For the Pepperdine Theatre department, the show must go on, even when issues concerning what is appropriate for a student production cast doubt onto what that show might be. Senior Theatre major Jillian Dobbins recently experienced a hindrance on the way to completing her senior project when the play she had initially selected to produce, and received approval for, was rejected.
“I spent seven months expecting to do one play, and then in four days had to find another one,” Dobbins said. “I was told on a Friday that I couldn’t do it, and my auditions were supposed to be the following Tuesday,” Dobbins said.
Each spring, junior Theatre majors enrolled in the Directing II course compete to see who will get the opportunity to direct a student-produced show for their senior project in the coming year. Dobbins was chosen to direct, and her play of choice, “After the End” by Dennis Kelly, was approved by the faculty.
“I knew the playwright, because I had seen a play of his called “Debris,” and it sounded like the play Jillian had proposed dealt with similar themes,” Professor Bradley Griffin said. “I felt like I had an understanding of what it was. I had an opportunity to read the scripts, but Jillian had described it, so I thought, ‘I think I know what this is,’ and the project was approved.”
However, after examining the show with further scrutiny, the faculty decided that the play was irreconcilably inappropriate for Pepperdine’s standards.
“Looking very specifically at the play, I realized, this is edgy, this is psychological, and it has some strong language in it, but it also contained several instances of nudity: male nudity and female nudity, and it has some very strong sexual content in it,” Griffin said. “For anything that we stage here, on the main stage or in the mini-theatre, one line that we as a faculty are not prepared to cross in any situation, is nudity on stage, and anything that is going to put our student performers into a position that would make them extremely vulnerable.”
While a new play, “A Steady Rain” was chosen and is now slated to be performed in April, the incident raised questions regarding the show selection procedure and the Pepperdine standards of decency for Theatre students. The faculty expressed regrets at the manner in which the rejection occurred, but remained firm in their decision.
“We should’ve looked into that more fully before we allowed the project to get to the point of getting ready for auditions and production,” Griffin said. “We posted a public apology to Jillian on our callboard, where we owned up to our mistake. But, we still said we feel like we can’t allow this project to go forward, for the reasons that we had stated.”
Dobbins insisted that while she respects the faculty’s decision, she did everything she could to make sure the potentially objectionable parts of the show were made known. Furthermore, Dobbins said she believes that the show could have been produced in a way that didn’t transgress any standards. Using discretionary staging, avoiding putting student actors in compromising positions would have been a technical issue.
“I would like to think that the faculty would have enough faith in me to know that I would be able to mask it in a creative way — I wasn’t even considering nudity on stage at any point,” Dobbins said.
While much of the buzz around the situation is due to the way it happened, beyond the procedural issues, questions about the University’s responses to more mature subject matter in plays remain.
“The problem is that there isn’t actually a written code as to what is appropriate or not, and that’s something that needs to change, especially when they tell us we have the liberty to direct whatever we want,” Dobbins said. “There are obviously restrictions, but we have no real way of knowing what they are.”
She expressed the hope that Pepperdine’s theatrical output would not remain limited to light subject matter, but would adapt to tackle tougher questions in their productions.
“My question to Pepperdine would be, are we really that afraid of investigating the deeper, darker parts of human nature?” Dobbins said. “As an artist, and as an actress and as a director, I think that it’s necessary to investigate the darker parts of human nature and I don’t condone any of the acts in that play, but that’s a huge part of learning about human nature, is seeing it performed on stage.”
Griffin acknowledged the predicament of trying to present modern drama in a way that fits with the University’s mission and values, and pointed to recent shows, “Proof” and “Rabbit Hole” as successes in addressing darker subject matter.
“When we talk about doing contemporary, as in late 20th, early 21st century plays, frequently, one of the things we have to think about, for the main stage, certainly, is language and content,” Griffin said. “We are trying to look at the whole story that’s being told, and ask ourselves, ‘is it a story that’s worth telling, and can we tell that story with integrity?’”
