Angels in America at the Catholic University of America

When administrators objected to a student play, faculty discovered that defending academic freedom can be a complex and conflicted ambition.

By Gary Jay Williams

When George Bernard Shaw visited Washington, D.C., he was told that the Catholic University of America was located in the city. Shaw's quick reply was that a Catholic university was a contradiction in terms.

I spent most of my career inside of what Shaw saw as an oxymoron; I taught daily in a culture of contradictions, where faith and reason are frequently in negotiation, often fruitfully.

But the encounter between Angels in America and Catholic University revealed some of the contradictions in their most agonizing form. On the table were competing interests between religious freedom and free artistic expression and between the interests of administrators of a church-affiliated university and those of its theater faculty and students. There were First Amendment rights and moral imperatives on both sides of the table. There were Catholics on both sides of the table. This article is about the complexities of this crisis, both human and institutional. It is not theoretical or legalistic. It describes how the situation played out at ground level.

I was a member of a theater faculty whose degree programs in the last decade have focused on developing contemporary cutting-edge theater. Doing so has often meant exploring issues of social justice through the art. I was also a member of the faculty of a university sponsored by the bishops of the United States, with a unique relationship with the Vatican. I taught in a climate of Catholic religious conservatism that has steadily intensified over the last two decades. At Catholic University, that climate took hold beginning with the visit of Pope John Paul II to our campus in 1979.

Dissent Discouraged

By the late 1980s, the university had challenged a tenured theologian, Charles Curran, who was on the faculty of our School of Religious Studies. Because Curran was seen as espousing liberal views contrary to church doctrine, the Vatican revoked his license to teach Catholic theology. The university then removed him from his position as a professor of theology. Curran brought a breach-of-contract suit, but the university won a favorable decision in D.C. Superior Court, because Curran's contract to teach theology required that he be licensed by the Vatican. It was a clear case of contract law and of the doctrinal concerns and legal rights of the church's university. But it had a chilling effect on dissent, and I suspect that it emboldened conservative Catholics thereafter.

Then, in 1990, Pope John Paul II issued his "apostolic constitution" on Catholic higher education, entitled Ex Corde Ecclesiae, or "from the heart of the church." In it, the pope stressed the Catholic mission of Catholic colleges and universities. Since then, our campus has continued to worry and talk about whether and how our university is fulfilling its Catholic mandate. Ex Corde was even the focus of a recent self-study prepared for our accreditors.

In 1990 the university set forth its Policy for Presentations and Balanced Programs, in which it declared its intention, as a private, value-based, religious institution, to refuse to "provide a forum for advocates whose values are counter to those of the university or the Roman Catholic Church." It declared its desire to have "balanced programs" in which knowledgeable spokespersons representing opposing viewpoints would deal with both sides of controversial issues (including societal, political, moral, and ecclesiastical matters) in pursuit of greater understanding. Making a distinction between "advocacy" and "objective explanation," it also declared its intention to refuse programs that might "promote action rather than understanding," or that would constitute "incitement" as opposed to the "scholarly and abstract discourses" appropriate to a university setting.

Unacceptable Content

Since the early 1980s, our department's theater seasons have included classical and contemporary works by playwrights from Samuel Beckett to the British Marxist Caryl Churchill. We staged the medieval Christian morality play Everyman and Molière's Tartuffe, which is about a cleric who is a sexual predator. In my graduate courses, students have been reading not only Plato and Aristotle but twentieth-century poststructural theorists such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. From the vantage point of these theorists, all claims to truth are mediated by language and culture, a view arguably not congenial to ideas of divine revelation. My point is that our administration did not forbid such views from discussion in the classroom.

Enter Angels. In fall 1996, our university president asked our dean, in effect, to control or suppress the forthcoming production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, a production directed by one of our M.F.A. degree candidates, with a cast of graduate students. Summoned to the dean's office, the drama faculty learned that the administration believed that Kushner's play, because of its sympathy with homosexuals, would be seen as endorsing a homosexual lifestyle, which is unacceptable to the church.

