TEACH YOUR PARENTS WELL

By Mike Fischer

“As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.” – Willa Cather, My Ántonia

Teach Your Parents Well

“As children we build ourselves a platform between the branches which could not be seen from below. When we were sitting up there, when we pulled up the ladder and cut ourselves off completely from the ground, then we felt perfectly happy. Our own room is prefigured here, the free life that is coming. – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

The battle lines get drawn early in Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening, the intense 2006 musical that shook Broadway with its edgy, hard-rock chronicle of bourgeois convention and blasted youth.

Adding a scene not included in the 1891 Frank Wedekind play they were adapting, Sater and Sheik take us into a schoolroom, where a sadistic Latin teacher is drilling a room of bored and sex-crazed boys on the finer points of Virgil’s Aeneid.

One of them, Melchior, steps forward and takes the rap for his friend, Moritz. Literally: Melchior’s teacher rewards him with a beating. Within minutes, the boys have stepped into a surrealistic dreamscape, singing a defiant but despairing anthem channeling their lonely sexual frustration.

The scene allows us “to see the repressive 19th-century school system in operation,” Sater later wrote in Purple Summer, his book on the musical’s lyrics.

It’s a dystopian world, Sater continued, involving teachers “forcefeeding young minds ‘a proper education,’ while quelling all the life in them.” It’s a world, as Melchior later writes in his journal, “where teachers – like parents – view us as merely so much raw material for an obedient and productive society.”

Underscoring this concept of a monological and monolithic adult world, Sater and Sheik assign all the adult roles in Spring Awakening to just one man and one woman; the show’s rebellious teens view all parents and teachers as well as doctors and preachers as indistinguishable.

Rather than engaging that world through dialogue or debate, the teens escape into song; rock music best expresses the churning and confused state of mind of speakers giving voice to what they can’t say aloud. “The scenes set out the world of 19th-century repression,” wrote Sater, “while the songs afford our young characters a momentary release into contemporary pop idiom.”

That release is physical as well as vocal; of the three Milwaukee productions of Spring Awakening I’ve seen, this messy and chaotic quality of teen rebellion was best captured by Dale Gutzman’s riveting 2015 production at Off the Wall Theatre.

Under Gutzman’s direction, the Off the Wall cast captured the raw, intensely physical quality of these teens’ sometimes inchoate efforts to dream a new language better reflecting what they feel; grammatically precise Latin lessons morphed into a writhing, prelinguistic mass of bodies, seeking release for wordless impulses.

It felt great; whatever one’s age, Spring Awakening invariably does, as it rouses one’s own dormant rage against the machine. Sater and Sheik’s musical, wrote New York Times critic Charles Isherwood in his review of the Broadway production, “restores the mystery, the thrill to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls, some time around the age of thirteen.”

But much as I love Spring Awakening, it can also be both sentimental and indulgent (Gutzman’s production did more than any I’ve seen, including the original, to fight against such simplification).

Dressed up for Broadway, Wedekind’s great play risks becoming a feel-good hymn of teen rebellion, sung through stylized anthems that shortchange the very kids it claims to understand. Spring

2021-22 Season Furlan Auditorium Productions

RUN FOR YOUR WIFE – September 9–26, 2021 WAIT UNTIL DARK – October 21–November 7, 2021 SHE LOVES ME – December 2–19, 2021 4 WEDDINGS AND AN ELVIS – January 20–February 6, 2022 BAREFOOT IN THE PARK – March 3–20, 2022 SOMETHING ROTTEN – April 21–May 8, 2022 AN INSPECTOR CALLS – June 2–19, 2022 NEWSIES – July 14 – August 7, 2022 Musical MainStage Concert Series

2021-22 Season 2021 Furlan-22 Season Au uditorium Productions Furlan Auditorium Productions

RUN FOR YOUR WIFE RUN FOR YOUR WIFE – September 9–26, 2021 WAIT UNTIL DARK – October 21–November 7, 2021 – September 9–26, 2021 SHE LOVES ME – December 2–19, 2021

WAIT UNTIL DARK – October 214 WEDDINGS AND AN ELVIS – January 20–February 6, 2022 –November 7, 2021 BAREFOOT IN THE PARK – March 3–20, 2022 SHE LOVES ME SOMETHING ROTTEN – April 21–May 8, 2022 AN INSPECTOR CALLS – June 2–19, 2022 – December 2–19, 2021 4 WEDDINGS AND AN ELVIS NEWSIES – July 14 – August 7, 2022 – January 20–February 6, 2022

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK Musical MainStage Concert Series THE BEAT GOES ON: ROCK CLASSICS – October 25–26, 2021 – March 3–20, 2022

