Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School
WILTON, Conn. — Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year’s “West Side Story,” performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” on stage last fall in the school’s smaller theater.
For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.
“In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member. “What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”
But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.
The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the play might hurt Wilton families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,” and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students.”
“It would be easy to look at this case on first glance and decide this is a question of censorship or academic freedom,” said Mr. Canty, who attended Wilton High himself in the 1970s and has been its principal for three years. “In some minds, I can see how they would react this way. But quite frankly, it’s a false argument.”
At least 10 students involved in the production, however, said that the principal had told them the material was too inflammatory, and that only someone who had actually served in the war could understand the experience. They said that Gabby Alessi-Friedlander, a Wilton junior whose brother is serving in Iraq, had complained about the play, and that the principal barred the class from performing it even after they changed the script to respond to concerns about balance.
“He told us the student body is unprepared to hear about the war from students, and we aren’t prepared to answer questions from the audience and it wasn’t our place to tell them what soldiers were thinking,” said Sarah Anderson, a 17-year-old senior who planned to play the role of a military policewoman.
Bonnie Dickinson, who has been teaching theater at the school for 13 years, said, “If I had just done ‘Grease,’ this would not be happening.”
Frustration over the inelegant finale has quickly spread across campus and through Wilton, and has led to protest online through Facebook and other Web sites.
“To me, it was outrageous,’’ said Jim Anderson, Sarah’s father. “Here these kids are really trying to make a meaningful effort to educate, to illuminate their fellow students, and the administration, of all people, is shutting them down.”
First Amendment lawyers said Mr. Canty had some leeway to limit speech that might be disruptive and to consider the educational merit of what goes on during the school day, when the play was scheduled to be performed. But thornier legal questions arise over students’ contention that they were also thwarted from trying to stage the play at night before a limited audience, and discouraged from doing so even off-campus. Just this week, an Alaska public high school was defending itself before the United States Supreme Court for having suspended a student who unfurled a banner extolling drug use at an off-campus parade.
The scrap over “Voices in Conflict” is the latest in a series of free-speech squabbles at Wilton High, a school of 1,250 students that is consistently one of Connecticut’s top performers and was the alma mater of Elizabeth Neuffer, the Boston Globe correspondent killed in Iraq in 2003.
The current issue of the student newspaper, The Forum, includes an article criticizing the administration for requiring that yearbook quotations come from well-known sources for fear of coded messages. After the Gay Straight Alliance wallpapered stairwells with posters a few years ago, the administration, citing public safety hazards, began insisting that all student posters be approved in advance.
Around the same time, the administration tried to ban bandanas because they could be associated with gangs, prompting hundreds of students to turn up wearing them until officials relented.
“Our school is all about censorship,” said James Presson, 16, a member of the “Voices of Conflict” cast. “People don’t talk about the things that matter.”
After reading a book of first-person accounts of the war, Ms. Dickinson kicked off the spring semester — with the principal’s blessing — by asking her advanced students if they were open to creating a play about Iraq. In an interview, the teacher said the objective was to showcase people close to the same age as the students who were “experiencing very different things in their daily lives and to stand in the shoes of those people and then present them by speaking their words exactly in front of an audience.”
What emerged was a compilation of monologues taken from the book that impressed Ms. Dickinson, “In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive”; a documentary, “The Ground Truth”; Web logs and other sources. The script consisted of the subjects’ own words, though some license was taken with identity: Lt. Charles Anderson became “Charlene” because, as Seth Koproski, a senior, put it, “we had a lot of women” in the cast.
In March, students said, Gabby, the junior whose brother is serving in the Army in Iraq, said she wanted to join the production, and soon circulated drafts of the script to parents and others in town. A school administrator who is a Vietnam veteran also raised questions about the wisdom of letting students explore such sensitive issues, Mr. Canty said.
In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests. A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”
Seven characters were added, including Maj. Tammy Duckworth of the National Guard, a helicopter pilot who lost both legs and returned from the war to run for Congress last fall. The second version gives First Lt. Melissa Stockwell, who lost her left leg from the knee down, a new closing line: “But I’d go back. I wouldn’t want to go back, but I would go.”
On March 13, Mr. Canty met with the class. He told us “no matter what we do, it’s not happening,” said one of the students, Erin Clancy. That night, on a Facebook chat group called “Support the Troops in Iraq,” a poster named GabriellaAF, who several students said was their classmate Gabby, posted a celebratory note saying, “We got the show canceled!!” (Reached by telephone, Gabby’s mother, Barbara Alessi, said she had no knowledge of the play or her daughter’s involvement in it.) In classrooms, teenage centers and at dinner tables around town, the drama students entertained the idea of staging the show at a local church, or perhaps al fresco just outside the school grounds. One possibility was Wilton Presbyterian Church.
