The Secret Court

Written by members of the Plastic Theatre and conceived & directed by Tony Speciale, The Secret Court is inspired by true events that occurred at Harvard University in the spring of 1920, when a student’s suicide sparked a campus-wide investigation by a panel of administrators who convened to investigate, expose and ultimately expel a group of homosexual students. Both intimate and epic, The Secret Court explores themes of fear and societal intolerance that are as relevant today as they were 95 years ago.

Shockingly, for more than eighty years the events surrounding the incident were covered-up, until 2002 when Amit Paley, a student journalist for The Harvard Crimson, came upon a reference to the “Secret Court” while combing university archives. After initial resistance, Harvard granted Mr. Paley access to the long-abandoned files of over 500 pages of documents describing the systematic persecution of a group of students. The revelation of this controversy motivated conceiver and director Speciale’s own journey into the court transcripts, family correspondence, and academic records revealing the lives of these promising young men. Speciale and his team of co-writers devoted hours of research and development decoding the previously hidden records from The Court, piecing together a timeline of events in order to shine a light on a long ignored event in our country’s history.