Around these parts, the toughest teaching jobs aren’t in high
school. They’re in academe. One week they name you “Teacher of the Year” and
the next thing you know, they’ve eliminated your department altogether and
you’re history. That’s the dog eat dog real world here in the “Athens of
America.”
The funniest play in the theater world this month (or any
month for that matter) is Andrew Clarke’s hilarious ACADEMY FIGHT SONG (at the
BCA through Sept. 26th). It has less to do with the Mission
to Burma
megahit of the same name and more to do with Kingsley Amis’ LUCKY JIM, which
inspired Clarke in the first place.
You could sum up ACADEMY’s plot as ‘one professor’s spectacular
descent’ but that doesn’t do justice to Clarke’s freewheeling imagination and
his outrageous way with words. Suffice it to say, I never stopped laughing from
the get go to the get up and leave. It’s a lightening fast eighty minutes
deftly directed by CentAstage’s artistic director Joe Antoun.
Clarke’s razor sharp dialogue is mother’s milk for his
deliciously naughty characters and the CentAstage cast delivers the goods.
Craig Mathers manages a tour de force as the cocky professor whose undoing
provides us with a windfall of laughter: The swan dive which punctuates his
preposterous Jacobean lecture is simply divine.
Richard Snee, too, is a certified master in the art of comic
timing. When Snee’s wry chairman of the English department spars with Mathers’
posturing professor, no one is safe from their prickly barbs. Even the girl
scouts take a hit for their relentless cookie assaults. Tracy Oliverio and
Tyler Catanella add to the delightful frenzy as an impervious ex-wife and a
young, talented rival for the professor to contend with.
The play moves so quickly that I missed one of the curves (a
definite hazard when every line is so entertaining that if you savor it too
long, you’ve laughed over the next one). Even that didn’t detract from the
unyielding enjoyment I reaped from one man’s extremely bad fortune. Miss it at
your peril.