SIMON & GARFUNKEL – December 13–14, 2021 SOMETHING ROTTEN SURF’S UP! – January 24–25, 2022 – April 21–May 8, 2022GET READY! – March 7–8, 2022 AN INSPECTOR CALLS IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND: ACOUSTIC SUPERSTARS – April 25–26, 2022 ABBA & FRIENDS – June 13–14, 2022 – June 2–19, 2022

SideN NEWSIES otes Cabaret Series – July 14 – August 7, 2022

THE BEAT GOES ON: ROCK CLASSICS – October 25–26, 2021 SIMON & GARFUNKEL – December 13–14, 2021 SURF’S UP! – January 24–25, 2022 GET READY! – March 7–8, 2022

IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND: ACOUSTIC SUPERSTARS – April 25–26, 2022 ABBA & FRIENDS – June 13–14, 2022 SideNotes Cabaret Series

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER: CHICK SINGERS – September 30–October 3, 2021 ELLA MEETS MEL – December 8–12, 2021 BOYGIRLBOYGIRL – February 10–13, 2022

YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND: CAROLE KING & JAMES TAYLOR – March 17–20, 2022 BEAUTY AND THE BEAT: PEGGY LEE – April 28–May 1, 2022 BROADWAY SINGALONG – June 8–12, 2022

Special Events

DAVID SEEBACH: ILLUSIONS IN THE NIGHT – October 15–17, 2021 JAYNE TAYLOR CHRISTMAS SHOW – November 27, 2021 ROCKIN’ IN A WINTER WONDERLAND – December 7, 2021 FUNNY GIRL: BOMBSHELL THEATER CO. – January 7–16, 2022 THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES: AFTER SUNSET STUDIO SERIES – March 24–27, 2022 SUNDAYS AT SUNSET – June 26–August 21, 2022 FOUR GUYZ IN DINNER JACKETS – August 25–September 4, 2022

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TESSA’S TIP-TAPPING TOES – February 16–19, 2022 HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE – May 11–14, 2022

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER: CHICK SINGERS – September 30–October 3, 2021 ELLA MEETS MEL – December 8–12, 2021 BOYGIRLBOYGIRL – February 10–13, 2022

YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND BEAUTY AND Musical MainStag: CAROLE KING & JAMES TAYLOR – March 17–20, 2022 THE BEAT: PEGGY LEE – April 28–May 1, 2022 e Concert Series

BROADWAY SINGALONG – June 8–12, 2022

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Awakening presents a world of saints against sinners, in which every kid seems destined for the barricades, while every adult is ultimately intent on mowing them down.

Mean Kids

If Spring Awakening risks reducing every teen to a rebel, a host of other school-related plays give us the obverse side of the same coin by suggesting that every kid is a conformist, straight from central casting for Lord of the Flies.

Among the most famous – and still, for my money, one of the best – of this lot is Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934). It’s not staged nearly often enough, in part because of its cast size and in part because it hits a bit too close to home, in an America slouching toward fascism (under Raeleen McMillion’s direction, UW-Milwaukee offered a solid production of Hellman’s play in May 2019).

The Childrens Hour

Set in a girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts, The Children’s Hour makes clear how quickly good people can be taken down when those around them morph into a mob. The mob leader in The Children’s Hour is Mary Tilford, a 14-year-old malcontent who falsely accuses the two 20-something women running this school of enjoying nightly sexual romps with each other.

Having made her wild allegations, Mary bullies fellow students into silence or complicity, with predictable consequences for the teachers she hates. But we’re provided with little sense of what makes her tick; neither she nor the girls around her are given texture or depth.

In large part, the same is true of a recent variation on this theme: Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; or The African Mean Girls Play, a tragicomic riff on Tina Fey that’s set in a 1980s girls’ school in Ghana.

The Mary Tilford of School Girls is Paulina; the defining issue in Bioh’s play is color – and, specifically, how each of the Ghanaian school girls we meet is defined and delimited by Western, white standards of beauty.

Much like Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye, Bioh tallies the cost for girls caught in a racist world they never made and confined by aesthetic codes that leave them feeling inadequate and insecure. But Bioh’s satire is too broad and declamatory to go more than skindeep, in a play that’s less about the content of these girls’ character than the color of their skin.

Teen conformity involving sexual orientation rather than skin color goes under the microscope in another school play: Tarell Alvin McCraney’s lyrical Choir Boy. In McCraney’s play, gifted and gay vocalist Pharus Young tries to square who he is as a person with where he is as a student: at the religious and conservative Charles R. Drew Prep School for young Black men.

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Can a gay Black artist find a home within Black American culture, and might he claim its traditions as his own, wresting them from an overly simplified and conformist hagiography that often leaves little room for people like him?

