MIAMI — Days after the Miami-Dade County School District denied students from attending Miami New Drama’s production of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Anna in the Tropics,” school officials pointed to lines and imagery they considered to be “sexually explicit” or inappropriate for school-aged children.
Among the examples cited were comments between characters, such as “I would’ve shot the son of [expletive] a long time ago,” and a stage note that referenced lovemaking on top of a table. There’s also a description “of what lovers do” and a violent passage in which a character reads from Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel “Anna Karenina.”
In total, the school district objected to nine parts of the script.
The decision to prevent students from seeing the play as part of the district’s Cultural Passport program came after a script review process that included two curriculum support specialists, the supervisor of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, the administrative director, and the assistant superintendent over the Division of Academics. The district did not identify the names of the people in those positions.
“If families want to go watch it on their own, that’s one thing, but staff felt it shouldn’t be a school-recommended trip,” Miami-Dade Schools district spokesperson Jaquelyn Calzadilla Diaz told the Herald Wednesday.
But, to some in the arts community, the district’s stance constitutes artistic censorship.
The school district is “trying to protect students by playing dictator,” Arnold Mittelman, the former artistic director of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, told the Herald Wednesday. In 2004, Miami-Dade public school students attended a performance of “Anna in the Tropics” at the Playhouse, when he was its artistic director. The Playhouse has since closed.
Furthermore, high school students are exposed to content far more vulgar in movies, television and popular music, he said, adding that the decision “could be moving in a way that could start to set a dangerous precedent in terms of what we believe people should be able to express in a free society.”
For Cruz, the Miami Cuban-American playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003, the first Latino to be so honored, “What is missing here is a dialogue between the school and theater company. They could have come to me and asked me, ‘Are you staging this exactly how it is on the page?’ ”
Timing of decision to reject play called into question
This is the first time Miami New Drama has submitted Cruz’s play to be included in the district’s Cultural Passport Program — an educational initiative designed to offer cultural field experiences to students and “equal access to arts and culture for every child.”
But it’s not the first time district students have been offered the chance to see the play.
In 2004, Miami-Dade students attended the Grove Playhouse’s production of the show, which is set in a warehouse in 1929 in the Tampa neighborhood of Ybor City, a Cuban hub in the late 1800s and early 1900s known for its cigar-making prowess. During the ‘20s, people working in the cigar-rolling factories had a person read to them to pass the time. In the play, the lector reads Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” a novel that deals with betrayal, faith, family and marriage.
Listening to the novel lights up the inner worlds of the characters in “Anna in the Tropics.” Cochinta’s husband, Palomo, cheats on her and he winds up having an affair with the lector.
According to actors who were in the 2004 production, potentially questionable scenes were subdued slightly when students were in attendance.
That’s one reason why some are calling into question the timing of the district’s decision and whether school officials are tiptoeing around new state legislation, including the Parental Rights in Education law, which bars instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade and in older grades if the conversation is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Critics have called the law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in March, the ‘Don’t say gay’ bill.
The new law also gives parents the ability to sue the school district.
Follows School Board decision not to recognize LGBTQ month
School Board members cited the law last week when they struck down a measure to recognize October as LGBTQ History Month.
For its part, staff has been reviewing — and sometimes denying — scripts since 2020 and the latest rejection “has nothing to do with legislation,” said district spokesperson Calzadilla Diaz. “It’s a practice that was adopted after students and administrators complained and walked out [of previous plays] for excessive profanity and inappropriate content.”
In an interview late Tuesday evening, Miami-Dade Superintendent Jose Dotres told Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago, who broke the story about the district’s decision, that the issue was never about Cruz, who is gay.
“We never made a decision based on him as an individual,” Dotres told Santiago. “We made the decision based on content and inappropriateness.”
Michel Hausmann, artistic director of Miami New Drama, argued this sort of decision is becoming a trend in the state.
“It seems like we quickly got ourselves into a new cultural war and the students are losing,” he told the Herald. “We are restricting information. We think that students are not capable enough for critical thinking. And if we don’t raise a flag now, ‘Hey, what’s next? Burning the books?’ ”
‘Silencing the students’
The Miami-Dade School District began reviewing scripts for plays in 2020 after Patricio Suarez, district supervisor of the Division of Academics Visual and Performing Arts, attended another show at Miami New Drama, “The Cubans.”
The theater recommended the show for students 13 and up. But after a district mistake allowed for younger students to attend, school officials deemed it inappropriate for them — citing a homosexual character, transgender issues and profane language, according to documents provided by Miami New Drama. After that, the district created a review system.
Still, district officials do not follow a specific rubric or metric to determine what is appropriate. Instead, curriculum support specialists, who are tasked with reviewing all scripts, use School Board policies and state laws as a general guide to make their decision. If curriculum specialists raise concerns about a play or specific scenes, the issues are elevated to administration or higher-ranking executives within the district, Calzadilla Diaz said.
But, argues Mittelman, “Reading a play is not like seeing a play. It is a much more contextual experience. It denies the context of why that material might be in the play, and as a result, it may be more or less potent when seen on stage.”
During the 2022-23 school year, 46 performances are being offered through the Cultural Passport Program, which offers students opportunities to see local artistic productions for free, officials said. (For “Anna in the Tropics,” officials received the script Aug. 18 and informed Miami New Drama of its decision Sept. 8, according to district staff.)
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the play — it had its world premiere at the now-defunct New Theatre in Coral Gables in 2002, and would win the Pulitzer the following year. The play touches on eternal themes of love, death, and life, as well as references to Cuban traditions.
For Cruz, the play is a testament to the power of literature.
“They are silencing the students in many ways,” Cruz said, “by not providing them the opportunity to see a work of art that deals with their community and with history.”
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