Arts Alive San Antonio

By Jasmina Wellinghoff, editor —

Writing about Joshua Harmon’s plays, commentator Alexandra Kennedy said: “Incisive, witty, satiric with plenty of heart, (his) plays deftly entwine the problematic and the comic.” She wrote that for a short essay in connection with the staging of Harmon’s piece Admissions at the Studio Theater in D.C.

Few who have seen the play would argue with her assessment. Humor and themes of social justice, hypocrisy and privilege, are all part of the play, that’s receiving its San Antonio premiere this weekend at the Public Theater if San Antonio.

“I read the play much before I was offered the opportunity to direct it, and I couldn’t put it down,” said Omar Leos who is directing the show. “It’s so well written! I wanted to see it on stage… It’s an important play that deals with race and fairness in a way that will make the audience question their own beliefs on these issues.”

The story focuses on a couple of white liberals, Bill and Sherri Mason, who are devoted to increasing racial diversity in the private college-prep school where they are, respectively, head master and admissions director. Sherri, in particular, has worked hard to attract students of color and she wants that fact reflected in the school’s admission catalog. But 18 % is still not good enough. There’s more work to be done.

However, when the Masons’ son Charlie doesn’t get accepted at Yale while his mixed-race buddy does, the Masons are so dismayed that their liberal ideals fly out the window. And Charlie gets really mad, spurring him to deliver a vivid monologue that critics – even the ones who were not entirely sold on the play – refer to as brilliantly written.

These characters are put “in somebody else’s shoes,” noted Leos. How they respond to their new situation is the heart of the play, which exposes the hypocrisy of privileged white liberals in contemporary society.

An interesting detail is that the playwright gives the other boy, the one who gets into the Ivy League college of his choice, an interesting racial background – his mother is white and his father is half-white. Checking the “right” racial box is a factor in college admissions, noted Leos.

Though he hasn’t seen a case like the Masons’ in his career in education, Leos has witnessed the difficulties that students of color face when applying to prestigious colleges, and not so prestigious ones, as well. Even such a thing as being the only, say, black person to audition (for a theater program) can be intimidating,” he said.

Admissions has received a lot of critical praise and won the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Awards for Best New Play of 2018. After its London debut in 2019, a critic wrote that Admissions “has the force of a bulldozer and the precision of a scalpel.”.      

The Public’s production stars two of San Antonio’s best-known thespians, Anna Gangai and Tim Hedgepeth, with a newcomer, Caleb Driesse, making his post-college debut as Charlie. He is a recent Texas State graduate with exceptional skills.

“We are blown away by what he is bringing to the table and to his character,” said the director. “He has four monologues, one of which is really long. When he came to the first reading, we were so impressed.”

Others in the cast are Shelly Chance as the mother of the Yale-bound teen, (the son is an offstage character), and Linda Ford as an employee of the prep school admissions department.

So, what has he been enjoying the most during the rehearsal process, we asked the director?

 “What I enjoy the most are the conversations with cast and crew about the topics of race, identity and equity that we have on a daily basis, and how all of that is the driving force for me and them,” he said.

He personally believes that merit should always be the important factor in the college admission process, but that other factors should be taken into consideration as well, to help increase diversity on college campuses.

Admissions, Feb. 28-March 22, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; Cellar Theater/Public Theater of San Antonio, in San Pedro Park; tickets $20-$45; 210-733-7258 or www.thepublicsa.org