“I would want to read the script before having it performed here, but from what I understand from the students who wrote it, they didn’t have a political agenda,” said the Rev. Jane Field, the church’s youth minister.
Mr. Canty said he had never discouraged the students from continuing to work on the play on their own. But Ms. Dickinson said he told her “we may not do the play outside of the four walls of the classroom,” adding, “I can’t have anything to do with it because we’re not allowed to perform the play and I have to stand behind my building principal.”
Parents, even those who are critical of the decision, say the episode is out of character for a school system that is among the attractions of Wilton, a well-off town of 18,000 about an hour’s drive from Manhattan.
“The sad thing was this thing was a missed opportunity for growth from a school that I really have tremendous regard for,” said Emmalisa Lesica, whose son was in the play. Given the age of the performers and their peers who might have seen the show, she noted, “if we ended up in a further state of war, wouldn’t they be the next ones drafted or who choose to go to war? Why wouldn’t you let them know what this is about?”
The latest draft of the script opens with the words of Pvt. Nicholas Madaras, the Wilton graduate who died last September and whose memory the town plans to soon honor by naming a soccer field for him. In a letter he wrote to the local paper last May, Private Madaras said Baqubah, north of Baghdad, sometimes “feels like you are on another planet,” and speaks wistfully about the life he left behind in Wilton.
“I never thought I’d ever say this, but I miss being in high school,” he wrote. “High school is really the foundation for the rest of your life, whether teenagers want to believe it or not.”
Private Madaras’s parents said they had not read the play, and had no desire to meddle in a school matter. But his mother, Shalini Madaras, added, “We always like to think about him being part of us, and people talking about him, I think it’s wonderful.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
It is appalling to think that a group of young people are being told they cannot present a play which sounds like it presents a realistic view of the current “war”. What is an acceptable topic? These are the very people who are going to be paying for this and any future wars our nation seeks to start. When I am dead and gone, these young folks will be trying to find the money to pay for our invasions. Surely they are capable of discussing such issues. This is censorship of the worst kind. What sort of topics to they discuss in their high school social studies classes these days? Anna Nichole Smith’s death?!!!!
I hope they make a film of their play and stick it on YouTube. I’d like to see it.
As a former high school English, creative writing and theater teacher, I take issue with Mr.Canty’s position. By their nature, high schools are conservative institutions maintaining the status quo and making every effort to keep adolescents in line. I never knew where my “average” students got their points-of-view - whether it be home, church, school or some other social institution - but they had a tendency to be right of center. They came to me pre-packaged and strongminded. And though students naturally rebel against authority, in many unthinking ways the ones I observed, contradicted their questioning natures by supporting the system that discouraged their free thought and creative experimentation. It seemed to me that most of my students reached the 10th, 11th and 12th grades with well entrenched conservative-leaning points of view. Now that might just have been in Portsmouth, Rhode Island where many of their parents were employed by the U.S.Navy, The U.S. Naval War College, and various defense contractors like Raytheon, IBM and the like, but I don’t really think that is the case. At any rate, Portsmouth High School had no problem accepting these pre-conceived points of view and actually encouraging them whenever possible. The curriculum I favored encouraged free thought based on training in argumentation, reasoning, evidence and fair play. In this context I shared my own thoughts which would generally be defined as left of center. I felt that my students needed to hear an actual live human being express a thought contrary to the conservative party line of the school and community. Whenever I did this, I encouraged them to use their training in argumentation to question everything I said. And of course they did. Nonetheless, I was often criticized for trying to brainwash my students. My minority stance, which paralleled a small group of the schools’ educators, was threatening to the status quo. It seemed that Portsmouth High School was more designed to control the energy and thought of its students. This lead to the inhibition of their critical thinking skills and consequently their emotional, intellectual and creative potentials. It seemed to me that this right leaning institution overwhelmed the efforts of individual teachers and succeeded in psychically numbing and dumbing down the larger majority of the student population.
I applaud the students who created this play. Let them perform it in school, and after school. They don’t have a monopoly on the truth. No one does. If their fellow students have been trained properly to exercise their minds and judgement, there will be no fear of brainwashing. Democracy is essentially a communication system based on the principles of argumentation and debate, reason and fairplay. What the system is afraid of is losing its influence - its ability to control the thoughts of our children. Beyond that, Mr. Canty is afraid to take the heat for a higher educational standard. This, I fear, is all too common today. Portsmouth High School just made national news by losing a case against a student whose intellectual curiosity has led him to medieval reenactments, not murder by sword, and who dressed in medieval armor and carried a sword for his high school yearbook photo. In losing, Principal Littlefield is redoubling efforts to block such photographs in next years’ yearbook. Kind of ironic for a school whose mascot is the Revolutionary War patriot. I await next years’ yearbook season in hopes that a student has the wits and courage to dress in a three cornered hat and carry a musket and demand that his picture be published in the yearbook - not murder by musket, but a defense of self and a bulwark against impending idiocy.
