BY PETER BRONSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
ACT ONE, SCENE I: The curtain rises on the Ohio Governor's office, where Gov. George Voinovich sits at a large desk cluttered with papers and proclamations he is methodically signing. A door opens stage left, and the governor's press secretary enters hesitantly, carrying a flimsy fax, heavily marked in red ink.
GOV.: What is it Mike? I hope it's not another request to show up at that Rock and Roll museum to give an award to Yoko's husband, Mr. Ono.
MIKE: No, your excellency, this is serious. It seems there is something called the Governor's Institute, run through the state Department of Education to offer summer workshops for gifted high school kids . . .
GOV.: Never heard of it.
MIKE:
Well, it has your name on it. And the one at Miami University, funded by Ohio tax dollars, wants to perform a play that contains more profanity than a grounded governor's aircraft . . .
GOV.: Very funny. Let me see the script. (Pause, while the governor's eyes pop out of his head.) Holy &%#! This is *&%#$ing offensive!
MIKE: What do you want me to do?
GOV.: Stop it.
Curtain falls. The End.
That's mostly fiction. I've never heard press secretary Mike Dawson refer to his boss as "your excellency." But the part about the curtain falling on a profanity-packed play -- Suburbia by Eric Bogosian -- is true. So is the the governor's decision to tell Miami University to stop it.
"The governor, when told about it, felt very strongly that this should not happen," said Mr. Dawson. He read the script, then described it to the governor. Within hours, the Ohio Department of Education told Miami -- yank the play, or the state could yank funding for the Governor's Institute.
"We viewed the script," said Stacie Lawell of the Department of Education. "We were very concerned with the content. We shared our concern with the people at Miami, and we were quite adamant that funding could be in jeopardy. We wanted to make sure that the governor and the department were comfortable with the message being sent."
Good call -- but too late. Nine of the 26 students in the drama camp had already been mailed complete scripts of Suburbia, with instructions to read them thoroughly for a performance at their workshop next week.
I'd show you some of the script here, but newspapers have much higher standards than high school drama workshops these days. Let me put it this way: I have worked as a truck driver, a ditch digger, on a loading dock and at construction sites. I have read adult literature and seen my share of raunchy movies. I can't fix a lawnmower without a three-quarter-inch socket and four-letter words. But I've never seen such creative profanity. Suburbia is blue enough to make a 1-900-PHONE-SEX operator blush and stammer.
I got pages of the script from Diane Fisher, who got hers from parents who blew a gasket when they saw the script their kids were assigned to study. As Ms. Fisher points out in her thoughtful column on Page 3, "There are bigger issues involved here."
Such as: What were the alleged adults thinking when they mailed this syllabus for Scatology 101 to high school kids?
"The mistake was made by Assistant Dean Rosalyn Benson," said Richard Little, Miami's senior director of university communications. "She did not review the material before letting it go out."
He said students were supposed to be given excerpts that have been used for three years. But this year, visiting director Chip Walton told Miami to send the entire script to the kids.
OK, so teens who see R-rated movies probably won't go into shock when they see the script. The problem is adults who think that ugly profanity, racism, suicide, perversion and rank crudity are healthy "realism" -- and young people need more indecent exposure to it.
"Eric Bogosian the playwright is fairly well regarded by critics," Mr. Little pointed out. But not by ordinary folks, who could hardly wait to miss his movie version of Suburbia. Maybe that's because there's already too much of that kind of "reality," and anyone who has stepped in it doesn't want any part of it -- for themselves or their kids.
"We will pull the play, and we will send a letter of apology to all the parents when they arrive on Sunday," Mr. Little said on Thursday -- after Ms. Lawell gave him the word from the governor.
Call me a square. When someone says "Art," I think "Linkletter." But I say let the self-centered, mutual-applause society of academics and artists pitch a fit. As the Supreme Court ruled on the same day the curtain fell at Miami, taxpayers do not have to subsidize obnoxious, offensive, obscene "art."
Gov. Voinovich is right: Stop it.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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