Theatre in Review: The Film Society (Keen Company)

	Euan Morton and Mandy Siegfried. Photo: Carol Rosegg

When The Film Society opened in 1988, starring the fast-rising Nathan Lane, it announced the 27-year-old Jon Robin Baitz as a playwright of uncommon promise. I didn't see the play, which is one reason I'm grateful to Keen Company for reviving it; even better, Jonathan Silverstein's production is so persuasive that it's difficult to imagine anyone other than Euan Morton in the role created by Lane.

Morton is Jonathon Balton, a teacher at Blenheim, a school for boys in Durban, South Africa, circa 1970. The fortyish Jonathon, a former Blenheim boy himself, is back after a failed career as a radio actor. He is no pedagogical paragon: He shows his students the Michael Caine film Zulu, noting that it constitutes "South African history in a nutshell." He also operates the organization of the title, which is designed more to entertain him than to enlighten his charges. His cinematic tastes are far from impeccable; as the play begins, he is miffed to have mistakenly taken delivery of a copy of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil instead of the Doris Day vehicle That Touch of Mink.

Blenheim, as the name suggests, is an enclave of British colonial attitudes in a changing South Africa. (In 1970, the country, having exited Britain's Commonwealth of Nations years earlier, was ruled by the Afrikaner majority.) If anything, Baitz is too hell-bent on making clear that this former outpost of the empire is crumbling to bits. It is nearly bankrupt, with overgrown grounds and infestations of bats and termites. And don't even ask about the plumbing. "When boys go into the pool, we need a team to find them," grumbles Jonathon. Among the senior staff, one is wasting away from spinal cancer and the headmaster, Neville, is slowly going blind.

While Jonathon is sitting alone in a classroom, taking in Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich in the final reel of Touch of Evil, Blenheim is in an uproar. Terry, another teacher and Jonathon's best friend, has caused a major disturbance by bringing in a black priest, who works in an impoverished school in a nearby township, to speak at the school's annual celebration day. The parents are furious, and Terry, who is widely suspected of having Marxist sympathies, is about to lose his job, leaving his wife, Nan, another member of the faculty, as their sole support. It goes without saying that Nan is one mistake away from dismissal herself.

Jonathon, whose default manner is a kind of sunny denial, insists that the incident is "a storm in a tea thingy." He desperately needs to believe this; almost certainly homosexual and either unwilling or unable to do anything about it, he is dependent on Terry and Nan. "There will be no one left for me," he says, waving away the idea of their possible dismissal. But forces are at work in Blenheim that will have a profound effect on his life. Neville, who sees the handwriting on the wall, is determined to secure the school's future. Jonathon's mother, Sylvia, a wealthy, willful old dragon, wants to secure her son's future. Thanks to the deal they strike, he will find himself in an unaccustomed position of power and will be forced to choose between the school and the people he loves most.

Baitz artfully knits together academic and social politics, creating a net of circumstances that will entrap Jonathon, leaving him more alone than ever. The Film Society has the density of a good novel, deftly filling in a back story that includes Jonathon and Terry's lifelong friendship, Terry and Nan's troubled marriage, and the minuet between Sylvia and Neville, in which power is traded for money. In one of the play's most shocking moments, Neville, unhappy with her demands, says, "Sylvia, must we negotiate like Jews?" That this remark passes largely without comment speaks volumes about the insular world of Blenheim.

At the same time, Baitz makes sure we grasp the terrible injustices that exist outside of Blenheim's walls. Terry, for his political beliefs, finds that his phone his tapped. Nan worries that their shelves are filled with illegal books. Their manservant comes to grief when he is arrested for violating the country's Pass Laws; out of money, they are forced to let him go, leaving him dispossessed. Meanwhile, in order to survive, Blenheim must cater to Afrikaner families who hanker for the symbols of the faded Empire.

Morton's Jonathon is an old boy in more ways than one, so used to living inside the stultifying attitudes of Blenheim that they feel like home to him. His cheerful manner is designed both to please people and to keep them at arm's length, but there's a festering dissatisfaction underneath that smile. When Sylvia, watching him try on new suits, notes that he has a hole in his underwear, his irritable response that nobody ever sees the garment in question anyway is a sharp, sudden revelation of his terrible isolation. As he becomes more and more responsible for Blenheim's fate, a new Jonathon emerges, one who is sadder and, if possible, even lonelier; his friendly manner curdles into bitterness as he faces an all-too-likely fate as the next Neville. Morton is probably best known for his work in musicals, but here he emerges as a fine character actor, one who isn't afraid of exploring the darker sides of Jonathon's soul.

There is also fine work from Gerry Bamman as Neville, who sees all of Blenheim's flaws even as he plays dirty while fighting to preserve it. In one especially evocative passage, he recalls buying the school when it was "a gentleman's sort of place," filled with "the flotsam and jetsam of the Empire." Still, surrounded by losses, he insists, "What is left is Blenheim." David Barlow is touching as Terry, who is still very much a Blenheim boy under the radical exterior, and who slides terribly when expelled from it. Mandy Siegfried captures Nan's growing frustration with Terry and also with Blenheim, especially in a scene in which, disgusted by their essays, she informs her students that "your Africa" is made up of nothing but "drums and spears." Roberta Maxwell's Sylvia, who offers Jonathon a rather frosty sort of love, is an acute study of the kind of woman who knows how to get what she wants; in her best scene, she genially informs the stunned Neville that, even with old friends, she never agrees to anything without a signed contract.

In addition to his deft handling of the actors, Silverstein has also obtained a fine production design. Steven C. Kemp's two-level setting is backed by a wall covered with an enlarged detail of the British South African flag, bits of which are torn away, revealing colorful African patterns underneath. Solomon Weisbard's lighting smoothly dissolves from one scene to the next, lending a cinematic flow to the proceedings. Jennifer Paar's costumes take note of such period details as beltless men's slacks; she also dresses Maxwell cannily, revealing Sylvia's eccentric style ideas. Palmer Hefferan's sound design makes use of the soundtracks of the movie musicals -- such as Gigi and Oklahoma! -- that Jonathon loves so much.

For all of its considerable élan, The Film Society is still a young man's play, and during the last half hour or so you may find each of the characters giving one too many speeches, just to make sure we understand every little detail of the evening's theme. But it's hard to think of another young playwright in recent decades who delivered such a fully realized first work. This is a vivid, scalding portrait of a colony living in the past and clinging to its hidebound ideas like so much wreckage, and Morton is most persuasive as its heir apparent.--David Barbour