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Admissions by Joshua Harmon at Lincoln Center Theater

There is much to like about Admissions: it's proof that playwright Joshua Harmon can be versatile in his subject matter and writing and the acting, lead by Jessica Hecht at her best, is uniformly excellent. The play grips you for 90 entertaining minutes.

But it is yet another entry in the "let's be as timely and relevant as possible" catalog that has consumed the New York theater scene this season. And look, I have said multiple times that good theater should reflect the time in which it is written, and that is a product of what's happening in the world. However, between Relevance, Kings, and now Admissions, I am tired of every playwright standing on a soap box to prove he or she is the most with it, the most "woke," as the kids would say. Just write a play, just tell a story, let us find meaning.

However, what Admissions also does right is engage the audience in a dialogue of ideas, and it left my boyfriend and I with much to discuss after the final curtain. It grapples with questions we've all asked ourselves: how can we make things better for others while still protecting ourselves? Is that even possible, or our we just hypocrites?

Jessica Hecht's character Sherri is the head of admissions at Hilcrest, a prestigious boarding school in New England. Her husband is the headmaster, her son is one of the top students. Sherri's focus is to improve the diversity of the student body; at the start of the play, students of color make up 18% of the population. This is up from the 4% it was when she took over the position. I think we can all agree that this is a noble cause; the world and everything in it should be diverse. And not only should institutions like schools be diverse but people of color should feel welcomed and safe. But how can a white person really understand the experiences of a person of color? She cannot. She cannot just say things are better because she includes students of color in photos in the admissions brochure, or because she replaces Moby Dick with literature written by writers of colors (sorry, I differ with her here; if we don't teach things like Moby Dick, they will be lost). In fact, it's almost insulting for her to believe these things have solved the issues for (potential) students of color. Especially in a school that is presumably filled with white, privileged kids who have never had to work hard for anything in their lives, have never experienced adversity, and have benefited from their parents' status and wealth. (One such kid is Charlie, Sherri's son.)

I couldn't help but think about Dominique Morisseau's Pipeline, which also played at the Mitzi Newhouse this past summer as I watched Admissions. The protagonist of Pipeline sends her son to a prestigious boarding school where he is one of the only black students in the school. But she wants him to have better opportunities, to hopefully escape the school to prison pipeline. And just like Hilcrest, that school attempts to include literature by writers of color, in this case, Native Son, and the play delves deeply into how that novel affects the young boy in both the classroom and life. When putting Admissions in conversation with Pipeline, Admissions is almost a joke. But is that the point? Is Harmon trying to highlight how ridiculous white liberals can be when it comes to diversity? That in the end, they're just clueless?

Well, regardless, Sherri's son puts a wrench into her plan when he is rejected from Yale and his biracial best friend, Perry, is not. Charlie is convinced Perry is only accepted because of his race, and he begins to question the point of working hard when women and people of color are, in his opinion, given the same or even better opportunities because of what they are. This is a point he makes in a long, uninterrupted rant early on in the play. (Surely his mother or father would've interrupted him at some point, right?) And look, I somewhat sympathize with Charlie. These are all thoughts we've had in our own lives. And I don't mean in relation to gender or race. But why do some people get opportunities than elude us? But Charlie, as I mentioned above, is clearly a straight, white, male who has benefited from his parents' wealth and status. If not getting into Yale is the most adversity he's ever experienced, he should consider himself lucky. As someone who could not afford to go to her dream school and is still paying off student loans, I couldn't help but think, "you should consider yourself lucky that it's even possible for you to go to Yale if you do get in." But I suppose I started projecting my own problems onto this play. Since high school, I've seen people get into school, get internships and jobs, because their parents have money and connections. Yes, it's unfair. And I couldn't help but think, "Charlie, shut the hell up. Your parents will clearly make things okay for you." Not once was I worried that he wouldn't find a soft place to land.

And then the play takes an interesting and unearned turn. It was almost as though Harmon wasn't sure how to wrap things up. Charlie does a complete 180 and decides he, like the rest of the world, is sick of white privileged men and rescinds all of his other applications (to other Ivy League and prestigious universities, because of course) so he can just go to community college, and writes an editorial in the school newspaper he is not the editor-in-chief of (because a woman got the position! because she's a woman!) that he is going to donate what his parents would pay for his tuition to Hilcrest for a scholarship for a student of color. Again, only a child who has lived a life of privilege and free of adversity would even have the gall to do this. But Charlie thinks this will allow someone else to have his seat at the table (a phrase that comes up over and over and over again in the text). This is his solution for making things better for people of color. But I just didn't buy that he would suddenly gain self-awareness and see through his privilege to do something so drastic. There's nothing in the text that supports this.

Understandably, Charlie's parents are very upset about this. Well, first of all, how can he possibly donate money that is not his? Clearly he has no concept of how the world actually works. They work out every possible way to undo what he's done, trying to piece to get their connections to get him into these colleges after all (they are successful). They even threaten to cut him off completely if he goes to community college. (I had a major issue with the fact that "community college" is treated like a dirty word by the parents. Some people have no choice but to go to community college, you know?) So Charlie calls them hypocrites for wanting the word to be more diverse but not wanting their own son to do these things that he believes would help diversity (in the end, it probably wouldn't.) Are they hypocrites? I am not sure. How can we make things better for everyone else and still protect our best interests? Harmon doesn't answer this question. Maybe there isn't an answer yet.

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