Georgia high school cancels "The Crucible" after complaints of "demonic" themes

Critics accuse Fannin County High School of caving to hysteria over witchcraft in a play about hysteria over witchcraft

This newsletter is free, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe to Substack or use my usual Patreon page!

---

If one of the main themes of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is the dangers of mass hysteria, then life is imitating art in Fannin County, Georgia.

The Fannin County High School was putting on the show—a fictionalized account of the Salem Witch Trials which is also an allegory for McCarthyism—as its big spring play, but after the first of its two performances just over a week ago, the district shut everything down.

According to a statement posted on Facebook, district officials said it was because of “unauthorized” changes to the script, in violation of their licensing agreement.

Specifically, it seems, the show included a wordless scene of young women dancing at the beginning of the show, supposedly summoning spirits. That’s not actually in the script; it’s referred to in dialogue, and it’s a big deal because it’s the reason certain characters are accused of witchcraft, but it’s never explicitly written into the stage directions. In other words, this was an interpretative choice. Hardly a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It didn’t change the show.

It’s not even a unique decision. I found multiple versions of this exact scene opening other high school productions of the show. It’s routine.

The controversial scene from The Crucible, taken from a different school’s production (screenshot via YouTube)

But there are three obvious problems with the district’s statement.

The first is that even Broadway Licensing, which owns the show, didn’t see this as a problem. A mother of one of the actors even posted video of her phone call with the company in which a representative admitted that scene didn’t seem like a violation and that if there were any concerns, the company would have warned the director in advance instead of taking the nuclear option of forcing the (high school!) show to shut down:

As someone who’s been involved in plenty of high school productions myself, the idea that a professional licensing company would demand an abrupt end to a high school production of a classic play for a reason like this makes absolutely no sense. Even if it was true, there would at least be a cease-and-desist letter/email from the company. (That’s what happened when a Texas church staged an unauthorized, Jesus-y ripoff of Hamilton a few years ago.)

The second is that the dancing scene could easily have been removed from the show. As one student put it, “Since the scene being altered was the issue, we could have just removed it out of the play and continued on and then it would be 2 hours and 58 minutes long instead of three [hours].” The school didn’t give students that option.

The third is that there’s no mention of why the show’s adult director was no longer working on the production two weeks before the performances. One reporter wrote that “some said he was forced to resign, others said fired.” That meant students had to navigate the final weeks of rehearsals with random adult supervision but not with someone specifically focused on theater who could have navigated this controversy. Were all these things linked? It’s unclear. But consider this: Since the drama teacher wasn’t available, it was an administrator who would have overseen the final weeks of the performance and witnessed the very scene in question. If there was any problem with it, how come no one mentioned it until after the first night’s performance?!

Either way, the school canceled the entire production despite months of preparation by the students and crew members (and plenty of time for administrators to resolve any copyright problems they might have had). One news outlet said the students were able to perform the second show at a local off-campus theater, but that appears to be inaccurate. The licensing agreement didn’t give them permission to perform the show outside the high school so they performed other (legal) material at a nearby theater instead. The show didn’t go on, but a show did. Because theater kids are nothing if not adaptable.

But that leaves an obvious question: If the problem with the play wasn’t the added scene, then what was it?

Take a wild guess.

“Originally, we were told that somebody made a complaint about the show that it was demonic and disgusting,” drama student Aiden McBee said.

…

Abigail Ridings, the senior who is president of the drama club and was directing the production, told a similar story. “I walked into my mom’s bedroom Saturday morning, the night after our first show, and she told me that the show had been canceled, that she just got off the phone with my principal. He said that certain people had to ‘repent after watching the show,’ as a joke, and that it was canceled due to parent complaints.” Asked about the specific nature of the complaints as explained to her mother, Ridings elaborated saying that the play was “too evil and disgusting and things like that.”

Caden Gerald, the senior who played the lead character in the show, released his own video highlighting how absurd the school’s statement was.

Gerald was also one of the leads in the school’s production of “Hadestown” last August. (Somehow, that one didn’t generate similar complaints!)

Arts journalist Howard Sherman summarized the outrage perfectly:

And so it seems that the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an [acknowledged] American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust.

The result is that the very people who need to see this play the most—the conservatives in a very Republican area—continue to spread the very ideas Miller was trying to warn people against. And the students who spent months preparing this show have been taught a valuable lesson by the adults who are supposed to look out for their best interests: If you dare to challenge anyone’s thinking, we’ll do everything in our power to shut you up. It’s the worst possible message a high school ought to be sending students as they graduate. (It’s ironic, especially, for a school that’s “Home of the Rebels.”)

The beautiful thing about this story is that the students are showing they’re so much more mature than the adults who get paid to educate them.

By the way, Broadway Licensing also owns the rights to a play called “Kingdom City,” all about a professional director who ends up working on a high school production of “The Crucible”… only to have a local minister try to shut it down because of blasphemy. If Fannin County High is looking for a production to stage next year, they might want to give this one a shot.

---