Dirty Books, Banned Books, and Why We Still Need to Play
Editor's Note: Mara Lieberman, the author of this thought piece on censorship, is also the author and director of the play DIRTY BOOKS.
Click here to read the related story--BATED BREATH THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS “DIRTY BOOKS” – Preview
In 2018, I began developing a piece about censorship, erotica, and the act of writing under pressure. I shelved it during Covid—sensual storytelling in cramped rooms was no longer an option. A few years later, while visiting my father in Sarasota, FL, something reignited the urgency.
I walked into an independent bookstore and saw a table with a sign that simply read: “Banned Books.” I assumed I’d find something newly provocative. Instead, I saw To Kill a Mockingbird, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, my beloved Judy Blume books, and other books that held significance inside my coming-of-age years, books assigned in English class, books that had shaped how I understood the world.
I remember standing there stunned: What could be so threatening about these books decades later?
Around the same time, I learned that And Tango Makes Three, the children’s book about two male penguins raising a chick, had been added to banned lists. My ex-wife and I read that book to our daughter many, many nights. It helped her feel less alone as a kid of two moms. What could possibly be dangerous about making room for different kinds of families?
Those moments reminded me why the shelved show was not just timely but necessary. They pulled the idea back into focus and pushed me toward finishing Dirty Books.
When I first imagined the piece in 2018, the questions driving me weren’t purely political. They were artistic, personal, and mischievous: What happens when a group of people come together to create something bigger than any one of us? How do we stage desire without cliché? How do we make nerdy legal history sexy? How do we show a marriage falling apart and a queer love story blooming in ways that resist naturalism? And how do we give the audience an evening they won’t forget?
Beneath all of that lived a deeper inquiry: What are the erotic and emotional truths people are told not to say—and what happens when we invite them to say them anyway?
Erotica has always been a curiosity for me. As a teenager, I read Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and was electrified by the sheer diversity of women’s fantasies. It taught me that desire is not uniform or polite or containable and that turn ons are fluid and wildly diverse.
Staging sex and longing is notoriously tricky—most productions overdo it or focus more on the sexual simulation itself- not on the energy between the actors. I’ve always believed less is more, that suggestion is often sexier than depiction, and that transgressing social norms can unlock a kind of joy audiences rarely get permission to feel. And in a moment when progress is being threatened across the country, it felt urgent to build a space where people could reclaim a bit of their own unruliness.
One of the great surprises of this process has been watching audiences leap so fully into the world. They answer secret phones. They invent character names. They watch the love story with laser focus. They laugh in places I didn't know were funny. They gasp. They lean in. They play.
I think it’s because participation—real, meaningful participation—lets audiences feel seen. Traditional theater setups ask people to sit anonymously in the dark, far from the action. They can leave feeling empty. My mission has always been to invite audiences into the story without them even realizing it, to create a shared experience that can never be replicated in quite the same way.
One of my actors once asked me, “Do you play every day?” I thought about it and realized: Yes. I do.
My father made up games constantly when I was growing up. It was never boring; anything could happen. I think I bring that sensibility into my work—especially into Dirty Books. The play is a big game with real stakes.
We even have a character called "The Warden of the Words", a stern 1950s gym teacher armed with a whistle. If the audience writes something that violates the old anti-obscenity laws, she blows it. She represents the people who hold power. The rest of us get to be “bad kids,” saying things we’re not supposed to say.
Censorship, at its core, is a mechanism of erasure. It is the insecurity of people who want their experience to be the experience. It’s sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “la la la, I don’t hear you” while real people—often those already marginalized—try to articulate the truths of their lives.
This country was built on the backs of people who were marginalized at best and brutalized at worst. You can try to rewrite, sanitize, or deny that, but facts are facts. Healing requires looking at the hard things. Books are often the only honest record we have of those truths.
In this moment—Dirty Books became a way for me to preserve history, resist softly but persistently, and remind audiences that they matter. That their voices matter. That they are not passive spectators but essential participants in the cultural story we are writing together.
It is a privilege to make experiences that matter now, with audiences who matter—audiences who become co-authors, co-conspirators, co-creators. Every night, we craft an irreproducible experience.
In a culture increasingly invested in silencing, I choose—again and again—to make room for voices. To play. To listen. To write in the open what others would prefer be kept in the dark.
Photos: Bjorn Bolinder.
