The curtain did not fall silently on the Devil. But rather to a chorus of “I am offended.”
In fact, the shouts by a group of Washington State University students pervaded the final performance in April of The Passion of the Musical — a show that has become the subject of a free speech disputemonths after its short run.
The protesters, angry at the satire depicting the last of two days of the life of Jesus, forced the show to stop several times. At the behest of campus security guards concerned about a potential riot, Chris Lee, a theater major who wrote, directed, and portrayed the cross-dressing Lucifer in the play, self-censored one of the show’s songs. Instead of singing “I would do anything for God, but I won’t act black,” a parody of Meat Loaf’s “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that,” the “black” was changed to “blank.”
Along with jokes about gay people, AIDS, Hitler, and the use of “nigger,” another chorus that roiled audience members was the “And I will always hate Jews” refrain in the parody of Whitney Houston’s hit “I Will Always Love You.” And of course there was the scene where newborn babies were shot onto the stage, apparently from a Mormon mother’s offstage womb, and Jesus, like a good outfielder, caught all 16 of them. Lee, like many of those who organized the protests and disrupted the play, is black. “The whole point was to show people we’re not that different, we all have issues that can be made fun of,” Lee said.
Several months after the play, a free speech group is coming to Lee’s defense and demanding to know why college administrators appeared to support those who disrupted the production. The group cites an e-mail obtained by The Daily Evergreen, the Washington State paper, in which President Lane Rawlins wrote to a professor: “I too was concerned about the threat to safety but I must say that our students, even though they were upset, exercised their rights of free speech in a very responsible manner by letting the writer and players know exactly how they felt.” Not everyone thought it was free speech that the 40 students exercised.
“The protesters were the people standing outside with signs,” Lee said. “Inside, they were hecklers. I wanted the play to cause discussion, but they didn’t even listen to it.”
Officials at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education strongly disagreed with Rawlins that the protesters were exercising free speech, rather than violating it. “Disrupting a play with mob censorship is not protected expression,” said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy at FIRE.
Similarly, Lukianoff argued, campus security should have protected Lee’s right to continue his play unchanged, rather than pushed him to self-censor to avoid an explosive situation. Washington State staff members and administrators who supported the protesters right to interrupt the play, including the president, contend that Lee created a public forum by engaging the crowd early in the play.
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