Currently I am coming to you from Fargo, ND where I have secured a summer job teaching Acting and Playwrighting to impressionable high school youths at an "arts camp" in the soft underbelly of the country. I'm now a little clearer on how Dorothy must have felt when she found herself in the merry ol' land of Oz. No, Toto, this ain't the big city any longer, not even close. Forgetting for a moment the Chinese Food arrives at table with gravy on it (and I'm talking this deep brown country gravy) or that you can order fried wonton stuffed with cream cheese, or that every breakfast at the local diner automatically comes with a side of smooth peanut butter in what can only be described as a plastic specimen cup, or that every place seems to serve something called beer/cheese soup, or that the first and only Caesar salad I ordered was made with iceberg lettuce, or that the countryside is littered with hundreds of nuclear missile silos, some less than ten miles from where I'm living and in the very neighborhoods of some of my students,
this place is so Twin Peaks-ean it takes your breath away. I'm working at the Trollwood Performing Arts School, in Trollwood Park. The school is affiliated with the Fargo Public School District. Apparently, there are funding concerns that plague this arts institution as is the normal course of events in this day and age. That being stated let me lay this out for you: One member of the administration here, when directing a play for a local high school, edited (along with the word "toilet" - I can't explain it, I only report) he edited the words Nazi and Jew from a stage production of The Diary Of Anne Frank because he didn't want to offend... WHO EXACTLY?
I almost feel the need to repeat that, so it's more likely to sink in, instead I will simply assume that you have gone back over it until you fully comprehend the scope of a mind-set that would firstly conceive of such a concern and secondly execute a censorship so mis-guided so as to make it implausible to anybody with at least two last brain cells left to click together to make up half a thought. What could the fear in that little pea brain have been? "I don't want to offend any members of the American Nazi Party who might drop in on our production of Anne Frank and be so taken with our little play that they'd care to become funders to the program"?Is that what might have guided this action? Or does the director secretly know he has people sympathetic to the cause of the Nazi's on his board of directors so to make the play more palatable to his own round table of Fourth Reich supporters he actually changed the line, "Those damn Nazi's," to (and I am not making this up, how could I?) "Those darn people." Wow, talk about letting a whole genocidal machine off the hook. "Those Darn People" might be invoked to describe The Apple Dumpling Gang , or those crazy kids on Saved by the Bell, not so much a political/military organization responsible for implementing a plan calling for the systematic extinction of every person of color on earth and the murder of over eleven million human beings. Then again, witness the exchange between my colleague Paula Cole and William, a young gentleman in a pub across the border into Minnesota. We're playing pool and yours truly was in control of the table. I do not mean to mis-represent my pool playing skills, I was merely beating a handful of Acting, Stage Make-up, Voice & Movement, and Dance instructors who were hanging out in this pub after a hard week of teaching. Up to the table saunters William, a local who is really there to hear his friend's band who are supposed to take the stage in the back room at ten or so. Now William has some time to kill as the band is inevitably going to be going up late as is the case with bands the world over, sister cities Fargo/Moorehead included. William imparted the local favorite witticism to my friend Paula thusly, "Yeah, I like living in Moorehead, because here we all get More Head!" Needless to say, she did not go home with him, as was (I assume) his hope. Anyway, I happen to notice on William's right hand, a crude ink rendering of a small blue swastika. I pointed this out to Paula who by this time happened to be partnered with our local friend in a game of "Team" eight-ball. Paula took advantage of the next convenient opportunity to inquire after the hooked cross on the back of her partner's hand. William studied the drawing, shrugged and explained that the doorman had drawn it on as a way of divining later who had paid the door cover for the band and who had not. When asked if the drawing bothered him he answered, "Not really. I'm Irish."If the overall message here wasn't so sick the irony of that statement might have made me laugh. Oh, sure, the Irish. Now, there's a group of people who can't appreciate oppression. Perhaps he missed the point, perhaps he should have stated, "No, I live in the mid-west". He did go on to say that it probably didn't bother him because he was "used to it." Apparently this swastika drawing was neither a surprise nor anywhere near an isolated event. Back at Trollwood. The big event of the summer here is the musical. Every year Trollwood puts on a musical in their outdoor venue. It was billed to me as the single most attended event in the city of Fargo. Past productions include Guys and Dolls, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and West Side Story. This year they decided to mount a production of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. In this play there are three basic female characters;
Against this backdrop I have been hired to direct a play at something they've dubbed the Dakota Young Playwright's Festival. This festival was to take the plays written during the June Session (where I taught Playwrighting, remember?) and direct them for the public using only student written material and actors. Can you guess what kinds of subject matter interested these young students?
Can you guess the kind of language a high school junior might pepper his or her play with, especially when faced with no limits on content and language? Yeah. I was hired to teach them to express their creativity. I don't know if you've ever tried to do that, but I don't know of any way to do it with boundaries, or imposed limitations. That's why I saddled them with none. I was also given no reason to believe that there would be any problem along those lines. This is called a Cultural Arts Institution, after all. There was no FUCK, CUNT, SNATCH, or GODDAMN in any of the final plays chosen. When the administration finally got around to reading the scripts (a week and a half into rehearsal), we were presented with a list of words that must be done away with. The list included shit, bitch, God, hell, ass, and damn. The woman running the whole program originally stated that it wasn't her, no the school board would not allow such language and that Trollwood was an arm of the school board. After we contacted her immediate superior at that very same school board, he told us that he had no problem with the language. This information led her to send the scripts to his boss, the superintendent of schools. Her fear, stated earlier, but later denied, seems to be that the offensive nature of the plays (was that hell, bitch, shit, or damn?) will cause certain funders to withhold contributions for following sessions. This fear seems groundless as there has been so little publicity that for all most of Fargo has any idea, there is nothing going on at the school on our performance days except for the aforementioned musical. We currently await word on the status of our project. The plays are being threatened right up to the week-end before our Monday opening night. The Arts Administrators are Censoring Young Artists in Fargo! Not on any principle, or misguided moralistic or religious stance! And let's not forget every censor in history has had some rationalization for their censorship. I'm sure the Nazis burned books out of some sense of moral superiority. Books get banned in order that "concerned citizens" protect their impressionable children, or religious organizations censor content in order to protect their own on some moral or religious precept. It doesn't matter what the intention is. The act of censorship is, on its face, evil. There are two camps, the censored and the censors. There is no middle ground. The administrators in charge have chosen to come down on the side of censorship. Again, not even for some whacked-out misguided sense of what is right. No. The administration is censoring these students for one reason and one reason only; to get their grubby hands on the thirty pieces of silver, they feel is so rightfully theirs. And in the guise of artists they sell their souls for the basest of all rewards: Money. Censorship is forgivable under no circumstances. It is a privilege to be offended. If a man's life has been so easy that the word damn actually offends him, then he should shut up and thank God for the easy ride. Addendum: Plays cancelled. Censorship permitted. Students injured.
"Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion"
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."
"The crime of book purging is that it involves the rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search" | |||||||
