Students gathered in Thompson Theatre Tuesday evening to celebrate the culmination of the Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of written works that have been banned in school systems throughout the country, in the fourth annual Red White & Banned event. 

Banned Books Week stresses the importance of open access to information, bringing together librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers and readers alike.

The Red White & Banned event featured performers as well as books and plays whose commonality is the fact that they have all been banned or challenged at different points of their commercial career. 

The event displayed banned and challenged books in the lobby of the theatre. Banned plays and other works were performed inside Thompson Theatre.

The featured works included: The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, Bang, Bang You’re Dead a one-act play by William Mastrosimone, The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey.

The event intended to shed light on the ridiculous rationales used to ban works of literature, including Captain Underpants and The Lorax, according to Nick Tran, a senior double majoring in nuclear engineering and economics, as well as a performer for the event.  

“It’s all very valuable literature,” Tran said. “We can’t just shun it for these extraneous reasons, especially when so many other things in our culture exhibit these same traits. We can’t single out literature, which is an enormous source of knowledge and information for what would amount to arbitrary reasons.”

The Red, White & Banned event helps to raise awareness about the pieces of literature that have been seen as controversial because they contain traits such as violence or sexually explicit content,  according to Tran.

“The event also highlights censorship of plays and musicals so it also affects theatres as well as libraries,” Allison Stilwell, a junior in education and performer in the event, said. “Censorship actually limits theatre a lot.”

In previous years, the event primarily consisted of monologues and single performances. 

However, this year the staff made a special effort to give some exposition towards why these works were banned and challenged by different states, Tran said.

Tran performed an excerpt from Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the story of a 14-year-old American Indian who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school. The novel was ranked second on a list of the most challenged books in the country in 2012, according to the American Library Association. It was removed from the curriculum by the School Board in Meridian Ohio in April after parental complaints according to the Idaho Statesman.

Stilwell mentioned that the turn-out was better than expected, as the theatre was filled with students. 

Cassandra Brinkman, a junior in microbiology, said her favorite part about the event was how well the actors transcribe the words of these works from page to spoken word. 

“Hearing someone else read it and have it spoken is quite interesting,” said Brinkman. “I will definitely be coming back next year.”