By Grace Meyer

A small group of parents and peers filed into the auditorium and sat down. They chatted quietly while they waited for the show to start, unaware that they were practicing the same constitutional right the show was focused on.

On April 8, the student theater group BETCo presented “The 17th Annual Censored Awards.” The group wrote skits themselves and performed them during F-block and after school. All skits were centered around the topic of free speech, citing the attacks on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo as a source of inspiration.

The show was presented as an awards show similar to the Oscars, with students portraying film celebrities such as Penelope Cruz, Alfred Hitchcock, Cameron Diaz and Sandra Bullock, joking about how all the Academy members are being old, white men.

These characters presented awards to fake movies and then showed scenes of them, which were actually the different skits. This was a great way to connect the skits, since otherwise they might seem unrelated.

The first was a scene from “Donuts and Coffee.” It highlighted inappropriate language in the workplace, specifically swear words, when one character began talking crudely in an argument and set off a chain reaction of others following suit and consequently getting in trouble (juniors Simone St Pierre, Maya Teich and senior Dillon McGuire).

This was followed by a short scene where a customer and a cashier at a grocery had random words from their conversation censored (juniors Sophie Brown and Maeve Forti and senior Kako Yamada). This was done in a creative way that had the crowd laughing as the different sentences were made to sound suggestive.

In the next scene a student tried to speak up about being forced to do AP work in a standard class, but was quieted by her peers and ignored by her teacher. She then fell into a nightmare where they attacked her for speaking out.

The final scene was titled “The Beginning.” It featured a couple with conflicting views on speaking up. The girlfriend was angry that her boss had punished her co-worker for speaking out, but her boyfriend sided with the boss (senior Dillon Mcguire and junior Simone St Pierre). After the break up, the boyfriend made a public declaration of her love for her and proposed to her while encouraging everyone to be brave and speak up. The scene sweetly ended with a kiss.

The performance ended with a question and answer session. The audience and cast members took turns sharing opinions and asking others for theirs. One recurring theme was the question of knowing when it is the right time to talk. People mentioned authority and differing power levels as the main reason to stay quiet, whether or not it was the right choice. The BETCo show overall was a collection of original pieces that sparked new ideas and conversations.

Grace Meyer can be contacted at [email protected]