Theatre in Review: Fish (Keen Company/Working Theatre at Theatre Row)

	Torée Alexandre. Photo: Valerie Terranova Photography

In her new play, Kia Corthron turns her unswerving gaze on education and social equality, saying a great many things that need to be said these days. Fish begins with a master stroke, as several adolescent Black girls enter their high school's elevator. It is supposed to be reserved for the disabled but they're all in a hurry; as it happens, however, they're headed in wildly varying directions.

The school, which could be in any American city, is aging, crumbling, and poorly tended. Resources are thin, funding is virtually nonexistent (and declining), and teachers dip into their meager salaries to take up the slack. The kids in attendance -- when they are in attendance -- are beset by bigger problems than penning a one-hundred-word essay on, say, notable Black women. Indeed, for members of the faculty, getting their kids' attention is a Sisyphean task. On the building's sixth floor, however, resides the Peak and Pinnacle Academy, a charter school bursting with supplies, enrichment programs, and classes in art and music. It is, of course, designed for those who can pay; most of the local kids in attendance were chosen by lottery, a cruelly random method that induces a feeling of helplessness in those left behind.

Whatever one thinks about charter schools, the choice to deploy them in government-run institutions creates disturbing juxtapositions that raise ugly questions: Why should a decent education be only the province of a few? What's to stop public education from becoming a warehouse for failures, the young people whom nobody has the time, money, or energy to help out? Is this really the best we can do?

It's exhilarating to hear these (and many other) ideas get a tough working over; in its best moments, Fish crackles with the excitement of a playwright reaching out and firmly grabbing a societal third rail. Corthron also engineers some exceptionally gripping confrontations between the put-upon heroine Latricia, a high school senior trying to raise her little brother without adult supervision, and Jasmine, an English teacher bent on getting Latricia to focus on her studies. It's an uphill battle; Latricia is so consumed with holding her little household together that she can't be bothered with book reports, or even with books. The threat of detention means nothing to her: She has too many responsibilities, especially her asthma-plagued little brother. Thanks to cutbacks, his school has a nurse on hand only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. "So guess the kids better know to stay healthy Monday Wednesday Friday," she adds, bitterly.

So long as the action stays focused on Latricia, played in a state of cold, furniture-throwing fury by Torée Alexandre, and Jasmine, who, in Rachel Leslie's characterization, has a stare that would make stone crumble, Fish is a strong and vital piece of work. But Corthron has many additional fish to fry, packing the play with characters and incidents that divert our attention: a surprise pregnancy; a grade-altering scandal; a prison-and-drugs subplot; and a tragic, avoidable death, along with pointed debates about charter schools, the Peace Corps, Teach for America, budget cuts, Common Core, and the tyranny of testing, unions, gun control, and a labyrinthine, unforgiving welfare system.

Each of these creates its own rabbit hole, resulting in a paradoxical effect: Scene by scene, Fish is filled with writing that is arresting and alive but, in its willingness to pause and consider so many related points, its central story has little forward motion. The playwright's lesson plan is overstuffed with lessons as if she felt the need to use every bit of her research, no matter if it is directly related to the main characters. There's the stuff of at least two or three more plays embedded in the crowded text.

Even so, Fish grabs one's attention with the distressing facts of a system designed to breed hopelessness. "You the third teacher we had this year, just this class," Latricia tells Jasmine. "I ain't even talkin' bout the revolvin' door in third period and fourth, you all stay about long enough you almost learn our names then quit." Jasmine recalls moving to a smaller city, where budget cuts led to four-day weeks and reduced teacher salaries, meaning, "Teachers spent their Fridays driving for Uber. Hiring themselves out as gardeners. Selling their blood." She adds, "The hospital finally told me I couldn't make a deposit more than once a week." The Peck and Pinnacle Academy, she notes, has the luxury of tossing underperformers, whereas "we can't just toss 'em out if they're floundering, we gotta keep 'em, figure out how to reach 'em."

There's plenty of humor, too, in Jasmine's martyred expression as yet another kid offers up a report on Harriet Tubman, and in the batty observation of a charter-school student, faced with having to do actual homework: "My mother always says, 'Now you in a good school but the horse don't drink. Some ole timey, like there's this river. And the horse wants to drink, but, I dunno. Polluted or somethin."

The director Adrienne D. Williams imbues the action with a coiled fury, providing plenty of air for the characters to take pitiless stock of their lousy, unfair circumstances. In addition to Alexandre and Leslie, as impressive a pair of antagonists as you will find in a New York theatre just now, Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew is fine as Latricia's friend LaRonda, who finds herself on an all-too-predictable path to hopelessness. Also, Morgan Siobhan Green delivers a mini tour de force in no fewer than five roles, including Nabila, a Muslim teacher who spars with Jasmine and guiltily looks back with nostalgia at a year spent teaching in a charter school.

Jason Simms' set sensibly solves the problem of representing a classroom and Latricia's home in a single gesture; Nic Vincent's lighting provides subtle shadings that distinguish each of the play's locations. Mika Eubanks' costumes feel accurate, helping the actors cast in multiple roles realize each character. Michael Keck's sound design evokes the intrusions of the outside world into the classroom: loud voices, public announcements, traffic, rattling radiators, and gunshots. In one especially poignant moment, Jasmine and Nabila, in the teacher's lounge, hear a violin student from the charter school playing; the sweet, plangent notes represent everything denied to the young people on the lower floors.

As we have so often been told, a house divided by itself cannot stand and the divisions seen in Fish seemingly foretell a society on a glide path to a terrible crackup. (The title alludes to the old saw about giving a man a fish and feeding him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for life.) If the play is sometimes inelegantly structured, the warning it offers is dire. This is a brave play, unafraid to call out a system that produces so much misery. If it occasionally falters as drama, as a call to action, it is hard to beat.--David Barbour