Playing politically correct

Protesters disrupted his play by shouting down the actors, blocking the aisles, rushing the stage and threatening the audience, and student playwright Chris Lee expected Washington State University officials to take action.

They did, but not quite in the way he expected. After an inquiry, the university’s Center for Human Rights concluded that the student hecklers had engaged in an appropriate expression of free speech after being provoked by the play “Passion of the Musical.”

University President V. Lane Rawlins agreed, telling a faculty member in an e-mail that the protesters had “exercised their rights of free speech in a very responsible manner by letting the writer and players know exactly how they felt,” according to the student newspaper, the Daily Evergreen, which obtained a copy of the e-mail.

Not only were the 40 protesters absolved of any culpability, but Mr. Lee said he later found that a university administrator had paid for their tickets.

Mr. Lee, who said he was so fearful for his safety and that of the cast during the April 21 production that he called 911, is fighting back. He contends that university officials are punishing him for running afoul of the campus’s politically correct zeitgeist, and has called on the university in Pullman, Wash., to apologize and renounce its position.

“It’s like they were trying to teach me a lesson, like, ‘Well, Chris, you wrote the show, this is what happens,’” said Mr. Lee, a 23-year-old senior theater major. “They let [the protesters] censor my show. They’re clearly wrong, and they’re not apologizing — they’re not even answering.”

Lawyers for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, who have intervened on Mr. Lee’s behalf, have written to Mr. Rawlins twice asking him to renounce the university’s support for the so-called “heckler’s veto.” So far, he has refused.

“Heckling a play is clearly censorship,” said David French, president of the Philadelphia-based foundation. “You don’t have the right to heckle it to death. Would the administration have taken the same view if the ROTC had come in and heckled an anti-war play?”

University spokesman Robert Strenge disagreed with the censorship charge, saying that the play was funded partly by the university and hosted in a school theater.

He said the hecklers were encouraged to voice their objections by the cast, who sometimes spoke to the audience directly and left the stage to perform in the aisles, which “helped the performance take on the quality of a public debate.”

Greg Lukianoff, the foundation’s director of legal and public advocacy, ridiculed that argument.

“Does this mean that any time a play addresses the audience it becomes a public forum?” he said. “Under this theory, every soliloquy in Shakespeare would turn a theater into a discussion hall.”

Mr. Lee’s play, a satirical takeoff on Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” had no shortage of critics. The play was loaded with ethnic stereotypes, racial epithets and jokes aimed at Christians, Jews and Mormons, and was advertised as potentially “offensive or inflammatory to all audiences.”

Mr. French described the play’s outrageous, irreverent humor as along the lines of television shows like “South Park” and “Chappelle’s Show.” The point was to create a show so widely offensive that no one in particular could be offended, Mr. Lee said.

“I took shots at everyone so that everyone can say: ‘Hey, we all have something that other people can make fun of,’” Mr. Lee said. “But then people were saying, ‘You made fun of my group more than you made fun of these other groups.’”

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