Friday, January 03, 2014
Taking the Drama Out of High School
HowlRound: There is a violent epidemic that is silently ravaging high schools across the country, and its name is censorship. An increasingly large number of high school theater departments across the United States are winding up in the news and it’s not due to rave reviews. A quick Google search reveals some shocking ignorance. Take, for example, The John Jay High School in Cross River, New York, which made headlines in 2007 after banning the use of the word “vagina” in their reading of The Vagina Monologues, or The Trumbull High School in Trumbull, Connecticut, where, just last week administrators abruptly cancelled a production of Rent weeks before it was to be staged because it was too “racy,” or—my personal favorite—The Green Valley High School in Las Vegas, where parents took the school to court over their production of The Laramie Project on account of its homosexual themes.
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This article makes some great points. No high-schooler is going to be able to relate to "Suessical" or "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." You can debate the artistic merit of these musicals all they want, but they are kids shows, designed for 10 year olds, not young adults that are dealing with lives a lot more complex than a children's book. Shows like "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and "Grease" might be charming classics, but no 17 year old football player is going to care about a stenographer in 1922 trying to find a husband. If there's one way we want to kill theatre for good, its going to be by alienating every child in the country by making sure that they believe theatre is outdated, silly, and unrelatable. Most highschoolers don't realize how powerful theatre can be, simply because they've never seen powerful theatre.
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