That’s the question McCraney poses in most of his plays, through outsiders who see the truth slant and often pay a hefty price for their gimlet-eyed vision. True to form, McCraney’s Pharus is a glorious, textured meditation on what it means to be such an outsider. Also true to form, all too many of the characters surrounding this outsider are one-note stereotypes.

As with The Children’s Hour and School Girls – and as with Spring Awakening – too many of the students in Choir Boy march to a single beat.

That approach may sharpen the (melo)drama. But it’s also frequently false to the complex, conflicted, and competing emotions that exist within every adolescent – and which distinguish them from one another, as individuals giving voice to their own unique and uneven songs rather than singing harmony in an angelic choir.

The History Boys

For all their innocence, there’s nothing angelic about the octet of students in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, which Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones has rightly named “one of the best plays ever written about education.”

Set in a northern England day school where the boys are preparing for their college entrance exams, Bennett’s play features two teachers who offer diametrically opposed views of education.

The old-fashioned Hector stands for truth, in which learning and language are intrinsically important, regardless of whether they’ll help one ace a test or get ahead. For the younger Irwin, both education and history itself “is not a matter of conviction. It’s a performance. It’s entertainment.”

Hector and Irwin join battle in fighting for the hearts and minds of the play’s eight students, who collectively suggest the range of possible responses to a debate that’s been made newly topical by the current assault in our own country on decency and truth, in our schools and in our lives.

“I count examinations, even for Oxford and Cambridge, as the enemy of education,” Hector later tells Irwin. “Which is not to say that I don’t regard education as the enemy of education, too.”

In a world where the liberal arts are under attack, education is viewed in utilitarian terms, ever fewer people read books, and we communicate through terse tweets in which style trumps substance, the battle between Hector and Irwin can feel old-fashioned: Irwin has clearly won. We’re teaching the young to be clever rather than compassionate and glib rather than good.

By the end of Bennett’s play, Hector is dead; Irwin is a government consultant hatching a plan to reduce democracy. Bennett’s play may be set in Thatcher’s Britain. But it’s right at home in Trump’s America.

Fight the Power

Can we do and be better? Might the young people being educated today create a brighter tomorrow?

One of the many reasons I love Dominque Morisseau’s Blood at the Root is because it dares to think so. I worked as dramaturg

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on Next Act Theatre’s 2019 production of Morisseau’s play, directed by Marti Gobel and featuring an outstanding cast which, collectively, embodied the possibility of a new world without ever underestimating the problems afflicting this one.

Morisseau’s play is based on events in 2006 Jena, Louisiana, where Black high school students were charged with attempted murder after beating a white student; that white student had been suspected of being among those who’d hung three nooses from a schoolyard tree.

Blood at the Root profiles six students involved in or responding to what happened. Three are white and three are Black; four are women and two are men. They include a star football player who is gay; a Black newspaper editor who refuses to side with his fellow Black students; and a Black protestor forced to confront her own homophobia.

Each of Morisseau’s characters is deeply flawed, making all of them fully human.

Each of them are given solos – more conflicted and honest and therefore more powerful than any of the sung monologues in Spring

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They have difficult conversations with each other about whether friendship across racial lines is possible; the relation between racism and homophobia; the toxicity of white privilege and its twin, savior complex; when and why racially or sexually inflected “jokes” are wrong; how women are unfairly defined by their bodies; and, most important, whether the past must be relived or might be transcended.

“Somebody’s been plantin’ these awful feelins in the soil somewhere,” muses one of the characters, reflecting on the deeprooted history of racism. “Long before we came along and started pulling up crops,” he continues. “We been digestin’ this same stuff, grown in this same soil, and ain’t even know it . . . is we ever gonna plant somethin’ new?”

Blood at the Root is much too honest a play to definitively answer this question; even as the play’s final speaker invokes the promise of tomorrow, she acknowledges the lowering clouds of today.

But one can see a glimmer on the distant horizon, particularly in the movement sequences that explain why Morisseau, taking her cue from Ntozake Shange, refers to her play as a “choreopoem.”

As devised by Gobel and choreographer Alicia Rice in collaboration with the Next Act cast, these moments in Blood moved beyond the play’s deep-rooted entanglement in the past, suggesting the prospect that we somehow, someday, could learn to dance a different song together.

“Yesterday gone,” we’re told at play’s end. “Today is here. Tomorrow is coming.” If we recognize how much the young can teach us about all tomorrow might still yet be, who would dare gainsay all we could achieve, once that new day finally arrives?

A Milwaukee-based writer and dramaturg, Mike Fischer wrote theater and book reviews for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for fifteen years, serving as chief theater critic from 2009-18. A member of the Advisory Company of Artists for Forward Theater Company in Madison, he also co-hosts Theater Forward, a bimonthly podcast. You can reach him directly at mjfischer1985@gmail.com.