Spring 2019 at a high school near you: the students are stressed and chugging Dayquil. Or they’ve withdrawn in the face of stereotypes and prejudices. The teachers? Pretty much the same. DOING SCHOOL tells the stories of four high school juniors and their teachers, affected in different ways by their class, race, and gender. They are going through the motions at a diverse public high school in a progressive American city, a microcosm of the speeded-up world beyond the school bounds. Interrupted by bells and buffeted by competing demands on their time, they strive to live up to – or sometimes down to – the expectations of others. As they navigate an uneven playing field, they risk losing themselves. What will save them? Better “Time Management”! … Or maybe not. Maybe there’s another way to close the gap between who they wish they were and who they have time to be. Maybe there’s a way to rescue each other? Set one year before the COVID pandemic, DOING SCHOOL reveals the fissures which will gape even wider when education moves online, and scarce resources become even scarcer.

In the fall of 1900, Freud, then forty-four, a virtually unknown, only moderately successful medical practitioner, analyzed a young woman of eighteen. The girl’s father had brought her in, alarmed by the discovery of a letter in which his daughter threatened suicide. Moreover, the young woman suffered from chronic asthma and laryngitis; she took no interest in domestic affairs and buried herself in her studies; she fought with her mother and accused her father of having an affair. The father hoped that Freud would bring his daughter “to reason.” In his account of her treatment, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Freud called his patient “Dora.” The play Fräulein Dora shifts the perspective to Dora: a bright, curious, intellectually ambitious girl first coming into sexual awareness in an unreflectively patriarchal culture. Her story shines a light on the origins of modern views of female sexuality and on the theoretical foundations that sill underlie our culture’s response (“hysterical”) when girls and women speak out.

It’s the late 1970s. Emmy Helmer is a teenager, living in Berkeley, California with her father and her two brothers. Her mother left the family when Emmy was three. Now Emmy has been assigned to read A Doll’s House in her high school English class and she comes to a realization: she is Nora’s daughter, Ibsen’s Nora, left behind in the middle of a life, trying to figure out what to do, how to live, how to become a full human being. Flash forward to the 1990s: Emmy is an aspiring theater director. In spite of her Yale Drama School degree, her career is stalled. She and her husband are expecting their second child. He’s supporting the family and is always at the hospital. She’s always facing a child-care crisis. And then the big job offer comes to direct a mainstage production at The Rep. It’s A Doll’s House.