Once upon a time in college, I started a theater group with my friend Scott. We called it Roundtable. Just like King Arthur's Round Table, the idea was that there would be no head. It was a collective. There were already theater groups, so ours had to have a different angle, so we chose to make it about putting up original theater. This reinforced the idea that we wanted everyone to have their voice heard. We would create a platform that allowed artists (some good, some not so good) to develop. We weren't going to decide what was good or bad, but let the audience decide.
So, we made announcements, and put up fliers. There was a lot of interest in our group, which was great. Unfortunately, when we organized our first writers meeting, only one other person showed up. I'll call him Wolfboy, because I honestly can't remember his name, and that later became his nickname, which I hope if he ever reads this that he's okay with that. He had an idea for an experimental shadow play. He described it as an epic poem about a man who has sex with a woman and then kills her. This sounded like it could be really awesome, or horrible, but it was unlikely to fall anywhere in between, and given that he was a freshman, I suspected the latter was the most likely scenario. Of course, Scott and I weren't going to make that decision for the audience.
Scott and I both had short scenes, but that wasn't really enough for an evening, and there seemed to be a lot of people who wanted to be involved, so of course we told Wolfboy that he could do his play. So Scott and I concluded that if the writers weren't coming to us, we would have to go out and find them.
Somehow we rounded up two seniors, John Stinson and John Roberts, and they really helped Scott and I take the evening to the next level. They were writers, and they also helped bring in even more talent. They were wizened veterans to Scott and I's brash upstarts. By the end of our open auditions, we were really excited about the direction the evening was going to take. There was a little concern about one of the pieces, though.
Jen Sampson (John Roberts then girlfriend, and now wife) wrote a piece about which my grandmother (who later saw the production) described as having "very colorful language", which was a complete understatement. One of the characters in her piece was a drunken frat dude, who spoke in the foulest, crassest language imaginable. For a moment, and only a moment mind you, we worried that we might need to tone it down. But we quickly got behind the piece, because censorship is bad. And since a woman wrote it, we figured our bases were covered.
At any rate, we were very excited about the night after the auditions. John Roberts described it as when you go and see a local band, and discover that their really awesome.
A few weeks into production, things seem to be going smoothly. I had a weekly radio-show on the local radio-station, WKCO, and I used it as an opportunity to promote the upcoming production. I invited the playwrights to come on different nights to help promote the show, because we took pride in our absolute lack of shame in self-promoting. One night, I had Wolboy on. He had kind of fallen off my radar, because he managed to cast his piece himself, and he was kind of a producer's dream, because he was handling all the details himself. This later turned out to be a mistake.
I definitely noticed a few themes in his writing that night. There were a lot of wolves, and a lot of references to women being impaled. He even had images in a sketchbook, which were pretty gothic and graphic. I think the case could be made that some of the poems, and sketches were misogynistic, but he really didn't cross any lines that I could see. Although, I should say that that particular radio show generated my one and only call-in at WKCO that year when someone called to say, "I think y'all are a bunch of fuckin' psychos." And that was a guy.
At any rate, the night of the show was coming up, and we needed to have a few run-throughs. Everyone had been rehearsing the individual pieces separately, and now we were going to see what we had as a whole. It was an exciting moment, because it turns out we had a pretty awesome show on our hands. I already had a good feeling about the writing, but the acting was phenomenal. How'd we string together such talent?
Now Wolfboy's show posed some logistical problems. He was doing a shadow play, which required a sheet across the stage (which was tiny), and a lamp to project the shadows on the sheet, and the actors were going to be naked, and because there were no dressing rooms, timing became very important. We were afraid of losing momentum with a long set-up and take-down time, so we had a few options. We could do it at the end, which was kind of out of the question. We weren't going to give the freshman the closing slot. The show didn't really need an intermission, but we had to consider that option. Or we could open the show with a shadow play. Bottom line, we needed to see the play in its entirety to make a decision.
For our first run-through, we hadn't decided where the pieces would fall, so we did the shadow play at the end. I had been right. The play could have been really awesome or horrible, and it turns out that it wasn't really awesome. This had me leaning towards having the play be an opener, because I worried that if we did it before an intermission, people might walk out. Scott and I were hemming and hawing on the order at that point. The program had to go to the printers, which meant that we had to decide on an order. It turns out that the order didn't matter, because the play was found to be so offensive to about half of the actors and writers, that they were contemplating walking out of the production.
