Jodi Picoult is hitting back at an Indiana high school after a planned performance of a musical based on one of her books was canceled, the Associated Press reports.
Mississinewa High School in Gas City, Indiana, had planned to stage a production of a musical based on Between the Lines, the 2012 young adult novel written by Picoult with her daughter, Samantha van Leer. The story follows Delilah, a teenage loner who falls in love with the fictional prince in a book she loves after he comes to life. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “fizzy fairy-tale fun.”
The school’s superintendent, Jeremy Fewell, said the production of the musical—which features a story by Timothy Allen McDonald with music and lyrics by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson—was canceled after concerns were raised over the show’s “sexual innuendo” and references to drinking alcohol. The novel and the original show featured a nonbinary character, but the version licensed to the school was one that had removed references to their gender in a bid to make it more acceptable to conservative audiences.
Picoult reacted to the musical’s cancellation on TikTok, saying, “I now have the distinction of being the author who has been banned in two different types of artistic media.…When we censor the arts, or for that matter, books, we take away a chance for kids to have tools to deal with a complex world, and we take away the opportunity for them to see themselves reflected on pages and stages. When we ban books and theater, we are effectively saying that only certain lives and certain stories are worth hearing about.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
