If you were looking for a Tony Award-winning play at Stevens Point Area Senior High (SPASH), urine the wrong town.

That is precisely the message that Stevens Point's Superintendent Bettie Lang sent to the school's drama club when it banned the musical "Urinetown" from being performed in February 2007.

However, in doing so, Ms. Lang compromised the educational benefit of showing the play, and she violated the rights of expression of the students and their teacher, all in the name of protecting younger students from the play's falsely "inappropriate" nature.

Urinetown's name suggests that the musical is a heretical devotion to bodily fluids, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This smart musical begins with a town that has experienced a drought that would send most townspeople packing. Twenty years of dire water supply has driven the town to make their bathrooms public, turning the private bathrooms of today into an unimaginable luxury.

Town residents can use the bathrooms for a fee paid to a corporation, as the town finds ways to combat water consumption in these trying circumstances. When residents use bathrooms without paying the fee, they are sent to Urinetown never to return.

Although most would read this play as satire with an environmental and anti-corporate message, the Stevens Point's School Board felt otherwise.

For those familiar with the play, it becomes obvious that the board, and most notably Superintendent Lang, based their assessment of the play solely off its title without any consideration for its appropriateness.

Sadly, her move is not without precedent, either. The Charlotte Observer reported that a Catholic high school in Pennsylvania allowed this very play to be performed, but was forced by a local bishop to publicize the play without the play's title.

Something tells me that the title "no name musical," as publicized on the Catholic high school's website, does not pack the same punch as "Urinetown."

Certainly not desiring to be linked with this kind of moral bullying, Lang suddenly backed off her claim that the play was morally inappropriate and limited the scope of her contention to its inappropriateness for K-12 students.

As the Wisconsin State Journal reported, Lang's argument quickly became that the younger students simply would not understand the satire in the play, but how that is justification for banning the play betrays common sense.

One has to ask: How are students supposed to understand concepts if they are not exposed to them?

In this case, Lang's move stifled the students' ability to learn from difficult concepts that, as Lang demonstrated, even some adults do not understand.

But the worst part of this ordeal is that students are going to miss the opportunity to be exposed to something unquestionably different simply because administrators cannot handle the possibility that the outside world does not fit neatly within the boundaries of the school's walls.

Concepts like satire are a great part of daily life outside of schools, and shielding our youths from these concepts in schools will only delay their development for the future.

By canceling the play because it is inappropriate, a contestable point of assertion, Stevens Point's School Board additionally violated the rights of students and teachers because of their disagreement with the title and subject matter.

Lang's arbitrary banning of the play without a strong justification creates the possibility that other worthy plays will not be performed, simply because administrators disagree with the subject and content matter.

It is baffling that the school sought to cancel the play because of what a priest at the Pennsylvania Catholic high school correctly assessed as "something that everybody has to do everyday" in an interview on the school's website.

Unfortunately for SPASH musical director Greg Chelcun and the school's drama club, the priest's wisdom will fall on the deaf ears of Ms. Lang, should she continue to ignore common sense and prevent the play from being performed.

Robert Phansalkar ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in languages and cultures of Asia and political science.