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I just sent this email to Dr. Robert Brown, the Dean of Arkansas Tech University, who has just canceled tonight's student production of Stephen Sondheim's ASSASSINS, for fear of campus violence. He did this the day of the production, a major blow against students who have been rehearsing the play and families who have driven up from out of town to see it. A public plea for help from one student received this response to me, cc'd to the student and the student newspaper.
(excerpted)
Dear Dr. Robert Brown:
This letter regards your recent decision to cancel performances of the student production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical ASSASSINS, out of fear of prompting on-campus violence.
I am aware that this cannot be the only protest you have received, and that some of the other reactions may be intemperate or even abusive. I therefore assure you right away that I intend to discuss these issues with all due respect to your office and to your noble intent in trying to protect your students. I believe that you made your decision because you are truly troubled by the tragic events that have befallen other campuses, and because you honestly believe that canceling this production may help you avoid a recurrence affecting the students and faculty for whom you bear considerable responsibility. I request that you return the favor and give this letter the benefit of the doubt as well, allowing me to demonstrate that I can provide my own arguments with all due civility. I believe that I can show that you have made a serious mistake.
I mention before I start that I am a veteran fiction writer whose newest novel is being released this week, and that I therefore can be said to have some knowledge of story values, but these are the comments of a theatregoer and an admirer of the play, which I consider an American masterpiece.
First, it is absolutely true that we live in a world saturated with violent images, and that these images have desensitized us to horror and atrocity; we have all seen tv shows and movies presenting situations where the heroes must kill for survival or revenge or the protection of others, and where the killing itself becomes an applause moment that the audience is expected to cheer. Some of these presentations are defensible, others not; what they have in common, most of them, good or bad, is that the protagonist gets what he or she needs by killing, and that we the audience are invited to take vicarious pleasure in that fact. One possible summary of THE MATRIX, for instance, is the transformation of a lone computer geek into a guy who achieves cool when he receives excuse and ability to enter a building and kill everybody in his sight. We cheer because by then we see him as the hero.
However, this is not even remotely true of Sondheim’s ASSASSINS. The musical, which examines the peculiar American history of alienated nobodies targeting the Presidents of the United States, does not present any of those historical personalities as sympathetic characters worth emulating. They are all treated as the dysfunctional people they were, and the musical takes great pains to document that none of them, not a one, accomplished what they hoped to accomplish from their mad deeds. As history bears out, they are killed in the attempt, or imprisoned, or executed. (Indeed, the executions are dramatized; and if we buy society’s argument that they provide a deterrent to murder, then what do you gain by canceling a play that shows this in vivid detail?)
There’s more. As the assassins sing about their motives, the play shows those motives to be specious, or self-serving, or racist, or stupid. One climactic song even comes out and underlines it all. The narrator tells the gathered assassins, in about as many words, you did not make the south rise again, you did not improve the sales of your book, you did not take away the pain in your stomach, you did not make Jodie Foster love you, you did not make people sorry they treated you the way they did, you just created a moment of horror that cost you everything. The assassins are denied vindication, they’re denied victory, they’re denied any sense of greatness. The very best of them, if you can imagine such a thing, come off as deluded fools. If the musical has any empathy for them as human beings, it is only in the sense that a drama should show empathy for all its characters, even its villains. But it’s empathy for the pain that comes with madness, not agreement with their twisted and deluded actions.
This is not a gangster drama, like SCARFACE, where the murderous protagonist gets to live like a king for a short while, until his evil catches up with him. (Sure, he gets perforated with machine gun fire at the end -- but they still sell t-shirts of his grimacing image to folks to wish they were him.) This is the story of several losers who think that killing a prominent person will get them what they want…who are doomed to failure in that ambition…and who are bigger losers afterward. Any would-be campus killer capable of seeing this musical and thinking that he wants to be one of these people is, to put it mildly, already so far removed from reality that he might well be inspired by the very next action movie, or videogame, or Bible passage, that resonates with his particular psychosis. You won’t protect your law-abiding students by canceling ASSASSINS; you’re just curtailing their freedom, in a wholly misdirected attempt to control a hypothetical madman who does not deserve to command your indulgence.
That, sir, is the real problem here. Are we to cancel DEATH OF A SALESMAN because of the threat of student suicides? THE ICEMAN COMETH because of the threat of student alcoholism? OTHELLO because of the threat of student domestic abuse? Should all drama be limited to nice people doing unobjectionable things? Should all student drama be vetted exhaustively to cover every possible misinterpretation by people who might take it the wrong way?
In canceling ASSASSINS, you have not only hurt the students who put their time and their passion into the production. You have not only hurt the friends and families who wanted to see them perform. You have not only hurt the image of the American college campus as a haven for the free exchange of ideas. You have not only treated your students as infants incapable of interpreting any but the most spoon-fed messages. You have not only insulted the work and the career and the artistic intention of a creator, Sondheim, who qualifies as one of the great artists of our time and is a national treasure who has helped to define our shared cultural legacy for decades.
You have done more than any of those things. The sad truth is that you have surrendered to our current climate of fear and in so doing contributed to it. You have given your students more reason to question, before they write a book or put on a play or sing a song or speak an opinion, will it be dangerous to do so? Should they not instead do something safer, more innocuous, more market-tested?
Is this what you want to teach your students? The country you wish them to inherit?
If it is, sir, then I reject your ambition, and we have nothing else to talk about.
If, as I would prefer to believe, you merely suffered a moment of poor judgment, brought on by the terrible psychic trauma of those images from Virginia Tech and elsewhere, and your own wholly understandable concerns about preventing such a nightmare from every befalling the people in your own academic community, then I can applaud your sentiment while still protesting the manner in which you have expressed it. In light of that understanding, I can only urge you to please recognize the folly of allowing your policies, and the choices available to your students, to be dictated by fear and panic. Do the brave thing, the right thing, the thing that embodies everything we are supposed to love about this nation. Understand the context. Admit your mistake. Let the show go on.
Sincerely,
Adam-Troy Castro
22 February 2008
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