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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