The performance was a script-in-hand reading of Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box, winner of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for drama. And the cast was to die for: Oscar winners Mercedes Ruehl (The Fisher King) and Estelle Parsons (Bonnie and Clyde), plus Christopher Reeve (Superman), Blair Brown (Molly Dodd), Robert Sean Leonard (Much Ado About Nothing) and the L.A. Law trio of Jill Eikenberry, Michael Tucker and Harry Hamlin. The stars were there to protest the cancellation of a student production of the same play at nearby Flowing Wells High School last year after parents and faculty members complained about its graphic language and depiction of a homosexual relationship. "I'm in the communications business," says Tucker. "It's very threatening to my business to be told what people can and cannot hear."
The controversy began last year. Flowing Wells drama teacher Carole Marlowe, 48, scheduled a student production of The Shadow Box, a play about how three terminally ill cancer patients face death. "I thought it was a very good, very powerful play that had scenes kids could really gel into," she says.
Though Marlowe planned to delete much of the play's profanity before it was performed, she let her 27 students use the original text in rehearsal. Upon receiving several complaints, principal Nic Clement ordered her to find another play, a decision that triggered a walkout by 300 students. Marlowe complied, but the dispute was rekindled last February after her class performed a scene from The Shadow Box as part of the school's Fine Arts Week. When a fifth-grade teacher complained that her students were being exposed to "that homosexual stuff again," Marlowe was forced lo resign, even though her superiors had known about the performance. She has yet to find another job.
For his part, Clement says that the play's gay theme was never an issue. He points to the school's AIDS curriculum lo prove he is "not afraid to tackle difficult subjects" and says that Marlowe was dismissed for insubordination and lack of judgment.
But Arthur Kropp, president of People for the American Way, the First Amendment advocacy group that organized the reading, sees matters differently. "The sad fact in this country today is that censorship is an increasingly popular method of suppressing things," he says. "What sets Tucson apart is that once we made contact with the people in the community, they were ready to move beyond it."
There were some, however, who were less than enchanted with the star-studded performance and panel discussion of censorship that followed. "I felt the evening was a charade," says Cathi Herrod, Arizona director of the conservative Concerned Women for America, who participated in the panel. "The audience was packed with people who thought the play should have been performed in the high school. I was mocked and ridiculed." Still, the evening left drama teacher Marlowe feeling vindicated. "This was a very moving and healing experience," she says. "It just reaffirmed lo me that art needs lo be protected."
DAVID ELLIS
MICHAEL HAEDERLE in Tucson
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- Michael Haederle.
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