College Is Back in Session

Two new college lectures barely disguised as plays recently opened, and neither playwright Lee Hall nor A.R. Gurney can overcome the inherent didacticism in their The Pitmen Painters and Office Hours, respectively.

The Pitmen Painters arrived on Broadway with a highly polished pedigree. Hall wrote the Tony-winning Billy Elliot, and the National Theatre production of Pitmen has been a sold-out success. But it’s hard to see what all the fuss on the other side of the Atlantic was about, despite the presence of the original cast. Based on the real-life Northumberland coal miners who caused an art world sensation in the 1930s with their art under the tutelage of teacher Robert Lyon, The Pitmen Painters plays out like every Behind the Music ever aired on VH1: A group of talented nobodies gets together, causes a sensation and then bicker with one another and the man who discovered them before ultimately reaching a cozy peace. The problem is that Hall’s dramatization lacks all dramatic bite.

Part of the problem is that only artist Oliver Kilbourn (Christopher Connel) is fully fleshed-out. The other four members are all clearly dramatic devices: the rigid leader, the curmudgeonly one, the dry and ironic counterpoint and the eager, immature outsider. Whenever any of these men open their mouths, we immediately zone out. If we’re lucky, one of the original Ashington Group’s works is being projected on a screen, and we can marvel at the rough-hewn artistry on display. If we have no visual distraction, we revert back to being college students, and stare forward, eyes glazed, hoping we won’t be called on.

There’s no stirring moment of creation like the one in Red, when Mark Rothko and his assistant primed a canvas, nor much in the way of character development. Hall has Kilbourn briefly debate accepting the patronage of wealthy art lover Helen Sutherland (Phillippa Wilson) before deciding that once a coal miner, always a coal miner. Connel is an easygoing presence, an actor who can make Kilbourn’s sudden transformation into an art aficionado believable. The entire cast is excellent, actually, but none of them have the same chance at crafting a character the way Connel has. And whenever they must discuss the merits or demerits of art, all believability flies out of the window. Whether or not the Ashington Group actually had such heated debates is irrelevant; Hall hasn’t succeeded in creating characters with enough depth to make their exchanges ring true.

Of course, even their two dimensions have more heft to them than the cartoons with which Gurney has populated his Office Hours. A modest series of interlocking vignettes set on a college campus in the 1970s, Gurney’s newest work (his second New York premiere this year) follows a school-year’s worth of battles between professors and students over a course called “The Western Tradition,” one that is comprised solely of Dead White Men (think Aeschylus and Homer). Unfortunately, The Flea has chosen to have two alternating casts of six actors from their resident acting company, The Bats, perform the show. Which means that we have twentysomething beginners as both students and professors.

Using the Bats is a major misstep in the production, one that the play can’t withstand. Exchanges between professors have a stilted, amateurish quality, while the increasingly radicalized students are played with an overabundance of “We’re in the ’70s, man!” As each vignette unfolds in ways that reflect the Dead White Man under discussion—the Vietnam War provides ample fodder for a discussion of Thucydides—we’re subjected to a bludgeoning from the cast (the Homer cast on the night I attended), from none of whom director Jim Simpson can wrest a believable performance. In

The Bats’ hands, Gurney’s wispy seriocomedy becomes unbearably heavyhanded, from a bossy teacher who tries to trick her student into abandoning her pre-med major in favor of the humanities to a gay professor and his needy student discussing the latter’s promiscuity (the phrase “whore-mones” comes up, perhaps an exhausted result of Gurney’s prodigiousness). By the time Office Hours drags itself to its conclusion, one longs for the rigor of St. Augustine after so much soppy, sloppy sentimentality.

>> The Pitmen Painters Through Dec. 12, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $57–$116.

>> Office Hours Through Oct. 23, The Flea Theater, 41 White St. (betw. Broadway & Church St.), 212-352-3101; $25.