This Jewish Playwright's Show Was Cancelled Because of Anti-DEI Initiatives
For playwright and director Zoe Senese-Grossberg, activism has been an integral part of her artistic process. “Growing up Jewish, you're taught to value writing and value education, and we do think about censorship,” she said. These values took on a new meaning this year when a student-led production of her play Boy My Greatness, a historical fiction piece about the boys who played Shakespeare’s women, was cancelled at the University of Central Oklahoma due to anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The university cancelled the production after the state senate passed Senate Bill 796, which prohibited public schools from using state funding for anything falling under the umbrella of DEI. Senese-Grossberg, who was in close contact with the two students producing the show, was disappointed but ultimately not surprised. “I was like, if this show gets shut down, it's going to be this production,” Senese-Grossberg said.
Boy My Greatness premiered in New York City in 2024 with a production produced by Firebird Project. It went on to tour at several theaters in the New York region shortly afterwards. The play follows six of the “boy players” (the young men who dressed as women to portray the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays) as they rehearse at the Globe Theater in the early 1600s. Although the play does not explicitly use words like “queer” or “trans” since the characters would not have had language like that in their time period, Senese-Grossberg feels that the queerness of the characters and the play is still quite clear.
“It's a trans Shakespeare play. It's a play about, you know, to be really simplistic, trans girls in the 1600s exploring their genders and sexualities and, like, making out.”
These themes are consistent across Senese-Grossberg’s work: “I like to write about what turns people on and what pulls them apart,” she said.
“I'm excited by talking about the past as a mode to talk about the present.”
The two University of Central Oklahoma students who were putting up the play, Maggie Lawson and Liberty Welch, contacted Senese-Grossberg quickly after the university’s theater department informed them that the funding was being pulled from their show. However, they also told Senese-Grossberg that they were planning on raising their own money to perform the play as planned.
“They were like, ‘Hey, we're going to try to produce the show ourselves,’” Senese-Grossberg said.
“And I was kind of like, ‘You should do that, yeah. You guys are 20 years old and being censored by the government.’”
After an online campaign and some viral TikToks shared by Lawson and Welch, as well as the Firebird Project, the students raised nearly $10,000 to put on their new production of Boy My Greatness. Senese-Grossberg was once again unsurprised, this time in a positive way.
“They were very organized and very smart kids. And I just had a lot of faith in them immediately,” she said.
Senese-Grossberg expressed frustration with the fact that some people with whom she spoke expressed confusion about why Boy My Greatness was censored when so many of Shakespeare’s plays involve gender-bending or cross-dressing. She said that, to her, the play is not “just about Shakespeare.”
“Let's be really honest with ourselves. What are they actually trying to censor here?” Senese-Grossberg asked.
“These people are directly going after…all gender nonconformity. They're against all queerness. They're against all expressions of diversity. But a huge direct target is trans women. And as a cis woman, I think it is disturbed and naive to act like that's not what's happening.”
As this particular production has ended (performances took place the last week of October), Senese-Grossberg reflected on what it means to have her work targeted by this anti-DEI legislation.
“If I'm being really honest… it makes me feel good about myself. I love that,” she said.
“But it also makes me really mad. And it's just the truth of it, that there is a concentrated effort to keep trans people out of public life.”
Senese-Grossberg is currently pursuing her MFA in playwriting at the University of Iowa, and the experience has not deterred her from continuing to write plays like Boy My Greatness. She has since worked on additional collaborations with the Firebird Project, including adaptations of Frankenstein. She still believes deeply in what she set out to accomplish with Boy My Greatness.
“I feel so, so tender towards the characters and towards [Boy My Greatness],” she said.
"It's one of the most special plays I've ever written.”
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