “They Fell” unilaterally? What would he like to say to anyone who has done that or contemplates that, against the legal contract of the license and copyright law?

“It’s lying,” said Cariani, “because that’s not the play.”

*   *   *

Some of the Maiden High Students who will continue to work on Almost, Maine (Photo by Eckard Photographic)

Last night, October 20, Baker and Eckard held a small meeting to begin organizing the play for production away from Maiden High School, discussing possible venues, budgets and timing.

I asked Baker whether she thought she might lose any of her cast, since the show is no longer a school activity, especially because the school has already begun surveying students as to their interest in participating in an alternate play under official auspices.

“Only one person for sure said they couldn’t do it anymore,” she replied. “But the show really is meant for four actors and we have a cast of 20, so even if half of them dropped out, we could still do it.”

Maiden senior Logan Riley wrote to me, regarding the school’s effort to mount its own show, “The school system wants to have another show to settle the unrest in the community. This does not mean that we will actually put on another show.”

Moving the play off school grounds could still result in opposition. Are either Baker or Eckard concerned?

“We don’t care if they oppose it,” said Eckard. “Free speech! It won’t matter if they are against a public performance, because those of us involved aren’t under any particular employment or jurisdiction that would cause us to fear retribution.”

Baker echoed the sentiment. “I mean, people will complain no matter where we perform it. We aren’t forcing anyone to come out and see it, but if people do protest, it won’t stop us from performing it.

*   *   *

So the students of Maiden High School are going forward with Almost, Maine, targeting the first weekend in January for production. They’ve set up a Kickstarter page to raise the funds they need and hope to confirm a location shortly. Their cleverly named website-to-be is www.almost maiden.com.

This isn’t the first time students have taken a show off of school grounds to get it done (there are many precedents, including Wilton CT and La Grande OR) and one has to applaud the Maiden students’ commitment to seeing the show happen, with its myriad messages of love intact. I have to confess to feeling that the school is getting off easy, since the relocated production also shifts the spotlight off of their efforts to silence the students and the play, leaving intact the utterly unacceptable official message that LGBTQ love is something to be hidden away – even as North Carolina begins legal same sex marriages.

But Conner Baker has a simple reason for how the play will now happen, and it’s pretty hard to argue against.

“We aren’t doing it to upset anyone,” she says. “We just want to do what we love doing.”

Years from now, when the musical Wicked is eventually made available for school and amateur productions, will some high school administrator declare it inappropriate? After all, among its many plot strands is the story of (spoiler alert) the manipulative Madame Morrible, a school headmistress who schemes against those in Oz who don’t conform precisely to her standards, be they green girl or anthropomorphic animal. It’s a terrible portrait of pedagogy gone wrong and surely doesn’t foster the collaborative, supportive relationships that school leaders must seek with each successive generation of students, as well as with their faculty and staff. From that perspective, it’s seditious.

I’m reminded of this element of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holtzman’s massively popular musical as I consider the challenges to high school theatre that I’ve read about, heard about and involved myself in. Recently, I was engaged to deliver the opening keynote at the Educational Theatre Association’s (EdTA) annual conference for high school teachers. During the question and answer session that followed, one attendee asked the others how many had had shows turned down when they sought approval for them. Roughly a quarter of those in the room raised their hands. In follow-up, they were asked how many had wanted to do certain shows, but didn’t even try because they were sure they couldn’t get approval. Virtually every teacher raised their hand.

Because I don’t believe that these teachers had all been contemplating Oh! Calcutta!, I find myself wondering about their internal decision-making, their self-censorship. Surely they weren’t considering shows which would be blatantly inappropriate in a school setting, so what are those shows that they thought would be good for their students, but which they didn’t even dare raise as a possibility? That might make for an interesting survey in itself.

Of course, what’s acceptable to the powers that be at one school, in one town, may be considered problematic in another. Earlier this year in New Hampshire, Sweeney Todd was canceled at Timberlane High School (since reversed) even as another school just a few towns away readied their production of the same show. In 2012, Sonja Hansen lost her position directing shows at Loveland High in Ohio after her production of Legally Blonde was declared inappropriate, yet according to the EdTA’s annual survey, its was the fourth most popular musical in high schools nationally.

So I’m very interested in the new “Public Performance Policy” that has been put into place at the Junior/Senior High in South Williamsport PA, where a production of Spamalot has been canceled by the principal for reasons that remain unclear. The drama director Dawn Burch asserts that Principal Jesse Smith stated, in an e-mail, that the show’s gay content was a factor. Smith himself has been silent since this story broke, and while the school administration has taken exception to one element of the first report about the issue (since corrected), it has yet to produce the e-mail in question to clear things up. Two “Right To Know” requests have been filed seeking that e-mail and related documents; one of those requests is mine.