The dean believed the play would be seen by many Catholics as offensive and counter to the university's philosophy and mission. As an example of the play's likely offensiveness to Catholics, he cited language in which the character Roy Cohn expresses himself in Act I, Scene 2. Cohn uses terms such as "God-fucking dammit to hell" and "Jesus fuck the goddamn thing." The dean concluded his hourlong scolding of us by reading a letter from the university president, Brother Patrick Ellis, who said that he found the play "profoundly offensive" and without redeeming literary value. The dean was in a difficult position as messenger and enforcer. But the drama faculty, whose members were clearly regarded by the administration as little more than reckless children, was given no opportunity in this meeting to defend its decision or the play.

We were then presented with two choices: cancel the production or restrict access to it. If the production were to go on, no admission was to be charged, there was to be no advertising, and the audience was to be restricted to faculty members, graduate students, and such professional theater agents as are usually invited. The university's undergraduates were to be excluded altogether, including our seventy undergraduate drama majors.

The idea of canceling the production was repugnant to the drama faculty, as was the prospect of restricted access. We also were told that the drama faculty would be responsible for enforcing restricted access at the door of the theater, an equally repug-nant prospect. The meeting with the dean was long, emotional, and explosive.

I doubt that the administration really expected the drama department to cancel the production. The restricted-access option was probably created as a middle way, with the hope of preventing a public confrontation over the issue of academic freedom. (The Curran case had recently put the university on the AAUP's embarrassing list of censured administrations.) Outright cancellation, without question, would have been seen by some in and outside of the university as a threat to the academic freedom that the university vows to foster in its statement of aims. Angels in America was, after all, not the Curran case, which related to the Vatican's licensing of a member of our ecclesiastical faculty. Angels involved the academic freedom of graduate students in the School of Arts and Sciences, a student director, and his cast who were working on a faculty-approved thesis project.

Unanticipated Trouble

You may be wondering why, given the climate of Catholic conservatism on campus, our faculty approved Kushner's play in the first place. It was not a casual decision, and the circumstances were not simple. First, we had come to expect the respect and support of our administration. The drama department, over its sixty-four-year life, has developed an international reputation for excellence, which our university's administration has been proud to publicize. Our graduates include Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights; award-winning stage and film actors; New York and regional theater directors; the past dean of the Yale School of Drama; past and present theater critics for the New York Times and the Washington Post; university scholars; officers in colleges, universities, and professional organizations; and teachers at all levels.

Second, although Tony Kushner's two-part play dealt with the church-sensitive issue of homosexuality, by 1996 the play had had a long run on Broadway; it had won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. At about the time our faculty committee approved its production, Angels was just closing a run at the Kennedy Center, a marble bastion of middle-class taste.

Third, our endeavor was conceived as a laboratory production, done on a low budget in a studio theater—the scale of all of our M.F.A. productions. This policy reflects our emphasis on a training process in which students can strengthen their skills and work in an environment in which conventional methods can be challenged and difficult issues explored.

Fourth, the director was one of our more capable graduate students. He was also a gay man, committed to gay rights, who, in his argument to the faculty for doing Kushner's play, was intelligent about the ways in which it addressed urgent issues in our society: homophobia and the plight of AIDS victims in America. (Our graduate directors must win the approval of our faculty production committee for their final project; this procedure, which includes presentations, is designed as part of the training process, mimicking that in professional theaters in which directors must win the support of boards and fellow artists.)

Fifth, our chair, Gitta Honegger, recognizing the highly charged issues of the play for our campus community, had arranged for after-performance panels of experts and audience discussions.

The selection of the play had been announced to the university community in spring 1996, five months before the administration objected to it. The department had not sought prior permission from the administration to do the play; that has never been its practice, although it has exercised judiciousness in selecting each season's plays. An arrangement involving oversight probably would be unacceptable to our drama faculty.

