Editor's Note:
Sean Kenady is a Texas-based musical theatre writer, composer, and producer, and founder of Kenady Sean Productions and the Broadway Bridge Project, developing original musicals and building pathways between regional artists and the New York stage.
Here, Sean Kenady, creator of a new musical based on the titular novel-- The Scarlet Letter Musical-- shares her thought on censorship and the importance of creating a space where all ideas are welcome.
Fear. Control. Fear of losing control. Fear of a threat to power. Before public education, before all had the privilege and ability to read, oppressing the poor and uneducated was easy. However, now in America, where we have the privilege of a free public education and the ability to read is all but taken for granted, control becomes much harder. Thus, a fear of an educated public, leads to a fear of losing control, and in the end leads to censorship. Censorship is driven by fear.
I’m writing to you as a theatre maker of two musicals, one a dystopian sci-fi comedy, Beyond Perfection, and the other an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, that will be in the Spark Festival on April 25th at the Tada! Theatre in NYC. As a lover of books and musicals, one may understand how I’m passionate I am about censorship.
As a huge dystopian fan, when I think about censorship, I think about Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In this dystopia, the government burned all books. Firemen in this society, were tasked to burn all books at the temperature of 451 degees Fahrenheit. The protagonist, Guy Montag, a book fireman, starts to question this practice and the adventure begins. The classic dystopian novel begs the question: why does this fictional society want to burn books? Why did Ray Bradbury find it important and necessary enough to write a story warning about censorship?
Books contain stories, fiction and nonfiction. Storytelling is a powerful if not the most powerful medium of expressing thought. Theatre makers hold this truth to their very core. This truth is what keeps theatre makers up at night, drives us to push forward despite insurmountable odds, and inspires us to keep writing. This truth is the hope that maybe one story, one show, one song could have a ripple effect that could change one mind, change one audience and thus change the world. Ray Bradbury understood this, and it is important we do, too. So why does a society ban books, or stories? Fear of the ripple effect. Without stories, without knowledge, without truth, without hope the oppressed can keep being oppressed, the deceived can keep being duped. The people in power can continue without fear of losing control.
There was an experiment “in 1967, [in which] Overmier and Seligman found that dogs exposed to inescapable and unavoidable electric shocks in one situation later failed to learn to escape shock in a different situation where escape was possible” (Maier & Seligman, 1976). This concept or phenomenon is known as learned helplessness. If we are censored, then we lack the ability to obtain knowledge. Without knowledge, we are trapped, unable to learn to escape, no matter what our reality is, good or bad. Truth ultimately sets you free, but if one can censor you and block you from the truth, one can keep you in a state of learned helplessness, trapping you when you could easily escape.
Today, I would like to argue that social media creates an environment of learned helplessness, ultimately leading us to be censored by our own personal echo chambers. While companies have been proven to intentionally censor content, for the most part, their prime concern is to make money. In that effort, they have created algorithms to keep us scrolling. In order to keep us scrolling, the algorithm shows us what we like, creating an echo chamber. We become the dog stuck in a box of electric shock, who has learned helplessness. We call this doom scrolling.
How do we get out of the box? We intentionally seek out voices outside our echo chamber. We read classic literature. We read multiple articles from different perspectives. We take advantage of the access we have in this modern age, to read and educate ourselves. We find common threads and common themes that have presented themselves repeatedly throughout history. It is then, that we can be rest assured that the truth will always win out, and rise above the noise. Then, we can be the dog that gets out, because we are no longer helpless because the truth sets us free.
For this to completely work, we must provide opportunities for all stories to be told, so we have access to differing perspectives. The beauty of this wonderful country we live in, is the diversity of thought and the freedoms we have in being able to express ourselves. Not only that, how blessed we are that illiteracy is all but a thing of the past, but with more people, there are more opinions. Instead of censoring them, we can let them be expressed and believe that ultimately the truth will win out.
I don’t think we have true diversity in theatre because not everyone has access to be able to create art. There are a small number of Broadway theatres, controlled by a small amount of people, which ultimately prohibits the diversity of stories being told. That is why it is so important for festivals like the Spark Festival, where we get to see theatre from all different people of all different backgrounds. The Spark Festival gives voice to artists that wouldn’t otherwise be heard.
To provide more access, I’ve created the Broadway Bridge Project. It provides people, like me, who live outside of Broadway access to the New York City. I hope with providing more access to the pipeline, we will give more writers the ability to tell their stories. In turn, more stories from differing perspectives will be shared, and we will have freedom of thought and the opposite of censorship.
Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1976). Learned Helplessness: Theory and Evidence. Journal Ol Experimental Psychology: General, 105 (No.1), 1–44. https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/lhtheoryevidence.pdf
