���What happened to the boys who played Shakespeare’s women?” That is the question posed by Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s 2024 play, Boy My Greatness.
However, two students at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond are being forced to ask what happens to the students who tell the stories of the boys who played Shakespeare’s women?
Boy My Greatness is a play from The Firebird Project, a theater production and education company based out of New York City. The play follows the actors at the Globe theater in London, England, in 1606 as they prepare for productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night.
As women were not permitted to perform on stage during Shakespeare’s time, all female parts were played by men or boys, and referred to as “boy players.” Boy My Greatness is about the complexities of growing up while navigating gender and sexuality, though it does not use modern language such as “queer” or “transgender.”
Maggie Lawson, who uses she/her pronouns, and Liberty Welch, who uses she/they pronouns, are UCO juniors. In the spring of 2024, Lawson first read Boy My Greatness and reached out to Welch about a possible collaboration. This stayed mainly an abstract idea between the two until this past spring.
“It’s just such an interesting story, and I feel like it’s relevant to now, because it does talk on, like, the censorship, because one of the characters is a Puritan preacher, and he’s like, ‘you guys shouldn’t be doing this.’ And they’re like, ‘but we’re gonna do it anyway.’ And so it’s just very relevant to now, and it doesn’t use any, like, hot words.”
As part of the UCO Theater Department, two student productions are selected each year to be performed at Mitchell Hall on the UCO campus. Lawson and Welch gave a five-minute presentation as to why they should be selected to produce Boy My Greatness for the program.
Just over a week later, they got the call. Boy My Greatness had been selected for the student-produced fall play. Though there was no official approval until that call, Lawson and Welch had been working on Boy My Greatness in some ways since November 2024; they had been discussing playwright rights and production concepts since February 2025.
Lawson and Welch spent the summer before their junior year of college hashing out the details of their student production. They discussed set plans, budget plans, everything that goes into a play. As they had been assigned the fall slot, they already knew for certain that the shows would take place over Oct. 9-12. Thus, the first two weeks of their junior year were spent holding auditions and callbacks, with every intention of moving ahead with the production.
On Sept. 2, what was intended to be the first day of rehearsals, the entire production came to a screeching halt. Welch received a phone call from Daisy Nystul, the head of the theater department, around 11 a.m. Upon meeting to discuss what was going on, Nystul informed Welch that once the playwright contract reached UCO’s legal department, there had been an issue. Boy My Greatness would no longer be part of the student-produced theater program.
“We went to rehearsal that night and we told our actors, because we didn’t want them to hear it from anybody else but us. And we were like, ‘Hey, this is what’s happening, we can’t do it here.’”
Lawson shared about the day Welch and she found out about the cancellation. Moving from a university-based, student-produced show to something bigger, more serious, was something Lawson and Welch worried about confronting their actors with.
“‘This is your out. You have the option to leave and not be a part of this production if you don’t want to, because now it’s something way more complicated than just doing it at school.’ So we presented them that; they were all like, ‘rock on, we want to do it.’”
Lawson and Welch considered that the current political climate in the state of Oklahoma could be a factor in their show being cancelled. UCO is a public university, and in recent years, both the state Legislature and Gov. Kevin Stitt have cracked down on diversity and inclusion in public education, including universities. In a press release provided to both Playbill and KFOR, UCO confirmed that both state and federal law were taken into consideration when reviewing the play.
“It is so incredibly frustrating that we live in a time where things like theater and things like history are getting censored and shot down because, like, if you stop telling these stories, where does the line end?” Lawson said. “It feels very much to me, like, we’re taking, we’re censoring everything so that we can pick and choose what we can talk about, and what we can’t talk about.”
Oklahoma’s SB 796, which Stitt signed into law on May 10, prohibits “certain institutions of higher education from using state funds, property, or resources to support or require certain activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Federally, there has also been a crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion, in the months following the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump.
The furor over Boy My Greatness is symptomatic of what’s happening on campuses across the nation, as faculty, administrators and students navigate intensifying rightwing attacks on free speech and expression.
At UCO, the cancellation coincided with a firestorm over President Todd Lamb’s decision to cease publishing a printed edition of the university newspaper, The Vista, even though private donors offered to cover the $12,000 annual cost – the equivalent of a rounding error in UCO’s $188 million budget.
Lamb’s plug-pulling was widely viewed as retaliation for unflattering coverage he received from the newspaper – a silencing of critics encouraged by Trump’s modus operandi and right-wing legislative ideologues who suspect a “woke” professor around every corner.
It’s also noteworthy that Lamb is a former lieutenant governor and state senator elevated to the UCO presidency by a Stitt-appointed, uber-right Board of Regents. The appointment of a career politician enraged some on campus, as well as at least one major donor, Paycom founder Chad Richison.
Lamb’s presidency, SB 796 and the nation’s deep political divisions created a climate ripe to assume Boy My Greatnesswas a casualty of anti-woke MAGA furor. But campus insiders, speaking privately, said they did not believe contractual hurdles were insurmountable. Had there been more time between the legal review and the show’s date, they said, it’s quite possible the show would have been approved.
After being informed that UCO would not allow the production of Boy My Greatness, Lawson and Welch were provided with two options: they could choose another show to produce or they could produce their show that already had hours of work poured into it outside of UCO. Refusing to back down, Lawson and Welch took to the internet.
In a video posted to the TikTok account @maggielibertytheater, Lawson and Welch sent a plea out to the vast ocean of mindless content. They told their story, sharing how they had worked on the play and been struck down due to increasingly repressive legislation, all while linking a GoFundMe in the caption of the video. Having decided to produce the show themselves, they would need money for a venue, costumes, set pieces, and copyright.
“We thought that we were only going to get, like, $200 and, like, a high five. Like, ‘you go girls!’” Lawson said a week after the initial shut down. On a GoFundMe initially asking for $2,000, Lawson and Welch reached a final total of $9,837.
With so much more money than they could have imagined receiving, Lawson and Welch had to think a bit bigger. Their first goal is paying the actors and crew who have followed them from collegiate to local theater. Additionally, they hope to put money into set pieces and costumes to make the show the best it can be. A portion of the money will be donated to local charities, such as Sisu Youth Services, which provides services and support to homeless youth in Oklahoma. Lawson and Welch would like to set up some kind of trust or savings account for other young people interested in producing and directing theater.
“It’s, like, a little mind boggling, and it’s a little hard to wrap our brains around. But we made the TikTok because we were like, we want to share this message and what’s happening to us. We can attach the GoFundMe to it, but like, our main message is that you shouldn’t be silencing theater.
“You shouldn’t be censoring theater because theater is history. History is theater.”
In an interview with the playwright, Zoe Senese-Grossberg, the central themes of identity and censorship loom over the news of cancellation. The rise of religious conservatism takes center stage in Boy My Greatness, a stroke of irony that Senese-Grossberg does not take lightly.
“This play, in particular, is about conservative challenges to queer people making art,” said Senese-Grossberg. “I actually think if you read the play, like, the play is dealing with a lot of nuance on this issue. The play is undeniably a celebration of trans identity.”
Lawson and Welch will produce Boy My Greatness outside the confines of UCO, at Upstage Theater in Edmond. The show will run October 23-26, a firm run that Welch says there are absolutely no plans to extend. Tickets run $7.18 and are available on EventBrite.
