Playwright: David Rush
At: Stage Left Theatre, 3408 N. Sheffield
Phone: 773-883-8830; $18-$22
Through April 7
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
As much as you want to rally behind the liberal protagonist of One Fine Day, you can't help but think, 'What an asshole.' These mixed feelings also prevent you from fully embracing David Rush's world-premiere comic drama about academic freedom.
Maybe Rush wants it that way. There are no clear-cut heroes and villains in One Fine Day ( except perhaps the estates of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, which balked at Rush's original and more appropriate play title, Any Day Now ) .
The drama surrounds outspoken widower professor Fred Miller ( Don Bender ) , who dressed up as Hitler and handed out Nazi propaganda to make a point in his Political Philosophies class. A Jewish student named Rivkah Brownstein ( an austere Lindsay Weisberg ) rightly took offense. So on One Fine Day, Miller faces down the media and pleading colleagues ( asking him to give up his fight ) to win back the right to teach his class again.
Rush likens the contrasting forces of conservatism and political correctness waging battle on college campuses to Lewis Carroll's gibberish-filled Jabberwocky ( which does battle with Miller in dream sequences ) .
Too bad your sympathy for Miller is tempered by the fact he forgot to remove the contact information on the propaganda he handed out ( which led to real white-supremacy groups ) . Miller also loses sympathy points for incorrectly railing against the Girl Scouts for being homophobic. ( It's the Boy Scouts who have the anti-gay policies. )
It's also hard to buy Miller's motivation for getting back at Rivkah for constantly needling him and challenging each point of his class lectures. Why he should choose her as a target, and not the right-wing forces on campus encouraging students to spy on teachers for liberal bias, seems wrongheaded, particularly with Miller's later personal revelation. Rush's pat end to the play also seems like an easy cop-out, since it dodges many free-speech issues he brings up.
If One Fine Day doesn't make much motivational sense for character actions, it still prods thought on the current state of American collegiate intellectual freedom. It also offers plenty of laughs.
One Fine Day receives a rigorous staging under Drew Martin's clever direction in the compact Stage Left Theatre.
Acting talent certainly isn't stinted on. Don Bender rightfully gets down Miller's constant aggravation and annoyance as he tries to stand up for himself in his self-inflicted conundrum.
The rest of the cast also do quite well creating the multiple characters that annoy Miller, from Kate Harris' chatty lesbian theater professor, Helen to Joseph Sherman's right-leaning student, Gene.
So, as much as you admire Rush's comic characterizations, the biting dialogue and the challenging sociological issues he brings up in One Fine Day, it's tough to get over this basic fact: It's difficult to root for an asshole.