Call the American Civil Liberties Union if you haven’t already. And in the meantime, stage the play on your own. Continue to take responsibility for your own minds and education. And if you want to take the play on the road, contact me at www.commonfencemusic.org. I’d be proud to produce your work under general lighting on a small community hall stage.
Tom Perrotti,
retired educator and musician
The lessons of how and what to censor begins by taking a cue from our distinguished institutions, The Supreme…. The US Cong…, The presi….. and accolytes, and ends in our schools. As teachers are strongly adviced not to present anything that it’s not tied up with the curriculum, subjects for plays are shrank to a few and tried old traditionals themes like West Sid…, Wizard of …, etc… We need our pound of flesh and wordly educated students are not keen to become a meaty measurement. An educated nation is a free nation.
I also work in high schools, and can second what domperro has said above about the fundamentally conservative atmosphere in American high schools. Controversy is avoided at all costs. Anyone who threatens to rock the boat is considered to be dangerous to the smooth running of the institution and is then marginalized. We should not be surprised by this reality, because the high schools merely reflect what is going on in the culture at large–fear of those who speak out, fear of real change. This is the neurosis of American society in the first decade of the 21st century. Our heads are mostly in the sand, and others, especially in Asia, are preparing to take over the position of lead power in the world, as we slip inevitably into senescence and ineffectuality. The dumbing down is now near complete in the United States and we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. If we’re lucky we’ll avoid dictatorship and full-fledged fascism, but things don’t look very promising right now, do they.
Cowardly Principal Canty is emblematic of everything that is wrong with public school education in America.
Public schools in America are assembly lines. The grade levels are nothing more than conveyor belts to move the product along the assembly line and out the door with a certificate.
The overriding policy is that, at all costs, any disruptions of the assembly line, including any waking of critical thinking in the students, must be suppressed and, if necessary, punished.
The schools are designed to crank out compliant little dummies willing to follow without question any instructions given to them. That’s a sure recipe for the accelerated fall of the republic.
That’s why Johnny can’t read, by the way. The schools are too busy indoctrinating him into a hive mentality and making him compliant. There’s no time left for real academics.
Bakunin (above) got it exactly right about the dumbing down. HELLO! ANYBODY HOME?
And three big cheers for Domperro (Tom Perrotti) above. It’s nice to hear a real educator taking his position. Would that there were more like him.
Two words for the fascist administration at Wilton High: FREE SPEECH
This pure censorship in American high schools should tell us that the US of A has become the 4th Reich- unprovoked attacks on non hostile countries, torture, rendition, propaganda and the elimination of dissent. Sig Heil Mr. Bush. And we all know what happened to the leaders of the 3rd Reich. We can dream can’t we?
These brave students are being punished because they have overstepped the limited rights of students in public and private schools. They are expected to happily accept an education that will get them a job at Walmart, and permission to go into debt for the remainder of their lives. I applaud these students who can still think for themselves.
Hoa Binh
The students and teacher involved, can rant on and bellyache on and on their echo-chamber blogs about this outrage, OR THEY CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
The students and the teacher need to, in evenings outside of class, find a public park or other such space, put up signs around town announcing the performance, and perform the most critical, radical, version of it! They are utterly protected by the First Amendment to do this.
Why this paralysis among Americans? Why this inordinate, paralyzing fear among middle class Americans of even a small chance of trouble with their bosses or job prospects, or their perfect, middle class comfort, if they take a principled stand on on anything???
I have numerous co-workers at my job who are entirely against the war, but won’t even attend a perfectly legal permitted protest, because of the tiny chance their boss might see them on TV.
GET OVER IT PEOPLE!
PJD: I’m afraid you don’t have clear insight into the mass psychology in our country at this time. You are perplexed by the passivity of the majority here, but that passivity is a product of three decades of reactionary conditioning following the trauma of the 60’s and 70’s time of activism. In American history the times of turmoil like the mid 60’s to early 70’s are always short and intense and always followed by long periods of reaction. What would it take to light a fire and end the passivity now? Personally I believe it could happen very quickly if an emergency situation arises which seems increasingly likely. There are tens of millions of very frustrated people out there who are acutely unhappy with the present situation in this country. What is worrying is that there seems to be no clear sense of an alternative direction. The country is without a clear vision for change, and that would seem to fortell chaos and turmoil far more severe than in the 60’s and 70’s.
bakunin,
Your points are well taken, I assume from your nick you are a young anarchist, so you don’t actually remember the 60’s and 70’s; correct me if I’m wrong.
So, as a 51 year-old person who does remember them, I have to ask: what chaos and turmoil of the 60’s and 70’s ??? I recall the protests were certainly more disruptive in DC and Chicago in those days, than the useless, legal, orderly ones of today. But, hardly “chaos and turmoil”.
