West Side Story, Untold

When I was in the ninth grade, I took a music history class especially designed for those of us who liked to listen to music but had no business playing it. Our teacher was a smart, enthusiastic 20-something with an unholy knowledge of pop music trivia and lyrics from musicals. Needless to say, we loved her. The highlight of the class was the week we watched "West Side Story" on videotape and discussed the musical's roots in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," the socially conscious message of the show and the Boston background of composer Leonard Bernstein '39.

All of which made me especially sad that the administration of Amherst Regional High School in western Massachusetts decided to cancel a scheduled production of "West Side Story" after a group of concerned Puerto Rican students and parents submitted a petition saying that the musical promotes stereotypes and is racist.

I was in Amherst briefly yesterday and stopped by the town center. I stood in admiration of the intellectual life surrounding me--Amherst is Emily Dickinson's hometown and also a famous seat of learning in New England, with the presence of Amherst College, Hampshire College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, not to mention Smith College down the road in Northampton and Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. How could a few citizens of this traditionally liberal enclave have made such a crushingly wrong decision, based on a fundamental misunderstanding, by canceling the free expression of a classic musical which still has a great deal to teach?

Some say that the answer lies in an overdose of political correctness--the high school administration was eager to appease the anger of a group of minority students and so just cancelled the play out of hand. That may be part of it, but the larger answer is that everyone involved in this controversy is suffering an overdose of incorrect assumptions.

Reaching back to my memories of ninth grade music history, this is what I learned about "West Side Story": it's a love story in which two teenagers, Tony and Maria, fall for each other against the backdrop of inner-city New York gang fighting. The musical's script, by Arthur Laurents, updates Shakespeare's tale of Capulets and Montagues by casting a gang of white New Yorkers against a gang of Puerto Rican immigrants.

Bernstein's brilliant melodies coupled with Stephen Sondheim's moving lyrics tell a story of injustice, poverty, crime and, yes, stereotype. But that story is intentionally told to reveal the assumptions inherent in society, to point them out to the audience in order to combat them, not to perpetuate them, as the Amherst petition's signers would have us believe.

Just as the point of "Romeo and Juliet" was to emphasize the power of love over the irrationality of rivalry and hate, "West Side Story" reminds us that issues of discrimination and injustice never go away. The portrayals of the gangs, white and Puerto Rican, are intended to illuminate the desperate situation of a life based on violence and discrimination along racial lines.

When the white Jets sing to the police officer on their tale in "Office Krupke," they are singing for all the delinquent youth in the play: "There is good, there is good/There is untapped good/Like inside, the worst of us is good." To examine the play and find it intentionally, harmfully stereotypical is not just a difference of opinion, it's a misinterpretation of the authors' intent. "West Side" is a timeless story, whether it's set in 16th-century Verona, 1950's New York or any modern city today.

The last report I heard in Amherst yesterday was that some First Amendment advocates were hoping to stage the production even after its cancellation by the high school. They will have to find a director, since Amherst Regional High School's musical director is already booked for the season, orchestrating "Crazy for You" in place of "West Side Story."

But whether these counter-activists are successful is beside the point. The administration of Amherst Regional High School has taught its students an inadvertent but incredibly damaging lesson in this controversy--that protest, in the absence of explanation or discussion, can prevent free expression, performance and education.

Think of the benefit the community would have gained from a high school performance of the musical, followed (or preceded, or both) by vigorous discussion and debate over the origin of the story, its influences and the aims of its creators. Dickinson once wrote in her poem "The Show": "The show is not the show,/But they that go./Menagerie to me/My neighbor be./Fair play--Both went to see." The great poet could not have imagined these neighbors, and sadly, there will be no "West Side" show to see in Amherst this winter.

Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.