photo credit: courtesy of ArtQuest Theatre
ArtQuest Theatre students perform their original play [REDACTED]

A theater program at a Santa Rosa high school is being recognized by a prestigious national award.

As a reflection of life, theater can tackle uncomfortable subjects.

That was the case in November 2024 when high school students at ArtQuest Theatre Program at Santa Rosa High School performed a play called Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead.

The play was cancelled by Santa Rosa City Schools Superintendent Daisy Morales after the first performance due to complaints about the content.

“I was called into their office the next day and told that we needed to cancel our play because it was using homophobic slurs and it had some profanity and some mature content. And this is nothing that we hadn't done for years, for decades. We've always done this kind of content,” said Santa Rosa High School theater arts teacher Jereme Anglin.

“It's just the administrators at the district level are all brand new. Most of them last for about a year or two and like the most recent - the superintendent just got ousted this week,” said Anglin.

Superintendent Morales lost her job after a 97-percent no-confidence vote by teachers, and a 5-to-1 vote by the Santa Rosa City Schools Board of Trustees on April 23.

Anglin says the theater group went on to secure the Mercury Theater, a venue in Petaluma, to stage their play and performed to two sold-out crowds.

“Since it was going to be off-site and not during school hours, it was no longer a school event. The students themselves just took over completely re-staging the show for the different space and just became… they became leaders which is what we want our students to do,” said Anglin. “And they really took charge, and it became more of, more than just art, it became a political statement for them. And they, they created signs all over the Mercury Theater and outside in the parking lot saying, ‘Expression, not Repression’ and ‘Freedom of Speech’ slogans.”

Since 2017, ArtQuest Theatre students have been collaborating with a local theater company called The Imaginists. Anglin says every year the students write a piece about what’s on their minds, and after the November experience, a new play started taking shape.

“That project started the day after we finished ‘Dog Sees God’ at Mercury. Censorship and freedom of speech was on their mind and immediately that ignited this frenzy of writing and collaborating with Brent at The Imaginist, to create a show. Very much a satire on the school district. They made a parody called Mommies Against Art,” Anglin explained.

M-O-M-M-I-E-S! A-R-Ts what we’re against! We’re Mommies against Arties, a brand new political party!

“The show ended with a piece taken from Euripides' The Bacchae where the artists, the bohemian characters and the disenfranchised people rise up to fight their oppressor,” said Anglin. “They get right to the point where you think something really terrible is going to happen and then the lights go black, and one actor just turns around and says:”

Relax! It’s just theater.

“‘Relax, it’s just theater.’ And then blackout,” Anglin says.

 The students’ play is called [REDACTED] and they took it to a statewide theater festival in Sacramento in February, where they took home 13 prizes.

“They have an award called the Bob Smart Spirit of Lenaea Award. That's really the top award at the festival,” explained Anglin. “Usually, it's just one person or maybe a group of people who get that award. And we receive that award of recognition just for fighting censorship.”

Anglin says months went by and students thought they had moved on from that experience.

“Just this week I got an email from The Dramatists in New York. The Dramatist Legal Defense Fund. It's a separate entity within the Dramatist Guild. And they had heard about what we had been doing here in California and they wanted to give us a thank you - an acceptance speech to getting the award. It wasn't even a process. I was like, ‘Oh maybe we’re, we've been nominated or maybe we're up for the award,’ but no, we had just been given the award,” said Anglin.

The Defender award recognizes an individual or group’s efforts in support of free expression in the dramatic arts, like the cast of the smash hit Hamilton in 2016. They received the Defender Award not for their performance, but for the moment at the end of the play when they saw then vice-president-elect Mike Pence in the audience and called him out with a plea from the cast and crew…

We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us…

I asked Anglin how his students reacted when they heard the news.

“Before I told them that we had won, I wanted them to know how important it was,” Anglin said. “So I Googled the list of previous award recipients and then I said, ‘There's this award. I want you to hear about it.’ And I read them the list and then after that I told them, ‘And this year, they're giving it to us.’ And the, the whole class just stood up and… they teared up and they were hugging each other, and it was just, um, it was a really happy moment. I'm tearing up…. Um it was just a really proud moment for them.”

I held back my own tears as I spoke with Anglin. He says the seniors who worked on ArtQuest's recent projects are now receiving their college acceptance letters.

“One student, he's our president of the theater club. He's going to go to college to do theater and he's decided to do politics also and get a degree combining theater and politics to help fight for freedom of expression. And the other student who really was pivotal in moving Dog Sees God down to Petaluma. Her name is Leila. She just got accepted to Cornish up in Seattle to do theater. She’s also very motivated by this project in freedom of speech. And I think it definitely gave them fuel for their college essays,” said Anglin with a chuckle.

Anglin and the Santa Rosa students recorded their acceptance speech, to be featured April 28, 2025 at the Dramatists Guild’s Awards Night ceremony in New York City.

Editor’s note: The Dramatists Legal Defense Fund Defender Award was given to drama teacher Jereme Anglin, on behalf of the ArtQuest theatre program at Santa Rosa High School. Other recipients are students Dean Jahnsen and Leila Paine, on behalf of their fellow students at Santa Rosa High School; Brent Lindsay, artistic director of Santa Rosa’s The Imaginists theater company, and The Mercury Theater of Petaluma.