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Theatre Topics 11.1 (2001) 63-69



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Advocacy, Activism, and Controversial Art:
Lessons from Charlotte

Keith Martin


IMAGE LINK= In March of 1996, conservative members of the cultural, political, and religious communities in North Carolina threatened Charlotte Repertory Theatre's production of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Angels in America with closure. When issued a "cease and desist" letter by its own landlord on the day of the first performance, Charlotte Rep successfully took to the courts. The theatre obtained a temporary restraining order--later made into a permanent injunction--by citing legal issues of prior restraint, imminent threats to its livelihood, and the potential violation of its First Amendment rights. The legal victory was followed by a political defeat when the local county commission, in a historic 5-to-4 vote, eliminated $2.5 million in public funding of the arts. A subsequent two-year advocacy effort resulted in the ouster of all but one of the elected officials who voted against the arts and the full restoration of funding, with an additional $500,000 increase. Charlotte Rep's Managing Director, Keith Martin, reflects on these tumultuous events. 1

In Charlotte, theatre has literally transformed the politics of an entire region and made the arts community into a highly desired constituency, not to mention a powerful and effective voting block. Local academic institutions have been one of the cornerstones of these advocacy efforts. The challenge for Charlotte Rep, as a professional resident theatre company, has been making our college and university constituents--particularly students--stakeholders in the arts community and partners in an effective advocacy program. The following are some concrete ideas for making advocacy a part of your theatre programs based upon what we at Charlotte Rep learned as a result of the controversy surrounding our production of Angels in America.

The first step toward a campus advocacy program is to personalize key issues by finding out what topics are important to your students. These issues will probably include the obvious (censorship, freedom of speech, first amendment rights) and the not-so-obvious (controversial artwork, the importance of arts education, viewpoint discrimination, and myriad gay, lesbian, and transgender issues). Once you identify the key topics, you need to put them into a local context. In Charlotte, there has been no shortage of context. The Angels controversy was followed by the loss of county public funding for the arts. There was the high school drama teacher, Margaret Boring, fired for choosing [End Page 63] what her principal deemed an inappropriate play (Lee Blessing's Independence) for her students--a case she took all the way to the United States Supreme Court. More recently, there was teenage lesbian playwright Samantha Gellar, whose original work Life Versus the Paperback Romance was censored by our local young playwrights' festival. In personalizing your local issues, it's important to stress that when one of us in the theatre community is threatened, we are all at risk.

In the classroom, you should cite success stories and provide extensive anecdotal evidence that demonstrates to your students how they can make a difference. Remind students that activism is the strategic and tactical implementation of advocacy. I always point with pride to the fact that over one-third of the demonstrators picketing on our behalf on the opening night of Angels were local artists and students.

The more difficult task may be convincing your theatre faculty and college administrators that advocacy belongs in the theatre classroom in specific, and in the academic curriculum as a whole. There is a well-known mantra that must be repeated over and over: all politics are local. Convince your colleagues and the university administration that you've done your homework; provide them with an advocacy policy that protects the academic institution by clearly spelling out exactly what you can and cannot do legally. 2

Most importantly, advocacy and activism by the academic sector can help redefine the public discourse. In Charlotte, for example, government officials were voting on public art to grace the new county jail as part of a local "one-percent...

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