L.A.’s ‘Standup Tragedy’ Heats Hartford, Too

No Los Angeles show has ever put out more heat than “Standup Tragedy” did at the Mark Taper Forum last summer, Bill Cain’s study of a rookie teacher trying to “turn around” the kids in a bursting-with-trouble boys’ school. Cain’s play had started at the Taper--specifically, in Taper, Too’s 1988 new play festival--but it would clearly have a life elsewhere.

Sure enough, this week “Standup Tragedy” turned up at the Hartford Stage, again directed by Ron Link.

Not all the reviewers loved the show, but everybody felt the heat. Malcolm L. Johnson of the Hartford Courant thought that the script bopped around between being imaginative and being banal. But Johnson had nothing but praise for Link’s “driving, dancing, high-volume production.”

Robert Viagas in the New Haven Register thought that Cain had shattered “Blackboard Jungle” cliche “by showing how one person really can’t make a difference” when the actual purpose of a system is to hold its subjects down. As for Link’s production, Viagas described it in a single word: “Wham!”

The Boston Herald’s Arthur Friedman thought that Cain’s script bogged down in the second act. Nonetheless, the play “speaks powerfully to its theme: the low odds of survival in the inner city’s ‘ecology of evil’ and the risk that must be taken to increase those odds.”

Mel Gussow of the New York Times: “A kaleidoscopic portrait of education in extremis, written with an immediacy that makes it seem as if it were faxed from the front lines.”

WHAT THE MARKET WILL BEAR. Broadway continues to set box office records--the wrong kind. The new top ticket price for “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” will be $60.

IN QUOTES. Playwright Harold Pinter, in Theater Week Magazine: “We’ve been told in England that we have been a free country and a democracy for so long, a lot of people still believe that this must be the case.”