The timing of the Public Performance Policy, revealed last night at a meeting for the school board, is certainly no coincidence, coming between the initial assertions of anti-gay bias and the release of clarifying materials. As read by the school superintendent, Dr. Mark Stamm, it states:

General Guidelines: Public performances serve as a capstone project for students to showcase their dedication, determination, and talents for their peers and for their families. Performances must be age appropriate for participating students and audiences. Material that is generally considered offensive, suggestive, or demeaning based on race, religion, age, gender, or sexual orientation is not appropriate for school performances.

The first sentence of the policy, describing “showcasing dedication, determination, and talents,” is nicely affirmative ­– until one notices that there’s no mention of learning or growth, which would seem essential in any school activity, even at South Williamsport, where the drama program is extracurricular, and the drama director an outside contractor, not a teacher. That said, any adult working with young people in a leadership position is a teacher, accredited or not.

However, it’s worth noting that there is a mission statement for the drama program on the school’s website which admirably speaks to deeper value. It reads:

Our mission is to provide students with the opportunity to better themselves through the Arts. Whether it is onstage or backstage, in the production crew or artistic departments, theater helps all people more deeply understand our place in our modern, multicultural, globalized world.

As an aside: finding the drama information on the school website isn’t entirely logical. While there’s a section for clubs, which includes “Yearbook,” “Chemistry,” “Student Council” and “Songwriters and Musicians,” it doesn’t include “Drama.” The Athletic Program has its own site, with its own URL separate from the school district’s. But “Drama” falls under “Departments,” along with “Guidance” and “Nurse,” to which it seems wholly unrelated. How very odd to set it apart in this way.

But returning to the Public Performance Policy, the second sentence isn’t particularly troublesome, so long as it is not used as a justification to infantilize students by feeding them dramatic pabulum. But it’s the third sentence sentence where things turn tricky. While the phrase about not demeaning any parties is admirable (although in their seeming haste, they neglected disability, among other concerns), the language which begins the sentence is limiting, yet vague. “Offensive” and “suggestive” are completely subjective, presumably to be determined according to Justice Stewart’s famous phrase about what constitutes obscenity: “I’ll know it when I see it.” But no two people probably agree about what is offensive, or what is suggestive.

If this policy is meant to be general guidance for teachers (and contractors), shouldn’t it be constructed as such? Wouldn’t it be better to use affirmative language about supporting and advancing society through inclusive representations of race, religion, age, gender, or sexual orientation, instead of saying it simply won’t demean people on those grounds? As it is now, the policy seems more a declaration for the public, and a very general yardstick that teachers might be struck with should they violate its amorphous tenets. Since the school already has a practice of the principal approving the drama productions, it seems that process would presumably address content concerns, based upon reading the text and exploring productions and educational materials from other schools as aids, but in an open dialogue that would negate the need for future Right To Know inquiries. That said, I don’t favor shows going to any manner of public vote, and school boards shouldn’t decide play selection any more than they tell a coach what athletic plays to run.

I wonder, however, where the concerns were when the South Williamsport High School did Grease and Once Upon A Mattress? Certainly there are those who would find the plot points about pregnancy out of wedlock in those shows both offensive and suggestive. Grease, frankly, is rife with suggestiveness, at least as I construe it, but I don’t happen to find it offensive; but it was more than enough to cause a school in Missouri, following a 2006 production, to cancel the next show on the schedule: The Crucible. What about Urinetown, produced at the school in 2009? All that talk of toilets and body functions must have offended the sensibilities of some in South Williamsport. The world’s most famous teen suicide story, Romeo and Juliet, was staged, but I wonder whether the school provided educational programs and material to students and the public about the dangers of romanticizing exactly the sort of behavior Shakespeare depicted?

Was everyone sanguine with the following plot points, drawn from two synopses on the website of the licensing house Music Theatre International:

Soon after, attractive and seductive women appear and slowly surround him (“With You”). At first, Pippin is enjoying the romanticism, however, the mood quickly changes and the women bombard him. Pippin is pulled into numerous exotic orgies.

*  *  *

Audrey has forgotten her sweater, and Orin slaps her around for it…. Orin then pulls out a container of laughing gas, complete with a gas mask and puts it on himself to get high… Seymour feeds Orin’s body parts to the plant.

Obviously they passed muster, because Pippin and Little Shop of Horrors were produced at the school before Dawn Burch was hired. With this new policy, could any of the aforementioned shows be done again? Indeed, since there are – sad to say and sad as it is – still people who find homosexuality offensive, would LGBT life in any play or musical be precluded from the South Williamsport stage in deference to their reactionary sensibilities?

At the EdTA conference, I repeatedly counseled teachers to cultivate open and honest communication about their work with their department heads, their principals, even their superintendents if possible. Support for sports seems a given at our schools, but support for all of the arts, and it seems theatre in particular, must be developed over time – and started anew each time a key leadership position changes personnel.

