It was a quiet Wednesday night as South Bay residents and a handful of VIPs packed the theater at Southwestern College to see the 48th annual Bonitafest Melodrama Here Comes the Sun, a play not-so-loosely based on actual events from 2008 to 2011 about the scandal at Southwestern College and the superintendent’s efforts to silence the student journalists at the college newspaper, The Sun.
As a piece of theater, Here Comes the Sun sparkles. The dialogue is witty, the caricatures of administrators are played with just the right degree of exaggeration, and the score keeps the play lighthearted despite the serious subject matter.
Ella Aldridge shines as Dr. Bradford, the journalism professor and moral center of the story. Her performance juxtaposes the satirical portrayal of President Chambers and Vice President von Fowl (fictional names adapted for the screenplay).
Bonitafest’s melodramas are always drawn from real South Bay events, and this one revisits how Superintendent Raj Chopra, Vice President Nicholas Alioto and the Board of Trustees tried to crush the student newspaper after it exposed their corruption. The parallels to today are unmistakable. Chopra, like Donald Trump now, believed he could bully critics into silence, buy off opponents, and threaten those who refused to play along.
The timing of the premiere couldn’t be better. It opened the night after Jimmy Kimmel Live! returned to the air. Kimmel, a late-night comedian, had been suspended after the Trump administration took offense at one of his jokes. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr bragged on a podcast, “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
ABC chose the easy way, bowing to a corrupt administration’s threats and yanking Kimmel off the air. That decision was disgraceful, a betrayal of their responsibility to defend free expression. To their credit, ABC eventually reversed course. But the damage was done: the precedent of capitulation had been set.
And it’s not just Kimmel. Paramount canceled Stephen Colbert under similar circumstances. Journalists at the Pentagon are being denied access under Pete Hegseth’s new rules. Major law firms have cut deals with Trump as he threatens them. Trump’s pattern and practice of silencing dissent has reared its head in many places.
Art imitates life. In the play, Dr. Bradford is offered a cushy sabbatical if she’ll stay quiet, threatened with arrest when she refuses, and ultimately told her career is on the line. She pushes back every time. The climax comes when she locks her students in her office to keep police from arresting them for “stealing” their own college-issued laptops so they could finish reporting on Chopra’s corruption.
Just as she is about to be cuffed herself, her union representative intervenes, reminding the officer: “They teach you on the first day at the police academy to disobey an illegal order. This is one of those times… you have a house and a family, let’s put the cuffs away.”
It’s a dramatization, but not by much. The real story at Southwestern was that administrators did retaliate, police were involved, and students and faculty had to outwit and outlast the people who were supposed to be their leaders. What saved them was courage, solidarity, and a refusal to accept the “easy way.”
That is what we need more of now. Trump and Chopra are cut from the same cloth: men who mistake authority for impunity, who believe truth is negotiable, and who expect everyone to have a price. What they fear most are people like Dr. Bradford, who can’t be bought, and the brave student journalists who held him accountable.
Here Comes the Sun is a history, but it’s also a warning. It calls on each of us to be more like Dr. Bradford, and less like ABC executives. It reminds us that we have a role to play in standing up to corruption in our government, small and large.
Kevin Sabellico is a nominee to the county Planning Commission for District 1, which includes South County. He lives in downtown San Diego.
