Public school plight painted in shades of black and white
A bona fide horror story had its world premiere on Thursday night in the Alleyway Theatre. But there wasn’t a zombie, vampire or serial killer in sight.
Instead of Transylvania or Elm Street, Alleyway’s “Left Holding the Mop” transports us into the harrowing halls of the American public high school. It’s a hostile labyrinth crammed with aimless students, overworked teachers and parents who seem, if not stark-raving mad, at least flagrantly unconcerned with the educational well-being of their children.
Anyone who reads the daily newspaper (this one included) knows the picture this play presents isn’t entirely off the mark in many public schools, especially urban ones. Playwrights Bradford Willis and Anne Dunkin — both former educators — have made a valiant attempt to shine a flashlight down those darkened corridors and illuminate a pervasive domestic crisis.
But with a combination of overwrought writing, a creaky structure and a relentless uberrectitude that borders on the evangelistic, the playwriting team winds up badgering audiences with its point of view rather than convincing them of its truth.
The play focuses on the travails of Lara (Laura Bevilacqua), a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed novice teacher who somehow enters the public school system unaware of its manifold pitfalls. Her boyfriend (Michael Seitz) happens to be a ladder-climbing school administrator, and provides the built-in personal conflict that arises when Lara butts up against the school’s stifling “teach-to-the-test” mentality. The play also contains a subplot involving two underachieving students (Jeffrey Coyle and Jasmine Ramos), cheaply manufactured illustrations of the children left behind by the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Willis and Dunkin’s show commits all the sins of amateur socially conscious drama, what A. O. Scott recently called “the traps of well-meaning, preachy lower-depths realism.” It pits good against evil, with precious little wiggle room in between. It couches its situations in dialogue that ricochets from genuine to contrived and back in the blink of an eye. Instead of believable characters, it provides a parade of broadly painted cartoons.
Worst of all, the play culminates in an unhinged, fulminating diatribe from the main character, spewed alternately at the audience and at an imposing triumvirate of unmovable school administrators who are out for her job. Ranging in subject from student morale to gun violence in the media, later to the prison system and finally back to the evils of standardized testing, this bit of second-rate Aaron Sorkin (“Who are you people who think you can kill my passion for teaching without blinking an eye!”) has the effect of demoting a hitherto hokey morality tale to a tedious and unintended brand of after-school special. By the end of the speech, you’ll want to fire her, too.
Director Neal Radice has given the piece a modicum of flow but ought to have trimmed far more judiciously. Actingwise, the play is about as over-the-top as its characters. The exception is the versatile Kate Oleana, who plays a range of characters with measured authority and more than a pinch of grace.
Willis and Dunkin deserve credit for bringing this issue to the stage, as does Alleyway for staging it. But by attempting to standardize the American education system in hues so black and white, so brash and uncontained, “Left Holding the Mop” falls victim to its own logic.Theater Review
“Left Holding the Mop”
Two stars
Drama presented through Nov. 21 by the Alleyway Theatre
One Curtain Up Alley.
For more information, call 852-2600 or visit www.alleyway.com.
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