When cancelations emerge from behind school doors into the public consciousness, locally and nationally, genuine rifts inside school communities and even entire towns are always possible, with long-lasting and detrimental effects on drama programs. Some schools, such as in Everett MA, do away with drama altogether, deciding a fair and open discussion about dramatic value is simply a nuisance – and therefore the program is as well. Yet are sports shut down when a student is seriously injured, publicly? No. In the case of football, it remains celebrated, even as data on traumatic brain injury mounts, because athletic prowess and competition is honored. It is the thought and expression of theatre that seems to be the dangerous undertaking in so many instances.

Another question I now field with some regularity is whether it’s wise to speak up publicly about these conflicts, bringing them broader attention than they might otherwise receive. My response is that it does carry risk, but if people believe in the power of theatre to not only entertain but educate, in the best interest of the participating students first and foremost, staying silent only allows repression to flourish, and for students to be consigned to the blandest, safest, time-worn work possible. And doesn’t Wicked (among countless works of literature) teach us about the dangers of people working behind the scenes, censoring, excluding, supposedly in the best interest of the community at large?

Having cited Wicked twice, let me finish with a few lyrics that hark back to L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories. I think this pair of couplets, devised by master satirist Tom Lehrer almost 50 years ago, speak simply and directly to slippery words like “offensive” and “suggestive.”

On July 2, I wrote about a situation at South Williamsport, Pennsylvania’s Jr/Sr High School, where a production of Monty Python’s Spamalot, slated for 2015, was canceled, reportedly due to its gay content. A number of news items and opinion pieces were written about the cancelation, with particular attention paid to a statement that homosexuality doesn’t exist in the community. However, the television station which first reported the story subsequently repudiated that portion of its report, saying the statement had not been made. They stood by the rest of their account, which relied primarily on an interview with Dawn Burch, the school’s drama director.

So, nearly two weeks later, where do things stand?

As originally reported, Burch asserted that the principal’s cancelation was attributable to gay content in Spamalot, which he communicated to her in an e-mail. Burch sought legal counsel regarding her right to release that communication, and she has yet to share it, presumably on the advice of counsel. So the reported smoking gun that could prove or disprove anti-gay bias on the part of the South Williamsport district and/or the school administration has not been revealed.

However, the state of Pennsylvania has very clear “right to know” laws, available to both state residents and non-residents alike. Consequently, this morning, I filed a request for all documents and communications regarding the musical, in particular any communications between Burch, superintendent Dr. Mark Stamm, principal Jesse Smith and the licensing house Theatrical Rights Worldwide. According to Pennsylvania law, upon receiving a request, an agency has five days in which to either accede to or deny a request, with subsequent appeals processes.

As I was filing, I learned from a press report that another entity had filed the same type of request on July 10. While the source of the request was not identified, based upon their submission date, they should get an answer by tomorrow or at the latest Thursday, depending upon when exactly they submitted it. Without knowing who requested the material, it’s impossible to know whether they will make the response, successful or not, public. But at this point, I’m in the secondary position for an answer.

In the meantime, Equality Central PA had held a conference of support for gay rights on July 3 in Williamsport, which was attended by superintendent Stamm and school board president John Engel, as well as Dawn Burch. The event was by all accounts a positive one. But additional news reports included statements which suggested that Spamalot was only one play under consideration and had not in fact been selected and approved. Yet the superintendent said the play was canceled to avoid controversy, without specifying what he found to be controversial. While officials can’t even agree on whether the play was ever approved or was in fact canceled, the lack of approval claim is in direct contradiction of the statement I received from licensor Theatrical Rights Worldwide, that made clear that a license had been granted, which surely required both a contract and an advance payment (I don’t imagine any school enters into contracts for multiple shows while they wait to make a final decision). While Burch may have signed the agreement, surely someone from the district with authority signed the deposit check; it will be interesting to learn who approved that payment.

Last night, at a school board meeting in South Williamsport, the receipt of the first Right To Know request was acknowledged. However it appears the only public comment beyond that was that it had been referred to “the district’s solicitor.” As expected, they’ve lawyered up. For the record, my attorney received my e-mailed records request concurrently with the school district.

FYI: here’s an interesting tidbit. Under Pennsylvania’s Open Records Policy, every state and local agency must appoint an Open Records Officer. For the South Williamsport School district, that officer is Superintendent Stamm, not an outsider, ombudsman or impartial arbiter. I can’t help but suspect the documents won’t be quickly forthcoming.

And so, we wait, either for Dawn Burch to be assured that by releasing the e-mail she will not be putting herself at professional or personal risk or liability, or for the school system to release the e-mail, voluntarily or compelled to do so by law, the content of which they have not explicitly denied.

