25 March 2007
Site News - site format, news, not funny
Originally Posted Mar 25, 2007 – 11:47P [Site News]
A few minor changes to format should make things prettier and more accessible to boot. I’ve also created a column for a news archive to shorten the scrolling length of this front page.
Labels: news, not funny, site format
Voices.
Controversy abounds in the small, wealthy town of Wilton, CT, my home town. Recently a group of high school students in an advanced theater class, many of whom I knew personally, decided to create something real. They took real life accounts of U.S. soldiers involved in the Iraq war and arranged them as a play—a play to spark discussion, thoughtfulness, and most importantly, awareness. They planned to perform this play at the school’s theater with their teacher as director.
Timothy Canty, the principal of Wilton High School, saw things differently. The play called Voices of Conflict, he said, was originally shut down because he thought it “played to political bias.” In this case, he meant an “anti-war” bias.
Wilton High School has made a name for itself in the past few years by enacting some controversial policies in response to the actions of student organizations. According to a recent article in The New York Times, the high school has created policies such as requiring yearbook quotes to be from well-known sources in response to some coded messages, requiring that all fliers be pre-approved by the administration in response to a Gay Straight Alliance effort to wallpaper a stairwell with fliers, and banning people from wearing bandanas in an effort to minimize the appearance of “gang symbols” in school. In the last case, hundreds of students turned up to school the very next day wearing at least one bandana each. The school repealed the policy under this pressure and, if I remember correctly, Mr. Canty (then Acting Principal) issued an apology to the student body.
The issue of censorship at Wilton High School holds particular emotions in my heart. As a senior, I gave up the chance to be in the annual “Senior Show” musical for the opportunity to direct a play I wrote, titled Treatment, with the school’s drama club, the Little Theater Company. After months of revision to bring the content of the play to an acceptable level for the administration to let it go up, on the very day auditions were scheduled to run, it was canceled due to a parental complaint about two secondary characters’ sexual orientations.
The difference with Voices of Conflict is that the topic itself is controversial. In my play, the bit that caused some reservations was not even the focus of the play. I had not written the play for the sake of lesbians, nor was I encouraging people to be lesbians themselves. But just because of these characters, the administration did not believe that the student body was mature enough to act in or be part of the audience for a production of it.
Mr. Canty’s argument for Voices is similar: to protect the student body. If I were not trying my best to be unbiased (and I may have failed this cause already), I would find his motivation misled and his actions to achieve the opposite. By closing down the production, the administration may be further sheltering the potential audience of the play, closing them off from the awareness of what could potentially be the future for some of them. These students are the next generation of potential eligible soldiers. I personally would want to know everything I could about what life in war is like before I signed up for service.
The basis for Mr. Canty’s censorship is two-fold: the school may not represent a political point of view, and the school must be held responsible for protecting the student body, mind, and spirit. The students who put together the play rewrote the script to fit these needs, creating a version that is more reflective, and though at times rough, it allows every point of view on the war. The latest draft quotes US soldiers, family of soldiers, and Iraqis themselves, as well as opening with a reading from a letter written by Nick Maderas, a Wilton High School alumnus who was killed in action in Iraq this past year. Despite these revisions, however, the administration is unmoved.
The controversy of this play is not localized. In addition to the above NY Times article, reports about these events have appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America and on Fox 5 New York, as well as sparking discussion on a number of groups on the popular Facebook networking site, including one administered by the people behind the production. More publicity is likely on the way.
The group has received a number of offers from a variety of professionals to produce the play all over the country on their website, where full versions of the early and later drafts of the play can be read.
Labels: censorship, Iraq war, New York Times, plays, theater, theatre, true story, Voices of Conflict, Wilton High School, young writers
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