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Cast of 'Lesson' has much to learn

Playwright Eugene Ionesco once wrote, "the unusual can spring only from the dullest and most ordinary daily routine and from our everyday prose, when pursued beyond their limits."

Director Jen Kuhn's production of Ionesco's "The Lesson" in the Arena Theater this past weekend might have flirted with the limits of the ordinary, but never quite managed to push past those margins. As a result, the play remained confined to the plane of the "usual" and, in the end, flattened rather than animated the chilling rifts in this piece of absurdist theater.

The title of Ionesco's play, "The Lesson," first produced in Paris in 1951, suggests routine. A young woman arrives at a professor's home for a tutorial. The circumstances of the tutorial become immediately suspect when the professor commences the arithmetic portion of the lesson with the question, "What do one and one make?" As the professor exclaims his approval at the pupil's correct answer, the mundane begins to masquerade for the extraordinary. Let the professor's zealous praise be our first warning that this play intends nothing less than to push the banality of this arithmetic lesson well beyond its limits.

As we find out soon enough, the elementary exercises of adding and subtracting -- which elicit inordinate praise when performed correctly -- invoke a disquieting menace when miscalculated. The pupil's failure to comprehend the principles of subtraction sends the professor into a mounting fury of frustration and of sadistic illustrations -- "You have two ears .... I nibble one off. How many do you have left?"

From here, the lesson transforms into nothing less than an interrogation of torturous proportions as the professor's fierce, tautological quizzes of the pupil's command of philology paralyzes her in a spell of helpless agony. He has trapped her so completely in his cruel imagination that to give the final fatal blow, he simply crafts the image of a knife with his words and sacrificially stabs her through. The maid as our informant, we discover that this sadistic ritual happens every hour -- each time a new pupil rings for the professor.

While Kuhn's choice to open the play with the maid methodically cleaning the wreckage of the professor's book-strewn office effectively established this playing space as a war-torn battlefield, the motion lacked urgency and set a tone of complacency which crept into the dragging momentum of the rest of the production.

Beth Shaw's portrayal of the precocious, vivacious pupil who has arrived for her first lesson with the professor lacked the subtly of expression and easy vulnerability needed to keep the dynamic between her and the professor alive and compelling in its many mutations.

As the saving fixture of the production, Troy Sill -- the distracted, ostensibly shy professor -- endowed his character with the kind of quirks and emotional realness needed to restore dimensionality to the production. His appropriately understated speech and ever-mounting vigor peppered the dramatic movement of the play with variety and even added a hint of the humor. Sill's comic pacing as he commanded his pupil to perform her addition tables brilliantly strummed the ironic futility of this mundane ritual. However, as Sill's tongue sharpened and quickened, Shaw remained utterly unaltered by his stinging words. The pupil's toothache -- the pain of his words made manifest -- rather than causing her to shrink in agony as the professor sapped the life from her, became only a gratuitous distraction.

The sexual dynamic Kuhn tried to develop in the final moments of the murder fell flat, as Shaw never fully surrendered herself to the seductive torture of the professor's language. Sill found himself twisted in the spokes of his own elocution as he valiantly but unsuccessfully tried to save the dramatic crescendo of what became a one-man show.

In the final moments of the production, as the grandfather clock ticked and signaled the return to a kind of artificial order "in a world that now seems all illusion and pretense -- in which all human behavior tells of absurdity," this particular production, unfortunately, became its own exercise in banality.