MARK GARVIN
"The History Boys" includes Chris Bresky (left), Peterson Townsend, Evan Jonigkeit, Jonathan Silver.
Youthful male energy amid juicy drama and big ideas
This is one of those rare plays that people fall in love with. Like Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, Alan Bennett's The History Boys is a big, juicy drama, full of interesting ideas as well as complex characters. It won hearts and minds first in London, then in New York, then among moviegoers. The remarkable British cast remained, remarkably, intact for each of those productions, so it is all the more remarkable that the Arden Theatre's production reimagines that cast so brilliantly with local talent.
We meet eight boys who are in their last year at a provincial school in the north of England, being coached for the make-or-break entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. Their eccentric English teacher, Hector (Frank X), who has a lech for the boys, believes that education is for life, for sustenance. Hector's classroom is random, imaginative, joyous, and noisy, in contrast to the forum for bedrock facts overseen by their history teacher (Maureen Torsney-Weir), who notes how "dispiriting it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude."
The Headmaster (David Howey) - ambitious as only limited people can be - hires Irwin (Matthew Amendt), a young go-getter who knows what the examiners want and can teach the boys how to "find a proposition, invert it, then look around for proof." It's academic gamesmanship recognizable to anyone who knows teenagers already calculating what effect their noble extracurricular activities will have on their college applications.
The boys we get to know best are Dakin (Evan Jonigkeit), the sexy one; Rudge (Brian Crowden), the athletic one; Scripps (Matt Leisy), the religious one; and, Bennett's surrogate, the singing, gay, painfully young Posner (Michael Doherty in a delectable, subtle performance).
Terrence Nolen's direction is spare and clean and uses the youthful male energy onstage to move desks and chairs around. The production's only misstep is the distracting and unnecessary projections.
Through the songs and the confessions and the French improvisations and the old-time movie scenes and the recitation of poems, enormous, important ideas are being debated - about history (and therefore about time and memory), about knowledge and its value, about war, and about truth ("lying's good, it works, we've established that"). We are asked to ponder the difference between meretricious and disingenuous and between tact and decorum.
Most poignant is the tiny, crucial disquisition on the subjunctive mood - the verb form that expresses what might have been, a notion that is both antithetical to history and fundamental to history - public and private.
In his introduction to the British edition of the The History Boys' script, Bennett noted that "theater is often at its most absorbing when it's school."
The History Boys
Through Nov. 1 at the Arden Theatre, 40 N. Second St.
Tickets: $29-$48. 215-922-1122
