I Never Thought the Book Bans Would Impact Me
Then a teacher in Texas asked if her students could perform one of my plays.
I’m not a published author, and even in my wildest dreams where I finish this novel I’m writing and put it out into the world, I can’t imagine enough people would even read a book of mine to be worth trying to ban it.
Plus, as a childfree person, there are all sorts of bad things I see happening to the youth of our country that don’t, strictly speaking, affect me—everything from the onslaught of standardized testing to the epidemic of social media-induced depression among teenage girls to, well, school shootings.
So while it is in every citizen of the world’s best interest to live in a society that’s both well-educated and safe from harm, I didn’t expect this current rash of book-banning in schools would ever be more than a news story to me.
But I had forgotten about the New Play Exchange.
For non-theater folks, New Play Exchange is a revolutionary little website. Playwrights pay a small annual fee to host their scripts on the platform, and then anyone with a reading membership to the site can search for them, download and read them, and (if they like what they read) connect with the playwright directly to acquire the rights to perform them.
The goal is to flip the script, one might say. Instead of playwrights spending tons of time researching theaters to submit to and theaters being inundated with plays every time they open themselves up for submissions, NPX puts theaters in the driver’s seat to go looking for the sorts of plays they want to perform.
The real winner in this setup is honestly teachers, who in the past have been quite limited when selecting plays—either to public domain works only (thus all the Shakespeare), or to well-known American classics, or to the catalogs of play publishers who specialize in the school market. Now, with access via their institutions, teachers can go looking for plays that suit the students they already know they have and find roles that will allow them to explore and grow as actors.
Playwrights don’t make much money from these productions, but they do get our plays produced. Plus, they let us connect with young, aspiring theater folks and show them the range of plays that are out there—plays that have good roles for women and nonbinary people, for people of color, for anything and everything they might imagine.
When I wrote The Young Ladies of the Class of 1902 of Wesleyan University Present, “As You Like It,” I always hoped it would make its way to schools. For one, theater people love this play (it’s about the importance of theater, after all). More importantly, it has a cast of eight young women, each with their own meaty role and their own fulfilling storyline. Perfect for high schools and colleges.
This play was almost my first real full professional production—until 2020 happened. And the director who was interested in it moved back to Kansas. It also made it to the finalist stage of a prestigious playwriting competition—which was then put on indefinite hiatus.
Needless to say, I would really love for someone to produce this play already.
When I first received an email from a teacher at an all-girls school in Texas asking if her students could put on my play, I didn’t really take it seriously because she was looking for a 40-minute one-act, and The Young Ladies is a two-hour-long piece.
But then she told me that her students “responded to the play more strongly than they have to anything else we’ve read—it’s tough to find quality scripts for all girls, so we feel fortunate to have found yours.” (Way to go for my vanity there.) She also offered to commission me to write a one-act version of the play.
I tried to make it work. Unfortunately, I think any time you need to drastically reduce the length of a piece of writing like this, it’s most successful when you can take a piece out of the whole that can function as its own complete story, and the overall plot of this play—a group of college girls at a coed university decide to put on an all-female production of As You Like It, various shenanigans happen to get in their way, and then they perform the play—really isn’t conducive to that sort of cut.
The only option would be the kind of edit I know teachers sometimes do to fit particular constraints, cutting everything from the play that isn’t directly relevant to the central plot line. I’ve been in plenty of camp theater productions that did just this. It’s not a good option, though—you lose valuable character development, and decent roles can turn into bit parts in the process.
In the case of The Young Ladies, this degree of editing would actually result in eliminating several characters outright, which negates the advantage it has of requiring a large cast of young women in the first place. I told the teacher that, and her response was to go ahead with the cuts anyway because her school administration “would prefer we not include” the subplot in which one of the girls develops a crush on another and discovers her sexuality in the process.
In the teacher’s words, “Gotta love Texas.”
Let me remind you that this teacher had already offered to commission me for the one-act version of The Young Ladies. With this new condition? That request had functionally become:
“We will pay you money to take the gay character out of your play.”
I stewed over how to respond for a few days, and ultimately wrote a firm, kind email saying no to the request and wishing the teacher well—none of this was her fault, and her students still deserve to get the best theater experience they can.
But here’s what I wish I could have said to her school’s administration:
I will not censor my plays to appease bigots. I will not help you hide the fact that queer people have always existed, throughout history.
Nothing in this play is inappropriate for a high school audience. If anything, it could be exactly what these girls need to hear—because chances are, among the drama students at your all-girls school, one of them is also in love with her best friend and hasn’t realized it yet.
Preventing students from engaging with stories like mine will not keep them from being queer, but letting them access stories they see themselves in could save them a world of pain.
So I’m still in search of a first full production for The Young Ladies. In the meantime, I’m rewriting it as a novel in the hopes that the new format will make it easier to share the story with a broader audience. If we can’t experience the magic of theater quite so often anymore, maybe we can at least read about it.