Remember a week or so ago, when I posted a report about a small town where trying to educate kids about opera by way of “Faust” was considered too radical?
Now another town has decided that “Grease” and “The Crucible” are inappropriate (the NY Times notes that they are the second-most frequently performed musical and drama in US schools). And all it took was three letters to the school’s principal to start the censorship ball rolling.
Even better is the chilling effect this will have for upcoming productions and even on the drama teacher’s career:
The teacher and her students are now ruling out future productions they once considered for their entertainment value alone, like “Little Shop of Horrors,” a musical that features a cannibalistic plant, which they had discussed doing next fall.
Torii Davis, a junior, said that in her psychology class earlier that day, most students predicted that “Little Shop of Horrors” would never pass the test.
“Audrey works in a flower shop,” Ms. Davis said. “She has a boyfriend who beats her. That could be controversial.”
Ms. DeVore went down a list of the most commonly performed musicals and dramas on high school stages, and ticked off the potentially offensive aspects. ” ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ has smoking and drinking. ‘Oklahoma,’ there’s a scene where she’s almost raped. ‘Diary of Anne Frank,’ would you take a 6-year-old?” the drama teacher asked.
“How am I supposed to know what’s appropriate when I don’t have any written guidelines, and it seems that what was appropriate yesterday isn’t appropriate today?” Ms. DeVore asked. The teacher said she had been warned that because of the controversy, the school board might not renew her contract for next year.
I wonder what those head-in-the-sand culture bigots would think of “South Pacific” … the guy who sleeps with a Polynesian girl gets killed off, after all … maybe they would consider that appropriate punishment for immoral behavior. The underlying message, that bigotry will lead to unhappiness, might just sail right over their heads though.
ADDENDUM: Something I remembered after I hit the “submit” button — back in the day, quite a few of the music/drama types in my high school class were enamoured of the Stephen Schwartz musical, “Godspell” (which is a muscal adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew). We begged our theater teacher to schedule a production of it. He refused, saying it would be too controversial. And given that the Jewish population of our school was probably better than 50% I suppose he was right. He did not generally shy away from controversial subject matter — one of the productions we did do during my years at school was the Schmidt / Jones piece “Celebration”, which includes a number in which two characters are making love while a third person watches.
Is there a point to my anecdote? Not really, I just thought it was interesting to show how what is and is not ‘appropriate’ for high school students can vary so widely.