Public & Culture Project produce a high-school banned play

Note to all high school principals: cancelling a student-written play doesn't always make people sit down and shut up. The Public Theater AND The Culture Project will stage "Voices in Conflict", a play written and performed by high schoolers, originally as part of a class project. The play is about the Iraq war, and reportedly consists of monologues from soldiers' points of view. The high school production was cancelled by Principal Timothy H. Canty, who claims he was worried about the reaction from locals, "who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving," and also questioned the capabilities of the students by citing concerns about "political balance and sourcing." Since when is it the job of a play to achieve political balance or equality? Isn't being fair and balanced the job of the news? Oh wait...

If you're something of a geograph-ist like me, you might assume that the high school is located somewhere in the conservative midwest. Nope - it's Wilton High School, in Connecticut. It's actually not surprising that liberal areas can still be very limited when it comes to the freedom of speech for young people. When I was in high school in New Jersey, our school got a lot of attention for a scandal involving some nasty hazing going on within the wrestling team. Though it was all over the Star Ledger and other papers, our newspaper was explicitly instructed not to write a word about it. Of course, the main perpetrator of the hazing (which had involved students tying a pre-freshman kid down to a chair and doing *horrible* things to him) had been the son of the school's superintendant, so it came as no great shock that we weren't allowed to cover it. The two stories aren't really that similar, but my experience makes me all the more happy to see the Connecticut students getting so much attention for their play.

They were also on Good Morning America a few weeks ago to talk about the banning of the show in their school. ConnecticutBlog has clip of the appearance, and quotes:

Senior Seth Koproski said the play is not about politics. "We didn't want to spew propaganda," Koproski said. "We wanted to create a discussion."

The slightly defensive tone of Koproski's statement says a lot about how attacked the students must feel - I'll bet there have been a lot of accusations that spewing propaganda was, in fact, their aim, whether consious or unconsious. The Public has announced that the show will be staged on June 15th (tentative date), with a performance at The Culture Project the preceding weekend.

Update: Both Isaac at Parabasis and Gothamist have picked up the story. Looks like Wilton High is getting more attention than it's principal bargained for!