Playwright: Wendy Wasserstein. At: Apple Tree Theatre,, 1840 Green Bay, Highland Park. Phone: 847-432-4335; $38-$48
Runs through: June 28
It's hardly a secret that many of the rebellious youths who vowed to change their society for the better grew up to become the same kind of stodgy, pompous, parochial windbags they condemned, but Wendy Wasserstein was the first playwright to say so. Dying untimely in 2006 at the age of 55, her legacy to her feminist peers was to caution them against the smug complacency that knows no boundaries.
To be sure, her protagonist has reason for straying from her ideals: Laurie Jameson—10 years earlier, the first woman to be granted tenure at the Ivy League university where she now teaches—has a father suffering from geriatric dementia, a best friend struggling with cancer, and a child scornful of Mom's hard-won privileges, which currently include the unsettling symptoms of menopause. Small wonder that the having-it-all professor clings to her former principles for stability in an increasingly volatile universe, fighting the good fight against the old enemies—racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism. And when a student in one of her classes displays an intellectual independence inconsistent with his alleged demographic, she promptly makes him the target of her neo-doctrinaire prejudices.
Sarah Gabel, director of this Apple Tree Theatre production and Performing Arts department chair at Loyola University, has had ample opportunity to observe the phenomenon afflicting Dr. Jameson. Not for nothing has academe been dubbed an "ivory tower," aloof from messy everyday matters—but the human propensity for blaming our misfortunes on an exotic "other" can be evidenced in all segments of society. And long before the advent of on-line plagiarism, too-clever undergraduates often found themselves accused of theft by skeptical instructors. The solution, maintains Wasserstein, is to acknowledge one's error and atone, insofar as atonement can be affected, for the damage inflicted by misguided suspicions.
As played at full throttle by Robin Lewis-Bedz, Professor Jameson at the height of her fury risks coming off as too batcrackers to be taken seriously. Ironically, however, her anguish serves to render her redemption the more sympathetic ( the higher the horse, the harder the climb after falling ) . And the fellow travelers bearing witness to a fine mind gone temporarily sclerotic—Jim Farrell as the befuddled dad, Kristen Pickering as the restless daughter, Susan Felder as the candid colleague—reject the temptation to propagandistic saintliness, while Michael Gonring, in the pivotal role of Woodson Bull III, aka "Third," conveys perfectly the guileless poise of an alien species lost in an artificial wilderness.