GILROY
– With the school’s theater overflowing Friday, Gilroy High
drama classes put on a series of skits showing how comfortable
the
”
American Pie
”
generation is with explicit sexual language among 1,000 or so of
their classmates.
GILROY – With the school’s theater overflowing Friday, Gilroy High drama classes put on a series of skits showing how comfortable the “American Pie” generation is with explicit sexual language among 1,000 or so of their classmates.
Some Gilroy High School students and parents say the frank sexual jokes and content at the drama Showcase were no big deal. Other parents, along with Principal Bob Bravo, say it was inappropriate and wished they’d known about it ahead of time.
Drama teacher Kurt Meeker said The Dispatch’s questions about whether the material was appropriate were the first he had heard in his four years on the GHS faculty. He regularly puts on two Showcases a year.
Was this spring’s Showcase more sexually explicit than others past? Not really, Meeker said.
“There may have been a bit more (sexual content) than usual,” Meeker said. “I try to steer them away from that as much as possible, but I also think it’s important to let students pick their own material.”
There were three Showcase performances Friday in which students from different drama classes performed sketches they had selected and rehearsed, followed by improvisational comedy segments. The 260-seat theater was full each time with other classes, requiring dozens of students to stand.
Not all the skits included sexual innuendoes at the 1 p.m. Showcase, and not all of the sex-related skits contained explicit references, but many did.
Some were silly, such as a mock American history lesson that showed the letters of former Vice President Spiro Agnew’s name can be rearranged to spell, “Grow a penis.” Others were serious, like a monologue of a girl lamenting her pregnancy and her boyfriend’s wish to marry.
Many were somewhere in between, with laughs and drama mixed.
One of the first skits featured a boy and girl acting as a married couple, with the wife asking the husband why he didn’t want to have sex with her. He said he was too tired, which was followed by a frank conversation about how many times a week they had sex. At one point, the wife called her husband’s friends “latent fags” and said their influence weakened his masculinity. It ended with a physical struggle in which he twisted her arm behind her back and made her say that he, the man, was the boss in their relationship.
Another sketch, featuring two girls getting ready for dinner with two guys, contained a casual reference to oral sex. One girl, not excited about her date but feeling pressured from her friend, asked sarcastically, “Does that mean I should go down on him under the table?”
In one skit featuring a girl and a blind boy at her apartment, the girl put her date’s hand on her chest to prove to him that her breasts were not fake, unlike her hair and eyebrows. The curtain fell as they got into bed to have sex.
In the last sketch – introduced as a couple “crazy in love, emphasis on the word ‘crazy’ ” – a girl trying to break her boyfriend’s unflappable demeanor confessed to him that she had “crabs,” or pubic lice. The boy responded that he had had sexual desires for very young girls. A discussion of Freudian psychosexuality followed, with him commenting that young people today are “unshockable.” The curtain fell as they forgave each other and went offstage to have sex.
To up the ante further, swear words were sprinkled throughout the skits, with multiple references each to “sh–,” “crap” and “damn.”
This Showcase featured students from the sixth-period drama class.
Meeker said the students picked all the skits from resources aimed at high school drama classes, which he obtained though the Scholastic book company. Student actress Brandy Grimaldo gave another story, however. She said the drama students were supposed to read Shakespeare and other classic drama and interpret it into their own time, writing the lines themselves.
Grimaldo, a senior who acted in the second-period Showcase, said she “had a blast.” She said she couldn’t see how the material could be controversial.
“We know what not to say,” Grimaldo said. “We know, like, vulgar language, that we’re not supposed to use those words or anything.”
Asked about the skit with the sexually unsatisfied wife, Grimaldo asked, “That was inappropriate?”
“We shouldn’t try to hide from the subject,” she added.
Principal Bravo did not attend the Showcase and, like Meeker, had never heard complaints about its content. He, however, said he was “not happy to hear about it.”
“It’s something I will be looking into,” Bravo said Monday. “My line is, if it’s not something we’d let students talk about in class, … if it’s not something we’d let kids wear on a T-shirt, it’s not something that should be in a drama production.”
Meeker said the only time he thought the show got “out of hand” was when one girl began what he called a “raunchy dance” during the improv portion of the show.
“I had some words with her afterwards,” Meeker said. “She said she thought it would be funny.”
So where does Meeker draw the line?
“When there are direct references to what … would be offensive to an audience or what would be uncomfortable to an audience,” he said.
Meeker said he thought Friday’s scripted performances were appropriate for the student audience. For parents and the general public, however, the fare is different. Coming this spring to the GHS theater are C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the Rodgers and Hart musical “Babes in Arms.”
Delores Burdick, the mother of two GHS students, said she was bothered to hear of the Showcase’s sexual content.
“I know that they know these things,” Burdick said, (but) my daughter’s only 14, and my son’s only 15. They’re a little young, I think. … I have an older son also, who’s 21. Now if he went to something like that, it wouldn’t bother me.”
“If we’re talking stuff that would typically be in an R-rated movie or worse, I would want to know,” said another GHS mother, Diane Baty. “To me, it would be a big deal. … I would not consider that appropriate, and I’m surprised the school would.”
Richard Padilla’s son was one of the actors in the Showcase. Although he didn’t know the exact content of the skits, he said it doesn’t bother him.
“I treat him as an adult,” he said of his son. “If he feels comfortable, I’m comfortable.”
Miguel Castillo, a 17-year-old senior, said the skits were made funnier by the fact that that they were more risqué than what is usually allowed at school, but he said he wasn’t offended.
“They did use the words, like ‘d—‘ and ‘penis’ and stuff like that, but I didn’t really care about it that much,” Castillo said. “When they mentioned that men were, like, stupid, I felt kind of uncomfortable with that, but not really with the language. … They use it around here so much; it’s just not really like a big deal anymore.”
Sophomore Adrian Ruiz, 15, said he was neither surprised at the Showcase’s content nor uncomfortable with it.
“My family raised me, like, it’s not a big deal,” Ruiz said. “It’s part of life.”
