Teacher, student do battle

Dan O’Brien’s “The Dear Boy” starts both powerfully and compellingly, with a complicated monologue delivered direct-to-audience by the remarkable Daniel Gerroll, surely one of the most sadly under-appreciated major actors in the American theater.
As an insecure, 65-year-old literature teacher in Scarsdale Public High School in December of 1990, James Flanagan, Gerroll is very nearly unrecognizable: gray of hair, sallow of skin and nervous and insecure of demeanor.
“The Dear Boy,” in its first scenes, at least, resembles an American equivalent of the secure, literate, compassionate plays that Terence Rattigan used to write about British life, works such as “The Browning Version” and “The Winslow Boy.”
O’Brien sets up a fascinating verbal and intellectual conflict between the teacher and a gifted, neurotic boy, James Doyle, who yearns to be a writer and who, it becomes clear, has talent, despite the older man’s puzzling attempts to diminish and dismiss the efforts of the student, who, as a senior, is soon to leave the school.
When the lad arrives, roughly 20 minutes into O’Brien’s terse 80-minute play, “The Dear Boy” gives distinct signs of becoming a valid, even possibly unique struggle involving a pair of detailing, memorable individuals.
Dan McCabe, who distinguished himself last season in the Off-Broadway production of “Trust,” the story of a turbulent family in Northern Ireland, holds his own with the stage wise Gerroll, seemingly without undue effort.
Flanagan, it seems, has assigned each of the members of his creative writing class the task of coming up with a “Joycean” study of an individual the fledgling writer considers a “Hero.”
It doesn’t come as much of a surprise then that young Doyle, who is more or less accustomed to receiving poor grades from the teacher, has centered his story on Flanagan, whom he has dubbed “Professor Flyswatter,” and whose manner of speech and mode of dress he has obviously studied.
O’Brien’s vision of his central characters is as far from, say, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” or “Good Morning, Miss Dove,” to cite just two examples of popular pedagogically centered fiction, as could possibly be imagined. There is no facile sentimentality here. For one thing, both Flanagan and Doyle are remarkably adroit liars, each to his own ends. The 65-year-old pedant has been passing himself off as 59, probably in a winsome effort to head off age-based retirement rules.
He has also manufactured a “wife” to whom he refers with some frequency in his conversations with the boy, and, one assumes, other students.
In addition, Flanagan speaks in an affected manner in which can be detected traces of time spent in Ireland, England, and, when the going gets rough, the Bronx.
The boy, despite the fact that his surname is Doyle, claims not to be Irish-derived, claiming at one point that his gun-loving father is an Episcopalian police officer.
Earlier on, he has described his father as “absent.”
The fact that playwright O’Brien has named both of his central figures “James” might serve as an indication that, in one way or another, both the man and the boy may actually be aspects of a single personality.
That was the core of the novel and film, “Fight Club,” and far stranger things have turned up on the city’s stages in the recent past.
That, however, doesn’t seem to be the case with “The Dear Boy,” a title which might reasonably lead at least a portion of the audience to expect a play which, to one extent or another, has as its subject sexual abuse involving a pedant and his student, a topic which remains blissfully unexplored, despite the fact that the possibility does lurk in the work’s shadows a bit.
In retrospect, it seems unclear which of O’Brien’s Jameses, Flanagan or Doyle, is actually the “dear boy” of the title, which may quite possibly be the playwright’s intention, and probably is.
A plot point in O’Brien’s play is the question of precisely which of the school’s younger teachers will take over as head of the department once Flanagan has retired.
Placing the tale in the month of December affords the author the opportunity of staging an under-populated Christmas party at which one of the candidates, a flamboyantly gay teacher, Richard Purdy, whose partner has recently died, manages, under the considerable influence of alcohol, to unburden himself of numerous grievances against his colleagues, against the school, and, it would seem, against life itself.
The annoyingly overwritten part, played lavishly by T. Scott Cunningham, who has done vastly better work in the past, doesn’t do the play much good, and, in fact is the occasion for the one single act which brings O’Brien’s play to its knees, a position from which it never really recovers, despite the excellent work being done by actor Gerroll, who is onstage throughout, apart from a fleeting moment or two.
Suffice it to say that the play-destroying moment involves one of the firearms of which the student’s father, absent or otherwise, seems intensely fond.
The play’s fourth and final character is a young Jewish teacher whom Flanagan has hired and subsequently more or less thoroughly forgotten, one Elise Sanger, played with fire and grace by Susan Purfar. The actress, as it happens, was, until a couple of weeks ago, playing on the same stage in the Second Stage Theatre’s most recent production, “Swimming in the Shallows,” in which she appeared with an actor playing a shark.
The intermissionless production, directed by the skilled Michael John Carces, shows the signs of a decidedly limited budget. Wilson Chin’s extravagantly book-lined set has to serve not only as Flanagan’s office, but also, less convincingly, as what the show’s rather skimpy programme describes as “various locations in New York City.”
These surrogate situations, never very convincingly, are called upon to stand in for the bar in which the departmental office party is being held and a Manhattan apartment being occupied by the young Sanger on a borrowed or sublet basis, the abundance of books being justified by the fact that the flat’s regular occupants are a married couple who are both writers.
Adjustments in the lighting design provided by Ben Stanton do what they can to suggest that what the audience is seeing isn’t just Flanagan’s office.
Dan O’Brien is apparently the kind of writer who attracts grants and commissions in much the way that magnets attract iron filings, and “The Dear Boy” was written with the support of the University of the South (Sewanee, Fla.), and was awarded a Tennessee Williams Fellowship in Playwriting.
When it’s good, O’Brien’s writing is very good, so much so that “The Dear Boy” seems eminently worth a fairly thorough rewrite. For his part, the tireless Tennessee Williams, in whose name O’Brien’s fellowship was awarded, subjected virtually everything he ever wrote to extensive, exhaustive rewriting. Dan O’Brien might be well advised to follow suit.