I never imagined British playwright and wit Noel Coward was Satan’s weapon against the youth of the Emerald Coast.
The Daily News reported this morning that after protests by Walton County parents, the South Walton High School principal ruled that the drama department can’t stage Noel Coward’s comedy, “Blithe Spirit” since the play can’t be “sanitized” without violating copyright law.
The play, for those who don’t know, is the story of a man who holds a seance that turns out to be a seriously bad idea: The ghost he summons up is that of his dead first wife, who still considers herself his real wife and doesn’t take kindly to the fact he’s married again. Hilarity, as they say, ensues.
Having seen the show, I’ve never thought of it as something that needs “sanitizing” for high school — as you might gather from the synopsis, we’re not talking “Showgirls” or “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” here. But the protesters, it seems, were just filled with fear that this play was a viper the school had clasped to its bosom:
•It will encourage exploration of the occult!
This is, of course, the standard response from Christian groups to any fictional work that has any supernatural overtones: If your kids read Harry Potter, next thing you know, they’ll be sacrificing babies to Baphomet.
Being someone who’s read books like that since childhood,, and has multiple friends who’ve done the same—none of whom turned out to be devil worshippers, occultists or spiritualists—I find this pretty silly. Even if someone did try to hold a seance, Spiritualism doesn’t actually work (one of the founders admitted years later that she faked all the manifestations); using a ouija board is about as effective as reciting spells from Dr. Strange comics.
•The play will affect students’ views on monogamous relationships.
And how does that work, I wonder: “Wow, that guy had a ghost wife and a live wife—that seems so cool, I’ll try polygamy!” Noel Coward’s a funny, clever playwright, but I can’t imagine anyone looking to Blithe Spirit for life lessons.
Of course this is a phobia shared by pretty much everyone of every political stripe who looks at fiction primarily as a political/religious tract. The Ayn Rand Institute, for instance, gets just as hysterical about what it thinks the Goosebumps kids’ series “teaches.”
•”It’s a demonic action … spreading through our schools,” according to one pastor.
Um, no.
•”There isn’t any hope in the play,” one drama student who dropped out of the show told the School Board. “We need hope. There are kids struggling with depression, with drugs.”
Amazing. Someone who can review a Noel Coward comedy as if it were The Seventh Seal.
I’m quite sure there are South Walton students with heavy personal problems but I don’t think it’s fair to blame Coward for not writing a play that can cure depression or drug addiction. Much as I love live theater, no stage show yet written can do that.
•”All this play is is just pure garbage” according to another of the pastors.
No, it’s a well-written, amusing show. No more than that, but no less.
Hopefully none of the protesters will notice that the substitute show, “Harvey,” has an amiable drunk watched over by a benevolent but not particularly Christian supernatural being, or we’ll probably have to go through this again.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Destin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.