By Doug Shanaberger
for the Observer-Reporter
No matter how long you stand guard, wondering if he'll make an appearance with cap in hand and a schoolbook tucked under his arm, you won't find Arthur Chipping addressing a classroom in "The History Boys" at Little Lake Theatre. For that matter, you won't bump into his kindred spirits either. No John Keating. No Glenn Holland.
Because Alan Bennett's literate and thought-stimulating play seldom leaves a Yorkshire boys' school not unlike those institutions we recognize from countless coming-of-age movies, it's inevitable that memories of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," "Dead Poets Society" and "Mr. Holland's Opus would push the floodgates open whenever an imaginary class-dismissed bell rings in the hallway.
However, the times they were a-changing in the 1980s, when "The History Boys" takes place, and Bennett's alternately dramatic and funny story about the passion for shaping young lives and the passion for acquiring knowledge introduces a teacher who would never be mistaken for the stereotypical bookworm idealist wearing a jacket and tie.
He's called Hector, and, as played by Bill Bennett in a wonderful wise-owl performance, he's a scruffy, aging motorcycle-riding eccentric whose convictions - even more so than his proclivities - have made him an anachronism among his peers. And while it tosses many issues into a thinking cap and pushes the envelope pretty far when it examines taboos in the teacher-student relationship, "The History Boys" spends part of two and a half hours focusing on the differences between Hector's sensibility and a new-way approach he disregards.
Alan Bennett not being a conventionalist himself, the play also reveals an irony after Mark Cox's character, Irwin, enters as a tutor hired by the school's administrators to coach their brightest boys in preparation for tests that could mean acceptance to Cambridge and Oxford. What the headmaster (Philip Bower) and the school's tough-minded woman teacher (Arlene Merryman) didn't foresee is that Hector and Irwin, despite opposing points of view in the facts vs. interpretation argument, have more in common than a dedication to teaching.
At this point, you might think "I know where that plot is going," but you really don't, and for Little Lake's first outstanding effort this season, director Art DeConciliis has unified the themes in "The History Boys" so that Bennett's play can stand apart from schoolteacher tales of the past and yet unobtrusively show, as the others did, what a teacher will risk just to communicate with students on a human level.
Besides resourcefully guiding the adult cast members, DeConciliis has extracted assured performances from his younger actors.
Among the standouts are Danny Bradley as the openly gay Posner, Hardy Kern as the sharply practical Scripps, Corey O'Connor as the waggish Timms, and Jordan Walsh as the arrogant Dakin, whose sexual ambivalence leads to a confrontation the likes of which have been heretofore unseen at Little Lake. I tip a hat to DeConciliis, Walsh and Cox for the boldness and/or discretion they summoned to pull it off.
Portraying the upstart teacher, Cox (in his best work to date) combines nervous vulnerability with a forbidding coolness and acts the part as though he were gradually removing a mask. If "The History Boys" were more successful in establishing the eight boys as a clique, Mishan Blecher, Carl Mitchell, Grant Carey and Troy Bruchwalski - good as they are now - would have more freedom to develop their characters. And if he tamed his sentiment, Bennett would delete Posner's unrequited love for Dakin, a wheezy old cliché coughed up from every gay youth story ever told.
But I do like the play. And cinemaphiles ought to enjoy what I did: The students' tongue-in-cheek recreations of scenes from "Now, Voyager," "Brief Encounter" and "The Seventh Veil," all staged for Hector's amusement. They don't advance the plot, and they aren't meant to. It's just fun watching clever schoolboys turn old movies into "history."
What "The History Boys"
Where Little Lake Theatre,
McMurray
When Through July 19
For reservations,
call 724-745-6300
Rating Three and a Half Stars
(out of four)