“The Film Society,” a new play by Jon Robin Baitz, at the Second Stage, is set in a conservative prep school in South Africa. Its hero, Jonathon Balton (Nathan Lane), is a genial, mild-mannered, and vaguely idealistic teacher, himself an alumnus of Blenheim (as the school is called), who finds a refuge from its skewed and narrow spirit in Hollywood movies. Blenheim’s saving graces, as far as Jonathon is concerned, are his fellow-teachers Nan and Terry Sinclair (Laila Robins and Daniel Gerroll) and an extracurricular film class he holds several times a week, which he is allowed to run with a fairly free hand. When the play opens, a provocative gesture by Terry—inviting a black priest to speak at the schools centennial celebration—has cost Terry his job and jeopardized his wife’s (though Nan had nothing to do with it). Jonathon manages to persuade the headmaster, an old family friend, to keep Nan on. But there is a condition. Pandemonium has broken out among the parents as a result of Terry’s gesture. To allay their fears about Blenheim’s becoming a hotbed of radicalism, Jonathon must sacrifice the autonomy of his class, confining the activities of the Film Society to nature movies and travelogues.
“The Film Society” takes place in 1970, ten years after the notorious Sharpeville massacre and six years before the uprising in Soweto. Not that the spectre of such events ever intrudes on the characters in Baitz’s play; it’s part of his strategy to keep explicit references to politics and history offstage, showing us a world utterly “clean and English,” as one character describes “the Old Africa.” “The Film Society” is about moral isolationism among people who have only a partial vision of the world. Accordingly, Baitz gives us a partial, antiquated picture of the world—like the map of the Empire that hangs on a chalkboard throughout the second half, meticulously pulled down only halfway, so that the top edge of the globe is hidden from view. (The headmaster will later describe his own body as “an old and tattered map.”) Using the school as a microcosm for South Africa, Baitz explores the psychological workings of repression in a society that has to kill its conscience in order to persist in a course of action it knows enough to abhor but cannot afford to relinquish.
“The Film Society” is a hybrid. It plays like one of Simon Gray’s wistful, academic comedies, particularly under John Tillinger’s expert direction, but it reverberates like the best work of Athol Fugard. Baitz is clearly writing in Gray’s tradition; his play is full of elements one has come to associate with “Butley,” “Quartermaine’s Term,” and “The Common Pursuit”—framing devices, offstage characters, the dialogue of charmingly mannered people. But Gray’s characters often consist of little more than their amusing mannerisms. Baitz’s characters, like real people, behave differently depending on whom they’re with. And their idiosyncrasies are part of the playwright’s point. The speech mannerism Jonathon has inherited from his mother (Margaret Hilton)—both substitute the word “thingy” for any noun they cannot think of at a given moment—seems endearing in him; when we hear it from Mrs. Balton, it becomes sinister. It’s as though the playwright were asking us to take this tiny attribute, magnify it two or three thousand times, and apply it to action and moral thought.
Mr. Tillinger has assembled a cast of more than usually fine actors, all of them adept at light, British comedy. Here Baitz, whose point is that these characters are dangerous for the very qualities that lead us to embrace them, gives the actors a chance to vary and deepen their performances in stock roles (the long-suffering wife, the black-sheep roué, the teacup matriarch). Mr. Lane is at his best in confusion, trying to articulate what the Film Society means to him, or almost yielding to the bribe of self-esteem. (His last, passionate speech about “a whispered judgment on a veranda” moved me to tears.) Mr. Gerroll makes you understand the pathetic cowardice that lies behind a certain kind of British arrogance, and Miss Robins the full grief of complicity. Dennis Parichy’s lighting expertly shuttles us back and forth between the various locales evoked by Santo Loquasto’s set—a classroom, a breakfast nook in Nan and Terry’s house, Mrs. Balton’s sitting room, and one or two outdoor settings—but it is the playwright who makes the connection between the cane furniture in Terry’s house and the stone bench where he and Jonathon sit watching farmers burning some sugar-cane.
It’s one of many points where Baitz forces a confrontation between his characters and the outside world. At least once in every scene, in fact, someone gazes or gestures out toward the audience, in each case seeing or talking about something else—because the world outside South Africa means something different to each character. In the course of the evening, we become, successively, a movie screen; a full-length mirror; a beachfront that one of the characters hates; the members of a school club that one of them loves; what Jonathon, in a marvelous slip of the tongue, calls “a classroom full of empty boys;” a graveyard full of monstrous old men whose bodies, when they died, looked not unlike the country they had ravaged; and once, when Jonathon and Terry sit gazing toward the place where those farmers are burning the cane, “the fiery wall of mythology that separates us from the rest of the world.” That’s something to escape into, something to see oneself reflected in, something to hate, something to love, something in which to put one’s hope for the future, something one might become, something that sets one apart. Finally, in the play’s closing moment, when Jonathon throws up a handful of glittery Christmas snow, we become something to avoid looking toward at all.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, August 8, 1988