When the seniors graduate tomorrow at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge GA, approximately 90 miles north of Atlanta, the sporting events will all be over and the yearbook published. But for the drama students at Fannin, there will be words left unspoken, because last weekend, following the first of two planned performances of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the show was shut down, with students and parents being informed that the second performance would not be permitted. Over the course of the next 48 hours, the reasons given for the cancelation would change, but the show remained shuttered and, with the school year over, there’s no possibility of the second performance taking place.
In accounts from multiple students and parents, the Friday evening performance went off without incident. But on Saturday morning, word of the cancelation began filtering out. Angela Grist, a parent with two students in the play, described the Saturday morning in her house as, “The kids all got messages stating that, what the kids were told initially, was that somebody in the audience didn’t like the context of the play and said that it was demonic and disgusting and that it was immediately shut down. I got up and the kids were just so upset. I mean my daughter’s crying, my adopted son is close to tears telling me what happened. I reached out to the school and got no reply at all.”
Abigail Ridings, the senior who is president of the drama club and was directing the production, told a similar story. “I walked into my mom’s bedroom Saturday morning, the night after our first show, and she told me that the show had been canceled, that she just got off the phone with my principal. He said that certain people had to ‘repent after watching the show,’ as a joke, and that it was canceled due to parent complaints.” Asked about the specific nature of the complaints as explained to her mother, Ridings elaborated saying that the play was “too evil and disgusting and things like that.”
And so it seems that the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledge American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust.
The students and parents rapidly tried to see about offering the second performance at another local venue, but while there were offers on the table, concerns grew that it wasn’t permissible, because the license for the show was specific to the high school and that moving the performance might violate the contract. Instead, the students ended up pulling together a showcase of their talents using other material, which was performed that weekend for those who didn’t get to see The Crucible, as well as for those who did.
But that was not the end of the incident, because come Monday, the school issued a statement about the cancelation that was wholly different than what students and parents were initially told. In an unsigned statement on school letterhead, with five staffers including Dr. Scott Ramsay and athletic director Jeremy King listed among the leadership, the statement began:
“After Friday night’s performance of The Crucible, we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play. Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script. These alterations were not approved by the licensing company or administration. The performance contract for The Crucible does not allow modifications without prior written approval. Failing to follow the proper licensing approval process for additions led to a breach in our contract with the play’s publisher. The infraction resulted in an automatic termination of the licensing agreement. The second performance of The Crucible could not occur because we were no longer covered by a copyright agreement.”
Suddenly, the demonic and disgusting content had been magically transformed into a copyright violation. Three students stated that no words of the text had been changed in any way. The only possible material in the production that might have given the licensor pause was that the production began with a wordless scene of the young women of Salem dancing in the woods at night, enacting what is described by dialogue in the text, an interpretive choice that was unlikely to have been in violation of the license since it altered not the text, the spirit nor the intention of the show. Would it have been advisable to have checked with the licensor? Yes. Was it flagrantly out of bounds? I think not.
It’s important to note that the production was proceeding without the supervision of the drama teacher at the high school, who had departed two weeks earlier – some said he was forced to resign, others said fired – leaving the students to complete work on the show themselves. It left them without the natural advocate for the show and conduit of information with the administration. However, the remaining rehearsals, with the purportedly offending staging, had been repeatedly performed with administrative personnel present in a supervisory role.
It’s rare, barring something egregious, that a school would take it upon itself to shut a show down over their own perceived violation of copyright without consultation with the licensing entity, in this case Broadway Licensing/Dramatists Play Service. It’s highly unlikely that after a single performance on a Friday night, someone had made a complaint to Broadway Licensing and the company itself had contacted the school so quickly to lodge an objection, so that the school would make a decision within ours to cancel to avoid any further ostensible violation. And if indeed the reason for the cancelation was the wordless opening, the school failed to offer the students the opportunity to proceed without the supposedly scofflaw scene in place. So the timing is questionable and the solution draconian.
Parent Angela Grist said that she reached out to Broadway Licensing herself and, in communication with a staffer she identified as “Stephanie C.” Grist said, “She told me that everything that I told her did not sound like copyright infringement.”
Separately, another parent, Amber Cather Herendon, in a phone call commemorated by a video she posted online, spoke with a person she identified as another customer service rep at Broadway Licensing. That unnamed person, while careful to note that the Miller estate is very careful about permitting alterations to the text, said that their company’s director was aware of and exploring the incident further, but that, “We are not traditionally one to shut productions down, even if we are under the impression that copyright is being infringed on. At the very least we will reach out and say ‘hey, we understand that X is happening or Y is happening. We may have to shut productions down, but it would not be as abrupt as this production seems to be.” They went on to say, “Again, we’re not sure who provided the authorization to shut the production down. We certainly wouldn’t have done that completely. At the very least we would have just requested that the [unintelligible] be formally submitted so that we could determine if that is something we could alter.”
I have reached out to both the principal at Fannin County High as well as representatives from Broadway Licensing for comment and clarification and this post will be updated should they respond. But with two separate parental accounts, one recorded, it seems that the school’s administration decided, after content complaints, to use the wordless opening scene, an interpretive choice, as a pretext for shutting the show down, after bowing to complaints about the show’s actual content, namely the words of Arthur Miller and his characters.
Cast member Aiden McBee said of the copyright claim, “The timeline doesn’t make sense, if they learned it was copyright after the fact.” McBee went on to say, “They say they understand and appreciate the arts, but I just don’t believe it, because to appreciate the arts you have to understand. The Crucible is a message of authority and of distrust, which is quite ironic. I just want clear communication.”
Student Caden Gerald, who played John Proctor in the show and who said he was one of eight graduation seniors in the production, posted a five minute video recounting the incident and his feelings. He said, Some people noted, on Blue Ridge Facebook groups and on Instagram, that the show was demonic and disgusting – a show that called out a real issue of McCarthyism, a show that does not ridicule anything religious.” He continued, “I personally believe that this is a disgusting example of excellent PR training, an example of deflecting accountability and blame.”
Channeling the oratory of his character, Gerald said, “John Proctor is being forced to sign away his friends because of one cry against them. To draw parallel to real life, I ask you to ask yourselves, how may you teach us students to walk like men and women in this world when you sell us to lies and opinion, deflecting blame to our good names that we have made. Us students have not lived long enough to make great names of ourselves before you have started to tarnish them – names of us, children and young adults. How may we walk in this world when you have forced us to be sat?”
All three students quoted here, and parent Angela Grist, believe that the school owes the students an explanation and several demanded an apology for the events that shuttered the show. The silence from the school may be designed to run out the clock, with school over and graduation complete in less than two days. The community of Blue Ridge, and the cast and families of The Crucible, deserve more.
P.S. In Miller’s All My Sons, during the opening scene, characters discuss a fierce storm the night before that felled a nearby tree. In Simon McBurney’s 2008 Broadway production, the play began with a wordless scene in which a storm was depicted onstage and audiences saw the tree felled by wind and lighting. The scene is only described in dialogue, it is not part of the text.
