Oklahoma Student Play About Shakespearean Theatre Shut Down Over Gender Laws

For students, the show must go on.

Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash

Oklahoma college administrators reportedly shut down a historically accurate student play about the boy actors performing as Shakespeare’s leading ladies over concerns about anti-trans laws—so students raised nearly $10,000 to bring the show to life.

Oklahoma Central University approved a student-led fall production of Boy My Greatness by Zoe Senese-Grossberg. “As the plague and rising religious conservatism threaten their way of life, they are all forced to reconsider their futures on the stage,” the show’s blurb read ahead of its world debut. “[It’s a] play about growing up, gender, and a chapter of theater history we seek to forget.”

Evidently, the school deemed this a liability. In order to avoid even the potential threat of a lawsuit, they revoked funding and permissions for the production, which had been pitched by two 20-year-old juniors at UCO’s theatre program, Liberty Welch and Maggie Lawson. They told Erin in the Morning they received school approval for the show this past spring.

“After spending lots of months working on this piece, and pouring our hearts and soul into it,” co-director Lawson said in a now-viral Tiktok, “we were informed that due to Senate Bill 796—which took effect on July 1st in Oklahoma—our university is at risk of being sued.”

SB 796 bans public universities in Oklahoma from utilizing “state funds, property, or resources” to “support diversity, equity, and inclusion positions, departments, activities, procedures, or programs.”

The duo said school officials gave students two choices: do another show approved by the university legal team, or self-produce the event, which would require them to raise thousands of dollars, find a venue, construct a set, and secure the rights to the script before the October premiere.

The university did not respond to Erin in the Morning’s request for comment. They did, however, tell the theatre news site Playbill that the decision was made after reviewing “federal and state laws” as well as Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination. It is unclear what, exactly, the legal issue was; UCO has routinely produced a number of plays that address gender and sexuality at their program, Lawson and Welch said.

To both of their surprise, however, the pair says they have been met with overwhelming community support—that even conservative Oklahomans usually hostile towards LGBTQ rights donated to their fundraiser, citing concerns about freedom of speech. They raised the necessary $10,000 in a matter of days through GoFundMe, secured a venue, and are now in rehearsals to prepare for opening night on October 23.

The co-directors remain optimistic about the show, but nervous about the political implications of the ordeal when it comes to the repression of student rights. “For it to come from a university that I pay to go to, it is a little jarring for me,” Welch told Erin in the Morning. They described an uncertainty about what was allowed in the classroom now, following the passing of anti-DEI laws and policies.

“Where is the line?” they said. “Our school has a major in women and gender studies. Are we just not allowed to do anything that pertains to that? There's no parameters.”

Playwright Senese-Grossberg, now a 25-year-old MFA student at the University of Iowa, echoed similar sentiments. “This is going to get attention, but if it keeps happening, it's going to stop getting attention,” she told Erin in the Morning, calling the attacks on First Amendment rights across the state and country—from the DEI bills to drag bans—as dangerously broad.

“You could use it to cancel any production that you disagree with,” she said. “Art is just going to keep getting censored.”

Boy My Goodness has not been the only casualty of SB 796, according to Mauree Turner, who spearheads communications operations at the LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom Oklahoma. Turner was also the first openly non-binary state legislator in U.S. history, a position they held from 2021 until 2024.

“We are seeing, in real time, SB 796 have a chilling effect on our education system,” they told Erin in the Morning. “It is unfortunate when people with the power to preserve access to education buckle under that pressure, and [we] always wish higher education leadership would side with the students over the Oklahoma legislature. But we are also proud of Liberty and Maggie for the community reminder: We take care of us.”