To be continued.

Addendum, July 19, 2014: When I got home last evening, I had mail from the South Williamsport Area School District, dated and postmarked on July 16. It acknowledged receipt of my request for records under the Right-to-Know Law and said that the request was under review. However, it was most specifically a “Notice of extension for time to respond to request,” citing the following reasons: 1) “Your request for access may require redaction of public records,” and 2) “A legal review is necessary to determine whether the requested record is a public record subject to access under the law.” The letter further states that, “The School District expects to provide a response to you on or before Monday, August 21, 2014. If the school district fails to provide you with a final decision within that time period, your written request is deemed denied.” It is signed, “Dr. Mark Stamm, Superintendent and Open Records Officer.”

And so, in accordance with the applicable Pennsylvania law, I must wait. If the request is denied, I have the right of appeal, at which point the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records becomes involved. As I wrote previously, I doubted I’d get an immediate, affirmative response to my request, so while this is frustrating, it is not surprising. I suspect that many people don’t have the patience to see freedom of information and open records requests through to the end. However, I am not one of those people.

Addendum, July 31, 2014: Equality Central PA has issued an update regarding their press conference from July 3 and their written offer to work collaboratively with the South Williamsport Area School District “in order to foster a more inclusive environment for all students.”  The update states, in part: “Dr. Stamm responded to the letter promptly, and Equality Central PA is now in discussions on how this new partnership will move forward together. As next steps are determined, details and updates will continued to be shared.” The update concludes with a note, stating, “It has been made known that two separate organizations have filed “Right-To-Know requests relating to the e-mails from Principal Smith to drama director Dawn Burch. Equality Central PA is not involved in those inquiries, but will share whatever information becomes available.”

“I chop down trees, I wear high heels, suspenders and a bra.

I wish I’d been a girlie, just like my dear papa.”

My friends and I happily sang those Monty Python lyrics, at the drop of a hat, throughout our teen years, identifying with Michael Palin’s exuberant character, rather than the men who walked away from him in dismay. Yes, we’d seen men dress as women in comedy sketches, but those were burlesques, painted in broad, garish strokes. There had never been a declaration of donning women’s garb as a part of regular life, let alone by a macho character like a lumberjack.

In my little gang of friends, we didn’t necessarily know or talk much about homosexuality, which was decidedly less open in our suburban lives in the 70s (though one of our group later came out, to little surprise from any of us). We also hadn’t heard of terms like transvestitism or cross-dressing. Remarkable as it may seem, Monty Python may have played a key role in raising our consciousness, even more so when we learned, in the following decade, that Python’s Graham Chapman was gay, sadly lost too young to cancer.

So it’s particularly galling, more than three decades later, to find that South Williamsport Junior/Senior High School in Pennsylvania has just shut down an intended production of Monty Python’s Spamalot reportedly because of its gay content. WNEP News paraphrases the school’s drama director, Dawn Burch, as saying, “school officials dropped the musical because of its homosexual themes, according to an email she says she received.” WNEP quotes the superintendent as saying, “We want our performances to be appropriate for the student performers and audiences so that anyone participating or watching can enjoy all aspects of the show.” There’s no indication of what he finds inappropriate or unenjoyable.

I have already reached out to Burch, as well as to the school’s superintendent, for comment; I’ve received no replies as I write a few hours later. I would very much like to read exactly what the e-mail that nixed the production said. The language needs to be brought out into the open. But if Burch’s characterization is accurate, it marks the first time I’ve encountered a school explicitly saying that gay content caused cancellation of a show; the language is usually veiled, with references to mature themes, difficult material or, as even the WNEP report is headlined, “questionable content.”

The WNEP piece continues, “In that email, Burch says the principal wrote that homosexuality does not exist in a conservative community such as South Williamsport.”

If the principal believes that, then he is standing with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad who denied that homosexuality existed in his country during a 2007 speech at Columbia University. He is backing the rationale of Russia’s Vladimir Putin who has outlawed the “promotion” of homosexuality. That’s a very strange cast of characters for any high school principal to be aligned with, especially in such a conservative community.

While I’ll grant that there’s some language in Spamalot that a combined junior and senior high school might have some concerns about, they certainly could take those moments up with the licensing house, Theatrical Rights Worldwide. In fact, TRW already has an FAQ with suggested edits for schools right on its website (click here, then ‘Resources,’ then ‘FAQ for School Productions’).

But the marriage of the characters Herbert and Lancelot is non-negotiable. I asked Jim Hoare, director of licensing for TRW, whether they would ever entertain the excision of those nuptials, and his answer was blunt: “Absolutely not.” Hoare said that hundred of schools perform Spamalot annually.

