Running Against The Wind

Trumbull continues to make headlines. With Rent: The School Edition, for all the wrong reasons. We’re fighting a rear guard action against a bowdlerized version of an award winning Broadway musical based on issues that were headliners ten years before its 1994 opening.

And still, it appears, Trumbull is not ready to allow our high school theater company to perform a show that has been done elsewhere innumerable times, including in Milford three years ago.

A New York Times story, “Tamer ‘Rent’ Is Too Wild For Some Schools,” offers an insight into just how not ready we are. It describes several communities going through exactly the process we are in the throes of. The point of interest here is that the article is datelined February 19, 2009.

In our own drama, only the high school’s Thespian Society has distinguished itself. Their members’ forced defense of their project and their program has been sincere, articulate and reasonable.  In contrast, the adults in the room have left school principal Marc Guarino, a seasoned educator new to this community, out on an island.

Guarino has one advantage this observer guesses no other senior official has - he saw the original show on Broadway. Despite a reputation for openness, one wonders how tuned in to Trumbull he is, and what guidance he has received from his peers. Or is he taking one for the party?

In the wake of Guarino’s cancellation announcement First Selectman Tim Herbst called for the show to be rescheduled to this summer and produced under the aegis of the Trumbull Youth Association. That organization’s leaders rejected the opportunity so quickly one wonders whether Herbst conferred with them. And do we even know whether the lead actors and crew members, many of whom are seniors, will be available during the summer?

The Board of Education listened intently to some three dozen students, parents and other supporters at the start of the last three meetings pleading for the return of the show to its original schedule. Then, following Wednesday’s speakers, the board’s Chair, Deborah Herbst, stated that they are a “policy making board,” and since no policy issues are involved, any decision other than supporting the administration “is not in the board’s purview.” 

The heart of the controversy - and the driver for the production’s cancellation, then its rescheduling - is the stated need to develop an extended program to educate our high school students about the issues. Student speakers told the education board that they started learning about HIV-AIDS, drug use and homosexuality - the issues at the core of Rent:The School Edition - in their fifth grade health classes. Does this show call into question the value of that curriculum? Do our schools offer it because it is mandated, while questioning its efficacy when confronted with a real world test?

Perhaps the larger point is that it is Trumbull outside the walls of our high school for which the show is “too risqué.” Our high school has a LGBT group and numerous others that engage our teens in learning about all manner of social issues and ills. But how does that other community, for whom Rent’s issues have no direct relevance, resonance or impact become more sensitive to the realities of the world our students live in? Perhaps they won’t or don’t want to.

“Ay, there’s the rub.”