But, you are correct, in the 60’s and 70’s, USAns still had a social conscience and democratic socialism was still an alternative on the US public mind. Now, they are utterly clueless…
Oh,for the 60’s and 70’s!
I’m 63. My 6th grade teacher made us memorize the Guests”Equipment.”
“Figure it out for yourselves my lads.
You’ve all that the greatest of men have had,
Two arms, two hands, two legs, two eyes,
and a brain to use if you would be wise.
With this equipment they all began
So start from the top and say I can.”
Just recently a nonthinking superior in my workplace told me “Don’t think, just do as you are told.” I told her that being a thinking person my whole life, that at 63 years of age, not thinking was not an option.
She turned purple–two more years to go in my local government job. I hope I make it.
My very best wishes to those thoughtful students.
Impeach the liars now…
Correct me if I am wrong. Most of these students are 17 and in one year they will be eligible to vote and join the military killing machine.
Then but only then they will find out what it’s all about.
But please don’t tell them before hand or it may deter military recruitment.
The BBC produced a brilliant documentary a few years ago called “The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear”. If you look for it online, you can find it on DVD and purchase it, or it may be in your local library collection. It’s a detailed blueprint, going back to the mid 1950’s, of the concerted effort by western governments, including our very own, to build deep-seated insecurity, alarmism and gut-level fear of all sorts of external forces in the “civilzed” nations of the West…in our case, the vaunted American People, which I presume includes the affluent, pathetically distracted, conformist, passive-aggressive citizens of Wilton, CT.
Obviously, 9/11 fanned these flames of fear and blind obedience to an administration promising protection from the evildoers around the world, even while the same administration, in the name of “national security”, attacked a brutal but hapless dictator and his feeble army while the real anti-American terrorists sat back and smiled, and then proceeded to multiply like cockroaches in a tenement. So today, almost six years after 9/11, we’re dramatically more vulnerable than we were then, and we’ve directly contributed, through the mind-boggling incompetence of our “leaders”, including Senator Lieberman, to the exponential increase in shielded and harbored terrorists who want to destroy us all.
All this is the backdrop for this ass-wipe principal in Wilton who pours out sophistry by the gallon about his reasons for censoring this play, and then serves as a Goebbelsian role model for his students by his very exercise of the propaganda he is swilling to justify his decision. Is he himself terrified of pissing off Senator Joe, or perhaps the Bush Family, which has a long history in CT and can still pull a lot of levers there, or maybe just the wealthy right-wing parents who live in town? Who really knows?
I do know that we’ve come so far down the road of this bloody, insane, catastrophic, patently unwinnable war of choice—mishandled so badly by our president and his henchmen (and several henchwomen), one wonders if they’re capable of screwing it up any more than they already have—that censoring a group of thinking, sensitive high school thespians who want to promote further thinking and action about this war in their peers and even parents, in this country, after the parade of disgusting civil liberty affronts and violations we’ve recently endured, is nothing but an act of sheer localized tyranny that must be challenged.
By the way, I’m not some left-wing zealot. I’m almost 60, served 4 years in the U.S. Air Force during Viet Nam, and like some above, lived through and participated in social and political movements of the 1960’s and ’70’s that most young people today know only through the wonders of movies and TV, God help us all. Wake up and smell the coffee, and put this principal in his rightful place…where the sun don’t shine. Good luck, Wilton.
So I am to believe that 15, 16 and 17 year old students are not to have a politcal agenda, while at the same time being next in line for the military recruiters who are allowed access to the students files and personal information? Wilkommen to Amerika!! The 4th Reich has arrived.
I find it very distrubing that children are just fine to go fight and die for oil profits of the politicians who created this war. But they are to remain silent on any views and opinions of such a war, the first ever in US history of aggression.
Let us not forget that this war was engaged in willingly in Iraq and that Iraq has had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda even now and certainly had nothing to do with 9-11. In fact had the same group of administration officials who pleaded and begged to go to war in Iraq are also responsible for letting 9-11 happen on their watch. Their own negligence on 9-11 has been turned into the making obscene profits in the Iraq War and has done little to nothing to stop the terrorism they claim to be fighting. This ship of fools has also been revoking freedom after freedom under the guise of fighting for freedom. So with this case in CT now am I to understand that our current soldiers are fighting for the right of school principals to censor our future soldiers and citizens? Amerika? or America? Make a choice people. If the KKK can march in “peaceful protest” I think this play about the realities of war ought to be allowed anywhere and everywhere. The students involved were quite right in stating that people seem to be afraid of discussing real issues these days.
If the students decide to perform the verboten play at an off-campus venue or make a U-tube film as recommended by Earthian, perhaps they could add one or more scenes that depict the school administration’s reaction and censorship.