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Monday, September 5, 2011

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.
Posted by Jim Rutter @ 1:47 PM  Permalink | 5 comments
Comments   
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 9:03 PM, 09/05/2011
    What is the point? That it is ok for a teacher to have an affair with a student? Or that the law is meaningless as far as love is concerned? Poor play of a judgmental nature as real people do get arrested for doing something like this.
    — James
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 9:06 PM, 09/05/2011
    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
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 9:10 PM, 09/05/2011
    Lets continue to bash conservitive points of view, do you think this play would have been produced in the 1940's or 1950's? Or do you think the era would have called it what it is--disgusting! Thewre is nothing right about a 44 year old teacher having an affair with a 17 year old student, it is disgusting and it is flat out wrong! But hey liberals want us to live and let leave so it must be ok, the 17 year old is learning about life and the 44 year cannot help his love, unreal!
    — apa279
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 9:41 PM, 09/05/2011
    This one really hit a nerve with the Jazzy set, huh?
    — ahab
  • 0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 9:59 PM, 09/05/2011
    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


5 comments
About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


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 been writing 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 also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at 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 a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

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