Serpa described it as letting the show “peacefully die,” in a second Twitter video. But that move isn’t happening.Īfter conversations between Serpa and the school, subsequent to the canceled performances, they reached what was described as a mutual decision not to go forward with the show on or off campus.
Being a K-12 institution, the expectation of our drama programs is that every production they do is to be age-appropriate content.”Īn online fundraising campaign, to move the production off campus, quickly raised more than $1,000. Speaking to The Fresno Bee, Clovis Unified spokesperson Kelly Avants denied the charge of homophobia, saying “We own the fact that it should never have even been approved as a senior production in the first place. “Don’t put them in this bubble and darkness … because you couldn’t find the courage to talk to your own child about the fact that people are different.” “Talk with your children about reality,” urged Serpa in his video. The remaining performances were immediately shut down. Jared Serpa, the student directing the show as his senior project, as part of the school’s drama program known as Bear Stage, made the charge in an online video, citing a complaint by a member of the audience at the first performance and a conversation he had with a faculty member which specifically identified the gay character as being problematic, should a parent bring a young child and have to explain why one woman was trying to kiss another. Homophobia was cited as the cause of the cancellation of No Exit in Clovis CA, at Buchanan High School in late January. Poster design by Dominic Grijalva for No Exit at Buchanan High (via Facebook) Ragtime opens in one week.īut even as the initial decision adverse to Ragtime was being reversed, productions in Fresno CA and Danville PA were irrevocably ended, with school officials forcing a student-directed production of Sartre’s No Exit to end after the first of its three performances, and the school edition of Avenue Q canceled in favor of James and the Giant Peach, to be performed in April. It had sufficient time to have an effect, echoing other such efforts in recent years in Plaistow NH over Sweeney Todd and Trumbull CT over Rent.
A broad lobbying effort ensued to make the case that Ragtime was much more than the handful of slurs that are essential to the work, and advance its message of acceptance and inclusion. The school publicly announced its plan to alter the play’s text, to placate those who objected to words within it, which if enacted would have caused the school to lose the rights to perform the show at all. The decision by the school administration to alter all “offensive” language in the play, without permission from the licensing house or the authors, arose while the show was in rehearsals, six weeks before performances were to begin. The recent debate in Cherry Hill NJ over Ragtime is an excellent case in point. At other times, one finds webpages like the one above, from Danville Area High School in Pennsylvania in late January. When incidences of high school theatre censorship arise, the point at which they occur, and when that breaks out beyond school walls, can be central to efforts to reverse the decision.
0 kommentar(er)
