Theater Offers to Stage Play That Chapman Censored

Censorship has yielded a chance at professional exposure for a Chapman College senior.

Joel Moffett, a 21-year-old student writer, learned Wednesday that a North Hollywood theater will give his uncut play a full production--after Chapman College decided that it would not permit the performance of a nude scene from the work.

Just after Chapman President G.T. (Buck) Smith informed Moffett that the five-minute nude scene in “The Coloring Box” could not be performed at the church-affiliated school, the managers at the Skylight Theater decided that they would stage the work in late May.

Skylight artistic director Ronald Muchnick called Moffett last week after seeing news reports about the controversy. He met with Moffett and read the play, which the administration had originally banned March 10, then reconsidered after students and faculty members protested the decision. “I told Joel that I wouldn’t do anything until the school had made its final decision,” Muchnick said Wednesday. “Then he called me at about 4:30 and said that the college president had told him the play couldn’t be performed, and I said that we would do it. I read the play and thought it was a very good piece of work . . . obviously, I was aware of the controversy, but that’s not why we’re doing it. It has to hold up as a good piece.”

Skylight is a 4-year-old equity waiver theater, one of dozens of such theaters around Los Angeles that are permitted to pay less than an Actors Equity wage as long as they hold no more than 99 seats.

The theaters, which can endure due to their freedom from the economic pressures of the union scale, tend to mix veteran and newcomer stage artists in works that are often new and experimental. Skylight has staged everything from a Leonard Bernstein opera to a jailhouse drama. Its next production will be a recently written play about the Hollywood blacklist.

Moffett, whose 75-minute work is about the self-growth of characters who shed their clothes to symbolize freedom from society’s bonds, said he would have preferred to see the whole work performed on campus. “I’m really am happy (about the Skylight production), but the issue of censorship on campus has not been solved,” Moffett said. “I really understand Buck’s position, but I don’t agree with it. There is a really dark cloud on campus right now. He made a wrong decision to censor the expression of students.”

Smith could not be reached for comment Wednesday evening. But Chapman spokesman Jerry Derloshon said that Smith had met with Moffett on campus at about 3 p.m. Wednesday and told him of his decision.

Derloshon read from a letter Smith handed Moffett, asking the student to present the play without nudity to conform to “the appropriateness of a college holding higher expectations than might be reflected in the larger society . . . the aim of education is not merely the knowledge of facts, but the possession of values.”

Chapman College, a private school with 2,100 students, is affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a Protestant denomination. “The Coloring Box,” which was scheduled for performances May 18-20, would have been the first work on campus with nudity. The banned scene would have had two students standing naked on stage.

Muchnick said the students who would have acted in the school production will be invited to join professional performers at an open audition for roles in Moffett’s work. Exact performance dates have not been set.

Muchnick said that the students would probably be given roles as understudies and that understudies at Skylight are allowed to appear in at least one performance.