This news is just breaking, and I’m writing with limited information at what I suspect and hope is the start of a story, not the end. One facet to be explored: Dawn Burch’s husband Samuel is on the district Board of Education, and both are active in community theatre as well, so there may well be support for the show above the level of superintendent.

Despite this coming to light just before a national holiday (gee, didn’t Trumbull High cancel their production of Rent right before Thanksgiving?), it must survive the weekend festivities, on a wave of deserved outrage. School may not be in session, but hopefully the students can organize, like students in Trumbull High School in Connecticut, like students at Timberlane High in New Hampshire, via social media, to increase pressure on the narrow-minded, retrograde administration.

That any educator or school administrator is still denying gay love and gay life in 2014, that a school would cancel a show in a move designed both implicitly and explicitly to shame and frighten any gay student, teacher or person, is simply ugly and wrong. It’s worth noting that in the very first news piece on this, reporter Kristina Papa quickly found people to counter the principal’s alleged, now retracted, assertion about gay life in South Williamsport, which must have really startled the blinkered administration.

It’s worth noting that gay marriage is legal in Pennsylvania. So it is ironic that, as they marry in Spamalot, Lancelot says to his spouse, “Just think, Herbert, in a thousand years time this will still be controversial.”

I guess Tim the Soothsayer had warned Lancelot about South Williamsport, PA. But maybe we can change history, if we raise our voices together.

I urge you to write Superintendent Dr. Mark Stamm (mstamm@swasd.org) and Principal Jesse Smith (jsmith@swasd.org) to voice your concerns (and please share your correspondence with me, if you’re willing, at howard [at] hesherman [dot] com. But I ask that you do so respectfully, even if the district doesn’t afford the same respect in its attitudes and actions.

Addendum, July 3, 5 pm: WNEP now reports that the principal did not make the statement about “homosexuality not existing.” I have left the material in place with the text and my rhetoric about it struck through, because I cannot deny having shared that original report or that I made statements resulting from it, but to show that they are also no longer supported by facts in evidence. Disclosure of the e-mail at the root of this controversy seems more essential than ever, and it should be noted that the school administration certainly has the legal right to disclose it should it wish to do so.

For those who do read the original WNEP story, it should be noted that the local resident and parent, Manny Tskitas, who makes several statements in support of the school administration’s position and questions the play choice, is also a staff member of the South Williamsport school district, as the librarian for grades K through 6. It would have been beneficial if WNEP had noted his affiliation.

Correction, July 5, 7:30: The original version of this post stated that Graham Chapman died of AIDS. That was an error and the text has been updated with accurate information.

Arizona State University’s Gammage Auditorium

[This post has been updated twice since it was originally published. I urge you to read it fully before drawing any conclusions.]

Rent is at the center of an academic controversy again, with a few twists. This time, it’s not the whole show, it’s just one song, “La Vie Boheme.” It involves multiple high schools and a college simultaneously. The performance is over and done. But the song echoes.

Here’s the gist, summarized from video and written reports from AZcentral.com: earlier this month, students from Arizona high schools attended the Arizona All-State musical festival on the Arizona State University campus, under the auspices of the school’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. While there, they attended a performance made up of various pieces by the university’s performing arts groups, across many disciplines. The Lyric Opera Theatre program performed the aforementioned number from Jonathan Larson’s musical. Reportedly some of the students were uncomfortable with the content and physicality of the presentation and decided to leave during the performance, some fairly quickly. They shared their feelings with their teachers and their parents.

Subsequently, the Herberger Institute sent an e-mail to the music teachers of the groups in attendance. It read, in part:

“We sincerely apologize for the poor programming and lack of communication that led to the presentation of an inappropriate scene from the musical Rent at our host concert. I apologized directly to your students in each ensemble rehearsal on Friday afternoon, but I wanted to make sure you know that the entire School of Music community feels remorse over this unfortunate decision.

We have addressed this situation with those responsible. I assure you that we will implement a new protocol for the review of performance material so that this does not happen again.”

A similar but not identical statement was issued to the media. It read, in part:

“The faculty member who coordinated the host concert trusted that those planning the musical theatre portion of the concert would make appropriate decisions regarding the selection from the musical Rent. Unfortunately, this did not occur and an inappropriate scene was presented. The poor decision made by our Lyric Opera Theatre faculty marred the experience for many. The Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts recognizes an audience’s right to choose what they come to a concert space to see. Unfortunately, the audience was not given a choice as our program contained no warning about the adult content that was presented nor was an announcement made from the stage giving them the opportunity to choose to stay for the performance or not. 

The concerns of parents and directors were taken seriously with personal emails and phone calls made immediately, and a process has been put in place to reconfigure the leadership and organization of the Lyric Opera Theatre program so this does not happen again.”

The media message finished with “The School of Music deeply regrets this situation.” Both messages were issued by Associate Dean and Interim Director of the School of Music, Heather Landes.

