Unnecessarily verbose Thespian slating introductions.

Disclaiming that a theatrical performance contains a disclaimer is eating shit.

Even if you didn't grow up involved in theater, you might be familiar with Thespians, the drama club for middle and high school students. Thousands of members of the International Thespian Society gather every year to watch each other perform monologues, scenes, songs, and other works, competing against fellow schools.

Theoretically, student actors can perform anything they'd like at Thespian festivals, and that often includes works with adult language, sexual situations, violence, or themes of drug and alcohol abuse. The judges don't have a problem with this, presumably as long as it's all done maturely and with respect to the source material.

Like any competition, there are standards and practices participants follow. All Thespian performers start by standing before the audience, introducing their school and the name of the piece. Florida Thespians' official guidelines also state that, before they begin, students must disclose if their performances include any inappropriate material. When I was in school, every performer I would see seemed to abide by this.

But the guidelines don't give strict instruction on how the disclaimer must be worded. Interestingly, students all across the county, city, and state conformed to one consistent phrase. No matter their age or where they were from, actors would always announce the offensive content in the exact same way: they’d say the piece "contains an asterisk" for language. Or that it "contains an asterisk" for drug abuse, or rape, or whatever the offense was. Every risque performance, whether scene, song, or pantomime, would be introduced to the audience as "containing an asterisk.”

Year after year, Thespian pieces continued to be announced with this syntax. They never simply "contained language" or "contained sexual situations." It was always containing “an asterisk” for said content. This was so for the highest-awarded large group musical songs all the way down to a freshman’s first contrasting monologues.

Why? An asterisk already indicates that the piece contains some sort of inappropriate material, in and of itself. It’d be like if a table of contents in a book included itself in the listing. When taken literally, the students are saying, "we are telling you that our piece contains an indicator. The indicator references that the piece contains some sort of inappropriate material. And that the inappropriate material just so happens to be language.”

Just say what it is! "The piece contains language." That's it!

I never heard a single teacher or judge ever question, notice, or correct this language, and if one did, it clearly didn’t catch on. We’re talking about a competition where rules are so strict that a group would be disqualified if the piece ran one second over. It’s a system so sophisticated that scene actors would be required to present a printed copy of the play to each judge just to prove their work was from a real publication. With such elaborate rules, you’d think verbiage might count for something. Could I go up and say whatever the hell I want and still get a perfect superior rating?

You could argue that in the grand scheme of things, none of this matters at all. And you’d be wrong. ✍︎