BY NELSON PAVLOSKY

In print | Published September 1, 2005

Welcome to another year of Peer-to-Peer! You may recognize my face from the orientation play this year, so I’d like to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about theater. This column is normally about the power that the digital age gives to the average citizen to participate in culture, to be more than a passive consumer, but this week I’m going to talk about how the freedom to build upon the past is vital to participation in analogous forms of art as well.

A year or two ago at Swarthmore, students attempted to put on a production of “Waiting For Godot,” by Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett is no longer alive, but since copyright terms now last for the life of the author plus 70 years, his estate continues to control his works (and profit from them) in his name. The Swarthmore students played by the rules and asked permission from the Beckett estate to perform the play, but permission was denied. Why? Because one of the actors was female. Beckett’s creative vision didn’t include females. Other productions have been shut down for attempting to use black actors, because Beckett demanded that directors obey the stage directions in his script when casting actors, and his stage directions call for white males. The question here is, how long should an author get to control their work in this fashion? How long after they are dead and gone should someone get to dictate how people interpret their work?

Imagine if copyright were eternal, and there was a Shakespeare estate that controlled all of the works of Shakespeare, insisting that his plays be performed the way that Shakespeare would have performed them in his time. In Shakespeare’s time, women were not allowed to act, all of the female roles were played by men. Now, I don’t know about you, but I enjoy seeing women on stage. Moreover, Shakespeare is a living, breathing part of our culture precisely because people are allowed to reinterpret it in drastically different ways. Would Shakespeare have given permission for productions of “West Side Story” or “10 Things I Hate About You,” or the performances of The Reduced Shakespeare Company? I’m not really sure, but would it provide any benefit to our culture if Shakespeare or his descendants still had the power to deny permission, centuries after the plays were written? At some point, works should be allowed to pass into the public domain, an unregulated zone where everything is permitted, where artistic freedom reigns. Fundamental building blocks of our culture must be free for people to build upon without having to ask permission. We need to remember that the reason copyright laws exist is to provide incentives for producing creative works, and when they become so oppressive that they actually inhibit the production of creative works, it’s time to roll those laws back.

More importantly, however, regardless of the state of our laws and the length of our copyright terms, people should not uncritically accept the values and meaning built into artistic works from the past. When there is a movie with racist assumptions built into it, like “Gone With The Wind,” there is a need for books like “The Wind Done Gone,” which tells the same story from the perspective of a slave. When there is a story like Peter Pan, which makes kids never want to grow up, there is a need for a book like “After The Rain” by Emily Somma, a Peter Pan book which tells children why growing up isn’t so bad. Don’t accept the past as a given, don’t be afraid to question the decisions that our culture has made, be bold in your editing! Only dead things do not change, so I hope that you won’t be afraid to keep our culture alive and healthy by adapting it to fit your needs, to survive in a changing world. And don’t be afraid to change Swarthmore in your time here, either.

Nelson is a senior. You can reach him at npavlos1@swarthmore.edu.

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