Here’s what we don’t know: did “rows and rows” of students exit the auditorium, as one parent asserts? It’s unclear if that parent was even in attendance, or characterizing a situation based on hearsay. Considering that news reports say the school received 14 or 15 calls about the incident, it’s hard to tell how many of the several hundred students were troubled by the performance, though the calls could have come from teachers, rather than parents. We also don’t know what the staging of the scene was precisely, so a characterization of it as being “pornographic” is most probably hyperbolic (and catnip to TV coverage, as well as a caption writer who declared “an extreme performance … left the students shocked and disgusted”), even if a bare behind was flashed. I certainly hope the staging was exuberant and enthusiastic, as the show calls for. [I did attempt to get more details, but save for the prepared statements, received no other response to my inquiries to Prof. Landes and two separate staffers in the Herberger School of Music’s communications office.]

It does appear that the high school teachers who brought their students to the event didn’t know what the programming would be, and it turned up without the context of a full production. While I wouldn’t bat an eye at high schoolers seeing a discrete performance of that song, I grant that some parents and teachers might not condone even a flash of partial nudity or simulated intimacy. Because high schools do have a supervisory right and responsibility over what their students see while under their care, especially when away from school, I agree that somewhere along the way, a step was missed. A heads-up wouldn’t have been out of line, though an actual warning would have been. Although unless these schools have private showers for gym class and school sports, someone’s butt wouldn’t exactly be a revelation. Some pelvic thrusts or a bit of groping? Like it or not, par for the course in so many aspects of our popular culture, familiar except in the most sheltered of teen lives. I’m speculating now, but shudder to think that the portrayal of same sex couples could have brought on such swift disapproval by the offended teens.

A mistake was made, students made a choice not to watch once they saw a glimpse something they preferred not to sit through, no one was harmed, and given what ensued, it’s highly unlikely that such a thing would have ever happened again. The rather profound mea culpas – remorse? really? – that were issued strike me as a bit much, especially with emphatic statement about new protocols and reconfiguring. The disavowal of the scene from Rent is overboard, unless the production went way overboard. Given that mooning provoked the complaints, it’s perhaps a bit glib to say now that the statements suggest asses were being covered, but I can’t resist.

But there’s more. I turn your attention to a statement issued jointly last night by Acting Dean Landes and Dr. William Reber, Director of the Opera and Musical Theatre training programs since 1991 at the ASU School of Music, announcing that Reber would no longer lead the Lyric Opera Theatre program.

“Dr. Reber made the decision to step down from his administrative role as director of the Lyric Opera Theatre program voluntarily, and we respect his decision. He remains a faculty member of the ASU School of Music; where he has served the students of ASU for more than 23 years and will continue to do so. Our school and our students have greatly benefited, and will continue to greatly benefit, from his creative spirit, his commitment and his love and passion for music…

Leadership in the arts requires both artistic vision and difficult work. It also requires the willingness to take responsibility for how that work is presented and communicated. This incident was important enough to the school and its relationship with the Arizona community that Dr. Reber felt he needed to accept responsibility, and he has chosen to use this as a teaching opportunity for his students about the role and responsibility of an arts leader, not just to the organization he leads but also to the community at large.”

I’m not so sanguine about Dr. Reber “needing to accept responsibility” in the way that he did; one never knows the behind the scenes pressures that lead to such a prepared, jointly-issued set of remarks. I can’t help but think that the university felt it needed someone to take blame for this, needed someone publicly shamed, and this was the solution worked out. While I applaud Dr. Reber for not throwing anyone under the bus, it troubles me that the university couldn’t absorb this gaffe and maintain intact a program that was, apparently, working just fine save for this one-off gaffe. Dr. Reber protected his staff, but couldn’t ASU have found a way to fully protect its faculty and programs? 

Unlike a content controversy in a high school alone, where all the stakeholders are close by, a university setting is rather different. In the case of ASU, it’s a public university, so there’s all kinds of governmental politics that come into play. I have no idea what the ASU town-gown situation is, and how that may have affected into this. ASU’s students certainly aren’t necessarily all from Tempe, where the school is located, nor were the high school groups, so this is a statewide issue. But the strongest constituency for a school, its alumni, could be scattered across the country. I fear that a vocal minority has prompted swift results while the majority of Dr. Reber’s potential supporters didn’t even know that a problem existed.

