Review: Teach Your Children
In "Teach Your Children," about a real teacher-student affair, Jim Rutter sees a "straightforward, naturally unfolding narrative that frankly depicts rampant teen promiscuity and drug and alcohol use without blaming it."
Review: Teach Your Children
By Jim Rutter
Teach Your Children achieves a rare, albeit minor feat in theater: It presents a complex moral issue without moralizing.
Tom Tirney based his play on the case of 44-year old Robert Hawkins, a popular Council Rock High School South teacher sentenced to prison for an affair with a 17-year old female student (James Jackson and Melissa Connell play the lovers and seven other roles).
Tirney intended to examine texting and technology’s effects on communication (he failed) and the first scenes blather in trite phrases and academic jargon. While computerized chalkboard animation invigorates the set, a constant stream of text messages clutters an otherwise straightforward, naturally unfolding narrative that frankly depicts rampant teen promiscuity and drug and alcohol use without blaming it.
Kaci Fannin’s deft direction and the nuanced performances create an emotional landscape of subtle contours, discouraging quick judgments and revealing the issue’s complexity. When student pursues teacher and neither suffers, whom do we blame or punish? Other teachers knew — were they duty-bound to stop the affair? The play’s minor tragedy indicts parents who provided financial support but eagerly pushed their daughter on an older man willing to help her navigate life’s tougher questions.
That the play — and the real case — ends in a prosecutor’s office settles nothing. Teach Your Children may force us along, but it forces us to think.
$13. 8 p.m. 9/8-11, 9/14-17, 2 p.m. 9/11. The Theater at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, 2111 Sansom St.
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No different than the abuse scandal with the priests - except of course the abuser in this case is represented by a left wing union that contributes money and support to the same left wing party and president that this newspaper endorses.— fafafooey- Comment removed.
- This one really hit a nerve with the Jazzy set, huh?— ahab
- Newt both married one of his high school teachers, and is also currently married to a woman 25 years his senior. His relationship with his former teacher began in the early 60s (when these things never happened, right?) I forget, what ideology does Mr. Tiffany's ascribe to? In other words, this has been going on forever no matter what your politics.— bobcitydoc
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
