After the initial decision garnered local and national headlines, the district on Friday recanted the gender policy. But the district also announced the school will now produce an “age appropriate” version of the play.
Only two versions of “Oklahoma!” are available from a firm that holds the licensing rights: the original and a “youth” version billed as an “adaptation for pre-high school students” that has content “edited to better suit younger attention spans.” In that version, the character Max was previously cast to play is now listed just as “The Peddler.” The run time of the show is one hour, compared to the original’s two-hour length.
"I think it's insulting. I think it's still targeting Max. I think they chose the version that would have Max in it the least," said Amy Hightower, Max’s mom.
I think it's pretty obvious that they were targeting the trans kid with this policy. The "Oklahoma! is too adult for children" excuse is clearly that, just an excuse. Granted, there is actually a lot of darkness in the story, something that the recent St Ann's Warehouse/Broadway/London revival foregrounded, but does anyone really think that the school wouldn't have put on this 80-year old Rodgers & Hammerstein classic, a staple of school and community theatre for decades, if all the performers had been cis?
What I find ironic is that the Texas school could have actually made the argument that a white person shouldn't be playing the part of a middle-eastern (Iranian, or as it was known back in the 1940s, Persian) character. Personally I don't hold much stock in that argument either, especially for a school production, but it might have been interesting to see a progressive argument used to achieve a conservative goal.