“Today is the end of [liberal education at Kenyon College],” Fred Baumann, a professor of political science at Kenyon, proclaimed last week to a panel and its audience. The panel had been convened to discuss the retraction of professor and playwright Wendy MacLeod’s latest play, The Good Samaritan.

MacLeod’s work had been circulated to the students and community, with the intention of production in early April. The show centers on the experiences of Guatemalan illegal immigrants working only a few dozen miles away from Kenyon on an egg farm. As MacLeod explained in an email to the campus about the play, these characters “had been working without pay and living in dire conditions.” The Good Samaritan is based on a true story and MacLeod attempted to unearth it in her work, to, with humor, in her words, “[bring] the repressed to light.” Her play posits, satirically, what might happen if one of these illegal immigrants escaped from the egg farm and found their way to a school like Kenyon.