Off-Campus Production

The solution came from our faculty and students, who decided to take the production off campus. We wanted to avoid an embattled campus environment, especially the possibility of emotional confrontations at the door of the theater over the restricted access. Such circumstances could distract our young company from its work. The local media, already alerted to the conflict and primed by the "culture wars," would be likely to reduce the complex issues involved to news-at-eleven sound bites. Taking the play off campus would also somewhat allay the university's concerns and might prevent litigation.

Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., quickly and generously offered one of its small lab spaces to us. There the production had its run of two weekends, playing to full houses, probably due in part to the controversy. The university insisted that its name be identified with the production as little as possible but did not demand a disclaimer. The printed program noted only that the production was in partial fulfillment of M.F.A. degree requirements at the Catholic University of America.

At Arena Stage, the panels of experts discussed the play after three of the performances—panels originally intended to be heard on the CUA campus. Among the experts were a Jesuit theologian, a rabbi, a dean of undergraduate programs, and Jim Graham, then director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic for people suffering from HIV/AIDS. The opening comment in the first panel discussion was Graham's question, "Why are we here?" (and not at Catholic University).

The suppression of Angels caused a major dispute on campus. The university's weekly student newspaper, the Tower, objected in an editorial, suggesting that the administration seemed to have little confidence in the ability of its students to exercise the education the university was giving them. One angered gay alumnus returned his master's diploma. The controversy was widely reported in local and national media, which the drama faculty had tried to warn the administration would happen.

It is important to understand that our administration's decision was taken in a climate of Catholic conservatism to which our university is particularly sensitive. American bishops constitute half the members of our board of trustees (whose adverse response could affect our funding). The board's chair was the American cardinal closest to the pope. The university's chancellor is, automatically, the archbishop of the Washington diocese. CUA is the Catholic university on the hilltop in Washington, visible metaphorically as well as geographically.

Although I believe that taking Angels off campus was the best option open to the drama faculty and students at our religious institution, I deeply regret that we were forced to seek it. Kushner's play raises issues that American Catholics were having difficulty with in these years. It is sad that America's Catholic university did not see the event as an opportunity instead of a threat. To be sure, the university has its religious rights; it has no obligation to please the American Civil Liberties Union. But, as a university, it does have a duty to take the intellectual high road. If to perform a play is to sanction the behavior in it or its philosophical vision, then the dramatic literature to be censored will reach from Medea through Troilus and Cressida to Endgame. It is folly to attempt to reduce the arts to orthodoxy. That any university would expect to do so would be gravely disappointing. The suppression of Angels at the Catholic University of America seemed unworthy of the spirit of the university, which is not to say that the cultural moment of this crisis was not a difficult one for our university.

During and after the crisis, our drama faculty sought to turn the situation into a learning experience for our students. Clearly, their future in our culture would require them to be intelligent, responsible, and articulate about their commitments to both their art and their faith. For the following term, I created a new course on the history of theater and censorship for our undergraduates, a course that fit well the parameters of our theme-driven critical studies for undergraduates and one I taught again last year. (On opening day and in my syllabus, I warned students that the course would involve some sexually explicit materials and told them that anyone who might be offended should feel free to elect an alternative course, offered at the same time.)

I began with a close study of Angels and its suppression at the university. My administration had no objection to the rational discussion of the play or the controversy in a controlled classroom. Its comfort with this setting reflects a major point about the theater (and the university's fears of it) that should not be missed. As my students know, historically it always has been the theater's visibility as public event and its address to the emotions that have made the art susceptible to suppression. That visibility is a given, of course, and emotional conflict is the theater's driving engine. Artistically complex plays explore such conflicts for our interrogation; art does not resolve them for us. No play is value free. Certainly, no spectator comes to the theater value free. Such are the theater's rules ofengagement.

As you can tell, the story of Angels at Catholic University was a complex one, and for those, like me, with allegiances to both this art and the church, it was an agonizing one.

Gary Williams was professor of theater at the Catholic University of America for twenty-nine years.

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