 SEPTEMBER 19 • 2019 | 51

Admissions

Theatre NOVA play 
about racial diversity 
stirs conversation. 

T

he Masons, a family long 
advocating for diversity 
values, begin to question 
those values when their teen son 
is denied admission to an Ivy 
League school — not because 
he’
s Jewish, the son believes, but 
because he will not add to the 
university’
s racial diversity.
The situation fills the script 
of Admissions, a Joshua Harmon 
play making its Michigan debut 
Sept. 20-Oct. 13 at Theatre 
NOVA in Ann Arbor, where 
new plays are the focus.
Diane Hill, producing artis-
tic director, plays mom Sherri 
Rosen-Mason, dean of admis-
sions at a New Hampshire prep 
school, where her husband, Bill 
(Joe Bailey), is headmaster. They 
have worked years to 
diversify their admis-
sions.
“The issues 
brought up in this 
play are just a small 
part of a much larger 
conversation,” says 
Hill, a multi-the-
ater and film actor 
who founded and 
appeared in the discontinued 
T
wo Muses Theatre, a nonprofit 
in West Bloomfield, and was a 
theater professor at University of 
Detroit Mercy.
“I find it so interesting 
because you have a character 
who is liberal, progressive and 
proud of her work, but, despite 
her best intentions, her private 
aspirations have somewhat 
blinded her to what was really 
happening with the minority 

students she was recruiting,” she 
says. “It’
s one of those plays that 
will stir up a lot of conversation 
as it’
s also very funny.”
Jewish playwright Joshua 
Harmon’
s earlier work, Bad Jews, 
was presented in 2015 by the 
Jewish Ensemble Theatre (JET). 
That is a dark comedy about 
cousins fighting over a gold chai 
saved by their grandfather.
Admissions was chosen to 
open Theatre NOVA’
s fifth 
season because it tackles current 
issues and was considered pow-
erful and relevant. 
“It seems we are living in a 
period of accelerated hatred and 
more overt discrimination,” she 
says. “In many ways, we abhor 
it so much that we’
re almost 
needing to disassoci-
ate ourselves from it.”
The play, directed 
by David Wolber, 
also features Jeremy 
Kucharek as Charlie 
Luther Mason, Sarah 
Burcon as Ginnie 
Peters and Cynthia 
Szczesny as Roberta.
In an interview 
on the Lincoln Center Theater 
blog, Harmon expressed his 
ideas for Admissions: 
“This play is trying to hold 
up a mirror to white liberalism 
while remaining very conscious 
of the fact this is just one nar-
row slice of a much larger con-
versation … In real life, most 
people are not all good or all 
evil. Most of us live somewhere 
in between, whether or not we 
like to admit we do.” 

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Details
Admissions runs 
Sept. 20-Oct. 13 at 
Theatre NOVA, 410 W. 
Huron, Ann Arbor. $22 
and pay-what-you-
can. (734) 635-8450. 
theatrenov.org.

THEATRE NOVA

Diane Hill and Jeremy Kucharek play 
mother and son in Admissions now at 
Theatre NOVA in Ann Arbor. 

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