I was floored. I had invested so much of my time and energy into this production, and I knew that it was going to be a hit, but until that point I had simply seen that shadow-play as an imperfection in an otherwise great evening. Now it was threatening to derail the whole night. I figured that there had to be a compromise. The offended side (largely led by Stinson) argued for making a statement that they did not condone the piece in any way. This seemed reasonable to me. Fight free speech with free speech. But then David Skinner (one of the actors, and the only one to advocate for Wolfboy), argued that such an approach would be a betrayal to the spirit of the night. He had later argued that he didn't really like the play, but argued for its inclusion on principle.
At some point Scott and I were asked what we thought about the matter, and Scott looks at me as if to say, "Would you like to jump on that grenade or shall I?" So I have been under a lot of stress and I give a big speech about how stupid everyone was being, to demonstrate that I wasn't really taking anyone's side, and then said that the shadow-play stays in the production, and thought that that was the end of it.
The next day- the day of the production- I get called into the Head of Student Activities Office. She's the one who's job it is to make sure that none of the groups on campus are engaging in human sacrifice, or anything untoward. I'll call her Mrs. Desz, because she reminds me of my friend Samantha Desz. Someone from the production had given her the details of the play, and she informed me that she wasn't entirely certain, but that it might be illegal, because we are charging money and there was nudity. She made it clear that allowing the shadow-play to go on would jeopardize Roundtable's funding, and we might lose our status as a club on campus. My every interaction with her had been very friendly up until that moment, and she was saying in so many words, "I want to be your buddy, but I just drew a line in the sand." In hindsight, I can see why there was a new Head of Student Activities every year.
Now I had to and tell Wolfboy that we weren't going to let him do his play. So Scott and I got together with Wolfboy, and we explained the situation. We could make the case that it was the college that had come to the decision, but I realize that Mrs. Desz hadn't actually made that call, she was pressuring me to make the call (and that was a big mistake), and I also recall that there was uncertainty about the matter. Could the actors be considered naked, if you can't see their bodies? Really we were taking about the shadows of naughty bits- not the naughty bits themselves. But ultimately, the solution was to side-step the nudity question altogether and focus on the payment question.
Now there was no chance that we weren't going to charge. The last production we had done, we had managed to make money for pizza and beer, and I figured that we would have a helluva blowout after this one given the size of the cast and crew. But what if we had the performance as planned- without the shadow-play? We could then allow everyone to leave that wanted to, and anyone who hadn't paid, could enter at that point and see the production for free. Wolfboy was happy with the arrangement, and agreed that we would only have the shadow-play for one night, because really he just wanted his group of friends to see it, right? The people who had been offended by the piece were okay with the arrangement. How could they object? The show was technically no longer part of the same production. Scott and I were okay with it, because we had provided a platform for new art, as we had said we would without editorial interference.
Now Kenyon College is a small school, so by opening night, it seemed like everybody had gotten wind of the controversy, and there was quite a crowd. We sold out, and when the production was over, a crowd came in- standing room only- to watch the shadow play, which my play-writing professor, Wendy MacLeod described as "a unique instance of flaccid lovemaking," which is a good metaphor for the entire experience: a lot of foreplay with no erection.
I was called in to see Mrs. Desz, and without any formalities she said, "So I hear he did it anyway," and she gave me a withering look that said, "I had better not get fired over this, but it might be my own damn fault." So we had gone ahead and done it, and we were ready to face the music, but ultimately nothing happened. Maybe she accepted our explanation, or maybe nobody felt it was worth their time in the administration to pursue the matter further.
I've often looked back at that episode in my life, and it's one of the few times that I have no regrets. I think to myself, Wow. I did that. And it's not because I stood up for the principle of free speech. I think free speech is good, but contextualization is sometimes necessary. It's not because I helped put on an evening of great entertainment, though I did that. It's because I got to be a part of a great process, and work with great people who produced great results. And we did so, by letting everyone's voice be heard. And when we disagreed with each other, we didn't meet each other halfway, because to do so would be to betray our principles. Instead, we came up with a creative solution that was on no one's radar initially, but became apparent only because we had exhausted all our other options. We worked our asses off, and when it was my time to shine, I stepped up and did my part, because that is the very spirit of democracy. And if you think this story is about a college theater group, you might have missed the point.
Still, I can't help but wonder: who told Mrs. Desz about the shadow-play in the first place?
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