In response to Headmaster Deborah Holman’s request, a scene in the production of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale was altered on Nov. 4 to replace intentionally racist gestures and sounds.
After viewing a portion of the show on Friday, Nov. 1, Holman said she felt uncomfortable with certain content in the scene, which, according to Shakespeare director Mary Mastandrea, included repeated monkey sounds and gestures directed toward an African-American character.
The monkey sounds were replaced with the actor saying “Hey boy. Where’s your master, boy?” according to senior Jan Meese, the music director and an actor in the show. A lynching gesture was not removed.
“When I saw the two gestures, for me they were so potentially inflammatory to our community that I asked them to reinterpret that particular scene,” Holman said. “I think that the scene was very thought-provoking, and theater needs to be thought-provoking, but theater in a public high school needs to not be unsafe, and the concern was that that gesture could end up being unsafe for some participants, even in the play, and some audience members.”
According to Holman, she, Mastandrea, Assistant Headmaster Hal Mason and Interim Performing Arts Director Kenny Kozol met on Friday to discuss any scenes that Holman might need to be alerted to. The gestures came up in this discussion, and Holman requested to view the scene containing them. Holman viewed the scene that afternoon.
After viewing the scene, Holman said she consulted with people from both the high school and other schools, including Mason, African-American Scholars Program Coordinator Christopher Vick, some deans and associate deans and various teachers from the Newton High schools.
“I was clear that I was uncomfortable with the racial gesture, that it could be very offensive. That was the easy part,” Holman said. “The hard part was then placing that in a context where I want to as headmaster be careful about a lot of people: viewers of the play, people who had directed the play, spent months working on the play, the rest of the community. Imagining and putting all of that together in a communication was the hard part about it, but in terms of knowing that that racial gesture was inappropriate, that was clear.”
Sophie S. • Apr 9, 2014 at 10:08 pm
The thing about the whole high school vs. real world theater is that the school is teaching us what the theater can be like. For middle school, yes, it’s not a good idea, but we have people nearing adulthood (some are adults legally!), you can’t sensor things. Shakespeare wrote these pieces in a time with a really different perception of things. This by no means shows that we believe in his values, but rather how people thought at the time. We need to experience theater for what it is; the good and the bad.
PCamuck • Jan 27, 2014 at 12:50 am
I feel like you sort of destroyed the entire point of that scene. Wouldn’t it have been better to just have made an announcement at the beginning of the play that “certain scenes contain historically accurate material that should be offensive to some. etc…”
donmatthew • Dec 19, 2013 at 2:26 pm
So what will the PC crowd do next? Remove the character of Tituba from “The Crucible”? She was a real-life character, according to the Court records fro Salem, MA. She was a slave who was brought to the “New World” from Barbados, and she practiced some form of so-called “witchcraft” by having the girls of the community dancing in the woods at night.
So what would the BHS Principle do? Ban the character of Tituba? Change her to being Caucasian?
By the way, I’ve acted in the play “The Crucible”, portraying the role of one of the 2 judges. As far as I’m concerned, school administrators should stick to their own jobs, and leave the job of directing the plays to the Directors!