A Charged Title. A Canceled Show. Now a Cal State Official Resigns.

Michele Roberge, the director of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at California State University, Long Beach, resigned last week after the university told her to cancel a campus performance of a racially charged show.

The play, “N*W*C,” whose full title is three racial slurs, stars three actors of African-American, Asian and Latino descent as they reflect on their conflicted experience with race in America. The slurs are used in an attempt to deflate them, according to a 2007 New York Times interview with the show’s creators. The performance was scheduled for Sept. 29.

Ms. Roberge said this week that Jane Close Conoley, the university’s president, had received complaints from within the university over the show’s title, including from a vice president, and decided against the production in August. “It was shocking to me to be censored,” Ms. Roberge said in an interview. “My integrity would not allow me to continue working for someone that canceled a show like that.” She had been director of the Carpenter Center for 14 years.

The play, written by Allan Axibal, Rafael Agustín and Miles Gregley, had its debut in 2007. The three authors have been performing it steadily on campuses across the country, including a sold-out performance on the Long Beach campus last year. While the title of the show (the initials stand for “nigger,” “wetback” and “chink”) was initially criticized by the Long Beach branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Ms. Roberge said there were no live protests before or after the performance.

She recounted talking with Ms. Conoley a week after last year’s performance: “I said, ‘It was glorious, and I am going to present this show every year until we don’t need to anymore.’ She laughed and gave me a high five.”

But in a statement released on Thursday, Ms. Conoley wrote that the play did not generate meaningful conversations about race relations. She added that she had no impact on shuttering the show: “The Carpenter Center could have hosted the show without additional involvement from the university, but chose not to.”

Ms. Roberge disputed this in the interview, saying she had conversations with the administration regarding campus race relations following the 2015 performance but was ordered by the dean of the arts to cancel this year’s iteration. A university representative said Ms. Conoley was unavailable for comment.

The resignation is yet another incident involving free speech on college campuses, as protracted battles have raged this year over “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” and controversial guest speakers.

Howard Sherman, the director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at the New School College of Performing Arts, in Manhattan, condemned the cancellation. “Conoley has lost a 14-year veteran of the university who stood up for her principles, while silencing perhaps the most provocative performance of the season,” he wrote on the Arts Integrity Initiative website.

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