After Censorship, Santa Rosa Students Write Their Own Play — and Take the Gold

You can’t keep good kids down.

After having their fall play suddenly canceled due to subject matter, and faced with continued monitoring by the administration, the students in Santa Rosa High School’s ArtQuest theater program refused to back away.

Instead, they fought back the best way they know how: by co-writing a pointed, smart and hilarious one-act musical called [REDACTED], which satirized the school district and the impulse to censor content deemed “unsuitable.”

And you know what? Over the weekend, [REDACTED] won the gold medal at the Lenaea Festival, a statewide theater competition of over 70 high schools. Santa Rosa also won 12 other awards at the festival, including the Spirit of Lenaea award, one of the festival’s very top honors.

I’ve had a front-row seat to this entire episode, since my daughter is friends with some of the young actors in the theater program. And I’ve watched as they’ve fought against censorship and clawed back their agency, again and again.

Jereme Anglin, who teaches theater at Santa Rosa, said the awards ceremony “pretty much brought everyone to tears.”

“We all got pretty emotional with it,” Anglin said. To win so many awards, up against so many other high schools, “it just felt like our struggle had been recognized.”

It’s quite a curtain call for a long, painful episode.

Last November, after rehearsing for four months, the Santa Rosa students opened their fall play, Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal. In its imagining of the characters from Peanuts grown up and in high school, Linus is a stoner. Lucy is in a juvenile institution. Pigpen is homophobic, which is a problem, because Charlie Brown is experimenting with his sexuality.

Your usual high-school stuff, in other words.

After opening night, citing “complaints” — without elaborating — the school district suddenly canceled the play’s remaining performances. Undeterred, students Dean Jahnsen and Leila Paine mobilized schoolmates to get on the phone to the local paper, The Press Democrat. They also contacted the Mercury Theatre in nearby Petaluma to check about availability.

The result? Days of media coverage, hundreds of social media comments lambasting school officials’ priorities and two sold-out performances of Dog Sees God at the Mercury Theatre that raised over $3,500 for their theater program.

The district reversed course, formally apologized, and said the play could be produced on campus. But it also asked to proofread scripts of future productions, and instituted an age restriction for certain shows with “adult themes.”

Speaking with KQED, the singer and Broadway composer Sara Bareilles (Waitress, The Interestings) said the censorship at Santa Rosa High School “makes me so angry,” calling it a misuse of the district’s energy.

“We think that by removing stories about ‘problematic’ subject matter, it removes those experiences from the world. The world is not getting less complicated because we talk about these subjects less; people are given less tools with which to cope with those subjects. And that is what makes me so sad, that these kids have put in all of this effort,” Bareilles said.

The district also installed a new principal at the high school, who last month raised concern over the content of three student monologues that were to be performed at the Lenaea Festival, and asked that the monologues be approved by the students’ parents.

If that sounds a little bit like “Mommies Against the Arts,” well, that’s what the students thought, too.

In [REDACTED], a collaboration between the students and Brent Lindsay of the local theater company the Imaginists, a group called Mommies Against the Arts intervenes at a local school. They deride the librarian as “too woke,” celebrate that “indecent art is dying fast” after reprimanding “Mr. A,” and chant “Protecting kiddies is our duty! / We cancel anything that smells a little fruity!”

There are references to canceling plays, burning books and the school board having nothing better to do. The Mommies parade about, defending district employees, “particularly those who make over $200,000 a year.” One discovers a student script and screams, “You’ve been writing this? Without my approval?! Burn these words!!!”

Anglin invited the school board, district officials and the administration to see [REDACTED]. Not many came, he said. One woman from the district left partway through. The principal “didn’t really have much of a response to it.”

The judges at Lenaea, however, certainly did. In awarding the students the Spirit of Lenaea Award, Board director Cheena Moslen was emphatic.

“This group refused to be silenced. They mobilized their community, pushed back against censorship driven by fear, and ultimately staged their production, selling out performances. But that hurdle seems to be the beginning of a larger issue of silencing and oppression,” Moslen said.

“My experience with this school reminded me that we are not just performers — we are powerful, and our voices matter.”