So here’s the deal. If you live in Arizona and believe that Dr. Reber should still be running the Lyric Opera Theatre program (without having his hands tied over the work he does for the university’s students), start writing to the school’s president Dr. Michael Crow (Michael.Crow@asu.edu). Don’t call him names or presume anything about his personal beliefs and politics, just speak out in support of a vital theatre program and urge him to reinstate Dr. Reber to the Lyric Opera Theatre. Do the same if you’re just a supporter of quality arts education, for both high school and college students, no matter where you live. If you’re an alumnus or alumna of ASU, write to Dr. Crow as well, but you might also want to include R.F. “Rick” Shangraw Jr. (rick.shangraw@asu.edu), the head of the ASU Foundation, on your note, and mention whether these circumstances will have any impact on your future donations to the school. That can get a university’s attention.

Early reports and an online petition, since amended, incorrectly had it that Dr. Reber resigned or was forced to resign. He’ll remain on faculty and teach, but it still seems a shame that he’s been separated from the Lyric Opera Theatre program he ran. While some parts of the local community may be satisfied by this outcome, it’s worth noting that such events could cast a pall over the creative arts on campus. To insure that ASU can be a strong resource not only for its current students, but for students who may want to attend in the future, ASU should be standing behind Dr. Reber, acknowledging the error but not bending over backwards to placate the public. Because let me tell you, if aspiring theatre students, if aspiring arts students, hear that at Arizona State, Rent is something to apologize for, they may well think twice about where they want to go to school.

P.S. It may interest you to know that the incoming dean of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Steven Tepper, is the author of the book Not Here, Not Now, Not That: Protest over Art and Culture in America, which by coincidence is on its way to me from Amazon as I write. I’m dying to know what he makes of all this.

Update, April 24 1 p.m.: On Facebook, I saw the following statement shared, which adds very important perspective to this discussion. It is a personal statement from Dr. David Schildkret of the ASU School of Music, and in no way an official one from the school, in response to the online petition:

“A petition is circulating that castigates ASU for allowing Bill Reber to step aside as Director of Lyric Opera Theater. Earlier this month, LOT presented a portion of Rent to high school students without warning of adult content. It was part of an ASU School of Music showcase for the Arizona All-State music festival. Bill, recognizing how damaging this is to our school, has chosen to step aside. I believe the petition, while well-intentioned, is misguided. I posted this on their Facebook page. I am speaking for myself, at no one’s urging, and in no official capacity. Here is the post.

Friends: I speak as a friend and colleague of Bill Reber who deeply admires what he has done. I feel that this petition fails to recognize the honor and nobility Bill has shown by his actions.

Please understand the incident. Students participating in the Arizona All-State came to a concert that was meant to showcase our School of Music. An excerpt from Rent was offered as part of that. The excerpt, “La Vie Bohème,” included explicit language and highly suggestive staging. It was NOT appropriate for a general high school audience, and there was no warning of that. (When the same excerpt was presented in a preview for the Lyric Opera Guild, the staging was toned down. That didn’t happen when the same material was performed for 14-year-olds, and even Bill was surprised by that.)

The students in the audience did not come to see Rent. They did not know (none of us did, in fact) that material that was not school-appropriate would be presented. About a quarter of them left the hall and returned after the Rent excerpt ended.

This is not about a few offended parents. It is about the responsibility of artists to know their audience. It is about what we were trying to present to students and teachers at All-State. The question is not whether Rent itself is problematic. The question is whether this was the suitable occasion for this particular performance. (“Seasons of Love” would have been touching and appropriate and would have caused no such difficulty.)

Make no mistake, this damaged the ASU School of Music. You may not like that, but it is the reality. It undid work to build bridges to local schools that many of us, including Bill Reber, have undertaken with zeal and passion for years.

If in fact the university had caved to a few cranky parents, I would sign the petition in capital letters. But people were legitimately and justifiably offended at an occasion that was meant to be anything but offensive. That is their right.

Please give Bill Reber the credit he deserves. He did not succumb to strongarm tactics: he is more powerful than that. He felt that a wrong choice had been made and took responsibility for it. He has stepped up to say that he recognizes that we accomplish most when we respect our audience. He has stepped up to say that there were better choices to be made and that he could have seen to making them.

I deeply admire Bill for this. He is a model for all of us. By all means, send him letters of affection, thanks, and support: he deserves them. But don’t dishonor him by trivializing his very courageous and noble actions.”

I wish the school had been more forthcoming from the start with this kind of clear information. It mitigates a good deal of what I’ve written, and provides essential context, but I leave my post intact rather than remove or alter it. Thank you, Dr. Schildkret.

Update, April 24, 4 p.m.: Dr. Schildkret has written me directly to respond to something which I questioned in my original piece. He says:

“Rows and rows of people really did walk out of the performance on 4/11. About 25% of the audience left for that piece. Some of that was teachers taking their classes out en masse so that the teachers wouldn’t get in trouble.”

Once again, my thanks to Dr. Schildkret for straight answers to important questions. From here on, I leave everyone to draw their own conclusions.

