Is ‘more speech’ always ‘disinfectant’ to hate speech, play asks

When the curtain goes up on Paul Grellong’s “moral thriller”, Power of Sail, we find ourselves at Harvard University in 2019. Protesters have gathered outside the office of history professor Charles Nichols, who has invited a notorious white nationalist and Holocaust denier to take part in a prestigious symposium. He is challenged by both the Jewish dean and a black protégé about giving credibility to an obnoxious racist, while a graduate student believes that the protesters have been “triggered” and wants Professor Nichols to attend a “Safe Space Meet” with representatives of the black and Jewish student body.

Yet he responds to such criticism by claiming to be a “free speech absolutist” and declares that, when a country is “awash in ideological filth, more speech is the disinfectant. I’m the disinfectant. Me. I can pull this idiot’s pants down on a stage that matters. He speaks. Afterward, I debate him, his ideas don’t hold up. He can’t win.” As events unfold and everyone reveals their true colours, the play examines the opportunism and darker attitudes often lurking just beneath liberal platitudes, the factitious competition between indebted graduate students for a rare upcoming fellowship and the fears of old-school academics about being upstaged by telegenic younger colleagues.

Although Power of Sail was originally drafted and “workshopped” some years before, Mr Grellong reworked it extensively in response to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a white nationalist drove a car into protesters and killed a woman called Heather Heyer.

So why did such an outbreak of brutish violence inspire him to return to a drama about intellectual conflicts within a university?

Charlottesville was “a wake-up call”, Mr Grellong explained, because it showed that “people were no longer frightened of going out and saying [viciously racist] things with their masks off. And they can only do that if a permission structure is created elsewhere.” The thugs on the street were organised by “men and women in blazers” keen to “give a sheen of respectability to the movement”. What one character in Power of Sail calls “the sanitising spin cycle of speaking engagements and panel discussions” at leading colleges and universities was one crucial means of gaining such “respectability”.

Reflecting on the current state of higher education in the US, Mr Grellong expressed deep concern about “the truly vile things being said, and actions being taken, by groups of far-right college students at universities around the country”. In such a context, he felt “sceptical” about a “no-holds-barred” commitment to “every single kind of speech that falls short of incitement to violence”. He was also unimpressed by the recent trend to “decry ‘woke’ universities”, seeing it as a bad-faith “charade” often taken up by conservatives who were themselves Harvard- and Yale-educated as part of “the culture war game”.

Power of Sail has previously been staged in South Carolina and Los Angeles – the latter production featuring Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston and Judging Amy’s Amy Brenneman – and has just received its European premiere. Since the play is partly about how campuses can feel unsafe for Jewish students, recent developments at Harvard have perhaps given it fresh relevance. At a congressional committee hearing in December 2023, then-president Claudine Gay was asked “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?” Her response – “It can be, depending on the context” – was widely condemned, and the fallout ultimately led to Professor Gay’s resignation.

Asked about this, Mr Grellong said, although Jewish himself, he “did not find the congressional hearing frightening. I found it a little bit disappointing. I thought it was pretty obvious that [Professor Gay and fellow university presidents] were over-coached and they brought the wrong demeanour to that moment.”

Yet he saw the hearing mainly as “an extremely successful piece of theatre, conducted by the Republicans. The congresswoman who went viral for being this supposed champion of the Jews – Elise Stefanik – is no such thing. If these people were at all serious about protecting Jews and any vulnerable population, they would not be aligning themselves with Donald Trump.”

Although we never see him on stage, added Mr Grellong, at the heart of his play is “a really dangerous figure from the far right, who is trying to manipulate and infiltrate a university setting for his own political gain…I’m much more concerned about the political movement of the right, and what is being done in the shadows by their ancillary support networks, than I am about what those presidents said that day.”

Power of Sail: A Moral Thriller is playing at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory until 12 May.