[NEohioPAL] The History Boys - at the Beck - Review

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The History Boys

By Alan Bennet

Directed by Sarah May

The Beck Center for the Arts

17801 Detroit Avenue

Lakewood, Ohio 44107

216/521-2540

March 7 – 30, 2008

Tickets $19 - $28

Dana Hart seizes the part of Hector, an iconoclastic teacher at a boys’ school, and

doesn’t let go. In the central scene of the play, for example, a one-on-one tutoring session with one of the boys about a poem by Hardy, “Drummer Hodge”, Hart shows his terrifically empathetic insight into the essence of the student-teacher relationship. His character, Hector, has just been fired by the headmaster for impropriety, and the conflict between Hector’s personal grief and Hector’s impassioned belief in teaching plays out across Hart’s face and through his body language as Hector engages the student in a discussion of the poem. This is the scene that has to be magnificently acted for the whole play to be meaningful, and Hart makes it seem easy.

Dan Folino as Irwin is equally persuasive as the tempted teacher. His scene with a student who has found out Irwin’s secrets is impressive. Folino again employs the technique of seeming to separate the lower half of his body from the upper half in portraying a character with a deep-rooted conflict, as he did as Jekyll/Hyde. Folino’s Irwin is as uncomfortable in in his walk as he is master of the classroom standing or seated; it is evident in the comfortable ease of his posture while teaching. Folino does a really good job of playing conflict in this young teacher, which contrasts richly with Hart’s demonstration of Hector’s casual familiarity with the boys – a familiarity that is finally what gets Hector in trouble.

The boys themselves, led by Eric Fancher’s Dakin and Matthew Martin Thomas’s Posner, present a series of teaching and personal challenges to Hector and Irwin. The central issue is the conflict between two of the three kinds of love the Greeks identified: philos and eros (the third, agape, really doesn’t enter into this play). Hector and Irwin are both caught, in different ways, by their confusion of the two. Hector claims at one point that the teaching process is itself an erotic act, and Dede Klein, as the history teacher Mrs Lintott, in a brilliant piece of acting timing, destroys that illusion, one hopes, once and for all. Teaching is a kind of love, of course, a reciprocal love for and of knowledge – and the great danger of the teaching profession is the confusion of love of knowledge, philos, with physical love of another person, eros.  This is the center of the play: the danger of that confusion.

The boys, again. Effectively played by Tom Kondilas, Javar La’Trail Parker, Mack Shirilla, Stuart Hoffman, Adam Day Howard, and Max Chernin, along with Eric Fancher and Matthew Martin Thomas, they are the foils for the teaching dilemma that Hector and Irwin face. Director Sarah May gets them to play crisply and loudly as the smartest of the smart boys, stepping on one anothers’ lines and presenting all the charming pugnacity of kids who have it all before them. May does a good job of organizing them into a sort of Greek chorus commenting on the problems of their teachers.

In the film, the boys were the stars, acted on in various ways by the teachers; but in the play, the teachers are the main characters, and the boys are, as students always are, part of the long passing line of names and faces. May has emphasized that aspect of the boys, and it works well.

Dede Klein plays Mrs Lintot, with brio. Her set piece about Woman’s Role In History is worth the price of admission. Klein has a small part, but her craft brings a small role to life – there is not a moment she’s on stage that you don’t believe she’s who she seems to be.

Michael Regnier, as Felix Armstrong, the Headmaster, is entirely enjoyable as the kind of pompous ass that we all want to believe all Headmasters are – but Regnier has the class not to go too far. He’s fit his character right into the balance of the play. He’s just right.

Jeff Glover gives us his characteristic growl, especially as the long-suffering TV Director, and Aubrey-Kristen Fisher does not overplay the flounce as the headmaster’s assistant.

The set, by Trad A Burns, is excellent – the illusion that we’re moving into and out of corridors, classrooms, offices, and the teacher’s lounge is well done. The scene changes are quick and effective because of Burns’s design.

If you want to see a serious play, one with major educational issues, social significance, and emotional importance, but leavened with enough comedy and song, this is it. You’ll have a great time.