Timberlane High Performing Arts Center

I have just returned from a trip to Plaistow, New Hampshire, where I went to support students, parents, alumni and members of the community who wanted to speak out against the cancelation of a production of Sweeney Todd at Timberlane High School, announced for production a year ago, but scheduled for 2015. In the wake of the response to the cancelation, the school scheduled an open forum to hear from the community on the issue. This was an important and rare step, since each and every decision of school administrators cannot possibly be opened to organized public discussion, with the media present as well.

But in creating the opportunity, the administrators of Timberlane opened the door to two-and-a-half hours of speaker after speaker extolling the caliber of the show, the importance of theatre in their lives, and how deeply connected they are to the school’s arts program.  Despite the opportunity, no one spoke up against the show. Even though some apparently made their feelings known privately to the administration, or in letters to local papers and on blogs, none would stand to say so in front of their peers in a public setting.

Because I don’t like to give speeches except when I’m invited to do so, I spoke at the session off the cuff, based on what I’d learned about the issue and the community in the days and hours leading up to the event in the high school cafeteria, attempting to address concerns specific to Timberlane. I want to share my remarks with you, with all of the imperfections of impromptu speech. I hope I spoke some sense and maybe even some truth.

The superintendent indicated he would render his decision very shortly, and as I write, a community awaits, as do I.

*   *   *

Into the woods – you have to grope
But that’s the way you learn to cope
Into the woods to find there’s hope
Of getting through the journey.
Into the woods, each time you go
There’s more to learn of what you know…

Those are the words of Stephen Sondheim. Stephen Sondheim is the greatest composer of musical theatre in the past 50 years and possibly in the history of the American musical theatre. His work deserves to be seen and while his work has never been known to as somebody to easily please audiences, the challenge that he presents to every audience is a special challenge for students.

I’ve come up from New York to represent to you that there are people far beyond this community who care about each and every student who wants a great experience in the arts. I don’t do it because I believe that every student in every drama club will go on and become a professional artist. Indeed, I suspect most of them won’t. I come here because I want better audiences for the arts and by being involved in the most challenging work at this stage in their lives, those who take part in his work, those who see this work, become better audiences so that we can have better arts.

You have an extraordinary performing arts center – I’m still in awe of that turntable, I’ve never seen anything like it – and with a facility like that you should be able to use it to its fullest.

No, you can’t please everyone all of the time. I’m amazed to find the number of performances that you have here. In the case of this show, it will not please everyone, it never has. But it is a masterwork of musical theatre. The original cast recording was just announced to be inducted into the Library of Congress today.

People like to focus on the more lurid aspects of Sweeney Todd. But Sweeney Todd is not about its actions; Sweeney Todd is about morality, about justice, about the lengths people will go to and the lengths they’re driven to when they face injustice.

No, I would not bring a seven year old to Sweeney Todd. But I believe and I am told that there are many other opportunities in this community for people of all ages at different times to have different experiences. This is not – and I do know this script, I know this script particularly well – that you are not proposing to do the original script. Stephen Sondheim has authorized a school edition of Sweeney Todd which removes some of the material which would be difficult for high schools to endorse or for students to perform. It’s not neutered but it is toned down. Countless high schools do this show every year across the country. The students here should be able to have the opportunities that their peers, who they will be facing when they go on to college, had at their schools.

There are many stories of school shows which are canceled at the last minute. This is by no means the case – you have a year. You have a year to place the show in context, to inform not just in the students in the drama club, but all of the students, all of the parents, all of this community, through a range of educational activities that can be put into place. Other schools have done it. I pledge myself as a resource to help you find what’s been done elsewhere, what’s been successful and even people who can come in and help with those programs. Nobody would walk into this show and be surprised by what is happening. Frankly, given what has surrounded this in the past week, I think we’re past that.

Fundamentally, I believe student theatre is first and foremost for the students who make it and then if there is there is the opportunity for people beyond their family members to come and see it, that’s fantastic. But the experience is for the students. That’s what school is for.

I truly hope that a year from now, I will be driving back up from the city to see Sweeney Todd.

Stephen Sondheim is a vastly smarter man than I am, so I will finish again with his words.

Careful with what you say,

Children will listen.
Careful you do it too.
Children will see.
And learn.
Guide them but step away,
And children will glisten.
Tamper with what is true,
And children will turn,
If just to be free.
The more you protect them,
The more they reject you.
The more you reflect them,
The more they respect you.

Thank you very much.

*   *   *

Update, April 10: I am delighted to report that late this afternoon, Dr. Earl Metzler of the Timberlane School District reversed the decision to cancel Sweeney Todd and the show is now back on the Timberlane High schedule for 2015. The decision came about thanks to the respectful yet passionate efforts of the students and parents of Timberlane and members of the greater Plaistow community. I look forward to seeing them once again, and my favorite musical, a year from now.