Studies in Drama: Too Hot to Handle: Forbidden Plays in Modern America
This MIT OpenCourseWare seminar examines American theater censorship, from national and local obscenity laws to informal practices like canceled productions, denied funding, and banned school reading lists. Students read the plays themselves, works pulled from stages or classrooms, to judge firsthand what made them provocative enough to draw legal or extra-legal suppression. The course traces censorship's presence in American theater from its earliest days to current controversies, asking who gets to decide a play is too dangerous to stage or teach, and why film's ratings system never took hold in live theater. Materials include the syllabus, primary play texts, and related readings on obscenity law and cultural regulation, freely available through MIT's OpenCourseWare platform. There is no certificate, only the course materials themselves for self-study or classroom use.