It's unlikely any role model teachers with even a slight resemblance to Mr. Chips, Miss Dove or Miss Brooks could stay the course at Madison-Feurey High School, the setting for Bridget Carpenter's The Faculty Room, the third entrant in this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville. The teachers stuck in this ugly small mid-America suburb -- "a burnt-out strip mall with a few side streets," as one describes it -- get through the school year by viewing their work with cynical detachment, needling each other, and bemoaning intellectual inadequacies of students caught up in excited contemplation of "The Rapture" that's supposed to lift them to Heaven, and recoiling from aggressively Christian parents who look on the school as free day care. Burned out, the teachers regress to rebellious juvenile behavior as they drink, smoke, curse and use drugs (sold to them by students) in their between-classes haven.
This sounds pretty grim (and let it be said that real life teachers, while recognizing some underlying truths, would not be inclined to identify too closely with the playwright's creations) but Carpenter's smart, sharp dialogue provides crackling good entertainment, and the laughs come easily until the shocking ending that's plucked straight from headlines about school shootings and student-planned violence. Zoe (Rebecca Wisocky), teacher of speech and drama, Adam (Michael Laurence), the English teacher, and Carver (Greg McFadden), who teaches world history, are most often found in the faculty room. Sometimes the ethics teacher named Bill (William McNulty) wanders through in a speechless haze. And at play's end, a student (John Catron) penetrates the inner sanctum.
There are frequent, heartily inane announcements over the p.a. system from the unseen Principal Dennis (Colin McPhillamy) ,a jocular sit-com character who doesn't like to leave his office. His two-way device allows the clueless administrator to eavesdrop on teachers. Zoe and Adam, surprisingly, were Madison-Feurey graduates who came back to the school as teachers. Even more surprising, they were once married. Adam hasn't stopped loving her but Zoe is unmoved. They taunt each other by talking about which students they've chosen as girlfriends or boyfriends. Carver is a new teacher, idealistic and eager to make a difference, but he left his previous post at a big-city school under mysterious circumstances that Adam, jealous of Carver's growing friendship with Zoe, uncovers.
Who could imagine Miss Brooks, Mr. Chips, or Miss Dove being stationed at morning checkpoints to confiscate guns, cigarettes , knives or drugs that kids try to bring to class? Teachers at Madison-Feurey have that routine assignment. Director Susan Fenichell keeps the banter and the action moving at high clip through the school term's seasonal changes marked by clever costumes (designed by Lorraine Venberg) and decorations connected to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, and the annual Spirit Days of rallies and the prom. Paul Owen's teacher's-lounge set could have been lifted from school after generic school, complete with its "No Smoking" sign, battered and patched couch, file crates and cartons, vending machine, coffee maker and other "amenities."
Wisocky, McFadden, and Laurence (whose inspired tomfoolery with J. D. Salinger and Holden Caulfield as hand puppets is hilarious) are fabulous actors. But their skill cannot overcome the play's thin final moments that reach for catharsis but sink into cliche and bathos.
