BRATTLEBORO-Class, a play by Irish playwrights Iseult Golden and David Horan, gets its U.S. premiere at the Hooker-Dunham Theater this month.
The story: Brian and Donna's son, Jayden, is 9, and he's struggling. That's what his teacher says. Judging by test scores and behaviors, he should see a psychologist. But Brian and Donna - recently separated - never liked school, nor teachers. So are they going to trust this one? The upshot: a parent-teacher meeting goes very wrong.
The play is directed by Charlene Kennedy. Shannon Ward plays Donna and a 9-year-old Kayley. Isaiah Lapierre plays McCafferty, the teacher. Tony Manica rounds out the cast playing the father, Brian, and the son, Jayden.
Kennedy found the script while combing selections she receives regularly from Nick Hern Books in London. After a sold-out run in the Dublin Theatre Festival 2017, the play transferred to Ireland's premier theater, the Abbey, in 2018 before playing in the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that year - all to critical acclaim.
"It's a serious drama with moments of wonderful humor," she explains. Underscoring the title's double entendre, she adds, "class divisions exist in so many different manifestations in our world, and one of them certainly is education," where often a teacher might come from a higher socioeconomic status than the students in the class.
"That's certainly demonstrated here in this play," she says.
One of the ways is simply using vocabulary peculiar to the profession.
"The teacher addresses the parents using jargon that's very basic to him but not necessarily to people out of his element or class, or realm of experience," she says. "If we really listen to the words of the play and if our staging has helped it along, perhaps it increases an understanding of blocks that we put in front of ourselves on so many different levels that we're not really conscious of."
Class finds us witnessing these individuals struggling to communicate through misunderstandings and misinformation. While all are invested in addressing how to make school better for Jayden, "they're missing it. It ain't happening," says Kennedy.
Set in a present-day classroom in a lower-class school system near Dublin, Ireland, Class opens with "the parents coming to a consultation with the teacher who is concerned about the scores on national reading and comprehension tests. In the course of that discussion, we see how uncomfortable the parents are being back in a school system that did not do them justice as individuals," Kennedy explains.
"And they harbor a lot of fear [and] unknown discomfort about being back physically in a classroom," she adds.
When the teacher needs to leave briefly, the parents instantly become children at an after-school homework help session. "That scene is interesting. It's funny; it's different than the adult scenes, and in another split instant, they revert back to being the parents," she says.
Play resonates with educators
Kennedy has been in education her whole career, from teaching first graders through college and as an educational administrator. Class resonates with her.
"When I was teaching at the college level [Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts], a large number of students had yet to experience success in their lives. You can define success in a variety of ways, but many of them came from a lower socioeconomic background. Many of them had not had a great deal of success in the educational system," she says.
The first from her Woburn, Massachusetts, family to go to college, Kennedy adds, she brings that experience to directing Class. On some level, she says, she understands the parents' plight.
Of the two timelines operating in the play, Kennedy explains: "If you look at all the scenes involving the parents, it's one afternoon visitation with the teacher. Children's experiences in the play, [though,] take place over three different time periods."
The audience, she says, will find the two timelines "fairly evident - not with costume changes, but with acting. And the dialogue. It forces one to pay attention. And hopefully how we're staging it will certainly facilitate that understanding."
Ward adds, "It spoke to me the first time I read it, as a former elementary school teacher. I work with kids a lot. Just the setting of play [is] one of the more stressful situations; it's a very vulnerable place for both parents and teachers.
"Everyone has the same goal, the success of the student, but maybe has different perspectives [...] that relationship with authority and classroom experience can be very different for different people," she says.
The parents in Class "did not have good experiences as kids and hold a lot of anxiety still around going into a classroom," Ward continues. "It's not a place they feel comfortable. And so immediately things start off with heightened tension."
"It's those roles we play," Lapierre reflects, "the hats we wear and the way we sort of mask or code switch casually in life," noting that most of us are inclined to behave one way at work and another in the comfort of home. "And I think the teacher works both separately with these people."
Addressing the thread of authority in the play, he notes a fluidity in the dynamic.
"I've also worked with children [and] I've had a lot of teachers in my family, and I have come at this with a very pro-education view. I've been anti- the lack of funding and attention teachers unfortunately get. And the judgment and the criticism. I'm connecting in that way."
That said, Lapierre now appreciates more "that not everyone thrives in school for a multitude of reasons, obviously one of them being class, or privilege, reasons. But I'm starting to realize that more as I think about what school is for people and then how that informs them later in life. [...] It has made me appreciate that that's your setup for the real world."
Class has a lot of meanings, Lapierre notes.
"We see an element of class difference between the teacher and the kind of a posh neighborhood [he comes from]. And we see him trying to work within the system, having pushback on all sides about it," he says.
Regardless of advances in understanding child development, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and better practices, often we're "left with a very overwhelmed teacher or system at large that now needs to communicate it to people who are going to bring all sorts of their own biases and reactions to it," Lapierre says.
"I think teachers know a lot more and have probably a better lexicon and a better understanding of exactly what is going on in children's minds," Lapierre adds. "But parents themselves are challenged, too, because they're like, 'that's not the kid I know,' or they don't understand what's being said.
"So how do you communicate complex ideas simply, or simple ideas with the appropriate complexity?" he asks.
Performances of Class take place Friday, Feb. 21 through Sunday, Feb. 23 and Friday, Feb. 28 through Sunday, March 2. Friday and Saturday performances start at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday performances, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $15. Email [email protected] to reserve. The Hooker-Dunham Theater is down the Alley at 139 Main St., and is accessible only by stairs.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.