The Beast That Devours Itself: New at Reason

Beast Thing should have warmed the hearts of progressive students. It is a play written by a black playwright for a largely black cast that aims to critique whiteness and create a space for black performers. Yet in mid-November, the Williams College Theatre Department felt compelled to cancel the production of this play following student complaints that minority actors were valued a “token” for their race, that white students would feel uncomfortable, and that violent and upsetting imagery in the play would be unsettling. Although the cast included a relatively high percentage of students of color, the director believed that students also objected on grounds that the cast was still too white.

The Williams cancellation is not an isolated incident in the world of college theatre. Last year, Knox College cancelled a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwanon grounds of its perceived portrayal of Asians and insufficient representation of minorities in the cast. (It is unclear whether the censors at Knox recalled that Brecht’s works once fed the flames of Nazi book burnings.) Brandeis University, which bears the name of one of America’s greatest defenders of the First Amendment, censored a play about Lenny Bruce, a comedian prosecuted for obscenity, on the same charges of racial insensitivity that “deplatformed” Brecht, writes Michael B. Poliakoff in his latest for Reason.

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