he had garlic breath for my first onstage kiss

Wow. This has me floored.

When I think of Mark Ravenhill, writing for young people does not immediately spring to mind. Shopping & Fucking comes to mind. This is not to say he could not do it. Tony Kushner has paired up with Maurice Sendak to do a show appropriate for young people, and it looks very promising. Writers can work in many different styles. Yada, yada, yada.

Here is my favorite quote from the article. Ravenhill says...

"I wanted to write a play that would humanise sex for young people. I rewrote Citizenship in the light of those discussions with London teenagers: they emboldened me to develop the physical contact between the young characters, to be honest about young people's fascination with and confusion about sex. Still, I decided not to ask for any full nudity. The play would be performed by young people in front of parents, teachers and friends and I thought it would raise too many difficult questions. What the play does demand is a great deal of full-on sexualised kissing. I've since discovered that kissing between two teenage boys on stage can lead to young audiences doing anything from whooping with delight right through to booing with disgust - but never staying silent."

He decided not to ask for full nudity? He thought that would bring on too many difficult questions? What, like, why are you telling underage students to engage in sexual moments in front of an audience? Does he mean questions like that? What is he thinking?

Yes, teens are goofy about sex. It is crazy to me that he is just figuring this out. He had to have gone through puberty.

I think that the banning of kissing from school plays is ludicrous, but the sexually heated kissing that Ravenhill used is disturbing. Theatre teachers have to walk a fine line with their students. They have to build trust with their casts in such a careful way because these kids are still walking, talking hormones. They can shatter at a moments notice, and then turn around and be unbelievably strong for other things. The point being that you can never know what you are going to get. Sexuality at that age is not something teens look at with any objectivity, and the lines of what is occurring onstage and off blur even more frequently than they do with adults.

Imagine, for a moment, a school here in the U.S. where a teacher commissions a play about sex, and talks to his students about sex, and asks his students to engage in "a great deal of full-on sexualised kissing", and then directs two boys to engage in this same kissing, and then has his students perform it for the community. Yes, said teacher would no longer be teaching.

So, fine, Europe is not as prudish as the U.S., but the same issue is at stake. Why would you take an emotionally immature and vulnerable MINOR and direct them to do sexually charged acts in front of their community? What answers would it bring that could not be brought in a well mediated discussion with parents or counselors, or the like? In my mind it would raise more questions for all involved then answers. Questions without answers is not always a good thing. Sometimes that just creates more confusion.

Ravenhill seemed to think that because these teens were excited by the discussion, they were then ready to perform it. This cannot come as a shocker to anyone that teens love a juicy discussion about sex. They also love getting attention from people. Let's combine that talk about sex with an open minded, famous playwright, who is writing down the things you say, and they must have thought they were the coolest people on the earth (I know I would have).

I agree with Ravenhill that artistic integrity should not be compromised, but he goes on to say...

"Drama is sexual - it's about bodies, about display, about fantasy - and puritan regimes have always resisted it. We can't ignore the fact that we live in a sexualised culture. And a school play can either perpetuate the sexualisation of young people, as many school musicals and cabarets do, or it can be used to tackle the complex physical and emotional world young people find themselves in."

I am foggy as to why he thinks we have to abandon tackling sexuality if it is not put on stage. We do live in a sexually charged culture, which is why it should be tackled, but is having kids act out these issues really the best way to go about it? Should sexual discovery be made so public? I still get nervous the first few times I have to do love and/or a sexual scene on stage, can you imagine what a 14 year old with no experience might feel? It reeks of exploitation to watch such a young person explore sexuality in front of a crowd.

So maybe what we should think about is being careful about what work we teach and how we teach it. Hold on folks, I am not advocating censorship, far from it. Not all drama is sexual and using teenagers to tackle sexual issues is a scary road. What I am advocating is accountability and responsibility. As artists we may feel that we should be neither, that being responsible or accountable is restricting to what we do. But teachers have to forego that freedom because they are accountable to those that they teach. As any long time teacher knows, what they teach their students can have lasting effects, both good and bad.