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 Or they’ve withdrawn in the face of stereotypes and prejudices.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.
Fräulein Dora
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.
Just Deserts
Since the beginning of time, the three Furies have dedicated their immortal lives to the ancient, honorable principle of a slit throat for a slit throat. But when a young man walks into hell seeking help to avenge his father’s death—by killing his mother—they draw the line. And when he ignores their warnings against matricide and then begs for mercy, the moral order of the universe hangs in the balance. Just Deserts explores the origins of the Western (in)justice system.
Nora’s Daughter
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.
The Melting Pot
(Variations on a theme by Israel Zangwill)
A century ago, the United States was embroiled in a bitter dispute over immigration. Nativists warned that a flood of new immigrants—Russian, Italian, and most dangerous of all, Jewish—posed an existential threat to American identity, while liberals fought to maintain the ideal of America as a haven for all races and cultures. Into the fray leapt “The Melting Pot,” a play by Israel Zangwill. It celebrated the metaphor of its title, and both the play—a wildly popular melodrama—and the metaphor were seized upon as powerful weapons by those fighting to defend open borders. The current play distills the immigrant love story at the heart of the original melodrama and interweaves it with the story of Zangwill’s play itself and its role in America’s early twentieth-century culture wars.
Witch Hunt
February 1692. Salem Village, Massachusetts. Tituba, her husband John, and their infant daughter live uneasily as enslaved Indians in the Puritan household of the Reverend Samuel Parris. It’s the coldest New England winter in memory, the minister’s salary has not been paid, and firewood is in short supply. To comfort herself and nine-year old Betty Parris, Tituba tells stories from her childhood, magical stories to offer an escape from the present, but they raise the suspicions of Betty’s mother, Elizabeth. In the meantime, fighting between colonists and Indians in nearby Maine is worsening. Already there are refugees from earlier Indian wars living in Salem Village, including Betty’s eleven-year-old cousin Abigail, who suffers from night terrors and a racking cough. Now, Betty begins to show the same symptoms, and rumors spread that the girls are possessed. Tituba is one of the first to be arrested under suspicion of witchcraft. In a desperate act to save herself and her family, she chooses to “confess.” Tituba’s false testimony sets the members of the Puritan community against one another. The accusations multiply, the jail cells fill, and the condemned are sent to the gallows. Ultimately, before the fury burns itself out, twenty women and men are executed for witchcraft, and several more die in jail. At the height of the panic, 150 people were packed into the jail with Tituba. Now, in the spring of 1693, only she remains, because no one has yet paid her jail fees. “Telling stories to children – is that witchcraft?” she wonders. And what if it’s true? What if she is a witch? Then she can conjure whatever ending she wants to this story.