What is baffling to me of course, is that conservative Americans have been fooled into thinking that drag is not an American pastime. Again, this has been done since the creation of the art form of theater, and this is how theater remains to this day”. “In our productions, as in theater across the world (and especially in plays based on books), there are sometimes so many characters that we regularly have actors playing multiple roles … So actors play all kinds of roles on a regular basis: male, female, insects, animals, and more. Many states have passed laws that ban drag performances outright in public spaces, and opponents of these bills fear that this legislation will be used to unfairly criminalize trans people. Their complaint comes amid a floodtide of anti-trans rhetoric that this is flowing across the United States. The complaint that these parents have is that the 19 characters that are featured in this play will be played by seven actors, and some of those actors will need to play a gender opposite their own for the production to work. Besides featuring a triumph of interior decoration, there is nothing gay about this play. The Roald Dahl book (which was adapted into a film in 1996 and later into a stage musical) is essentially a story about a young boy named James who crawls inside a giant peach and befriends some polite anthropomorphized insects that have made a cozy home inside the fruit.

If you don’t know the plot of James and the Giant Peach, I mourn your squandered childhood. According to the Houston Chronicle, the district deemed the play to not be “age appropriate”, despite being a production for children. A Texas school district recently canceled a scheduled class field trip after parents found out that the play featured cross-gendered casting.

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