There are so many things wrong with Anthony Giardina's Dan Cody' Yacht that I don't even know where to begin.
As soon as the play began, I couldn't help but think, "no, wait, I saw this play already." It exists in the same vein as Admissions, Joshua Harmon's better written play from last season. We're once again thrown into a prestigious Massachusetts suburban high school (this time a public one) with white parents worrying about their already-privileged children's future at college and beyond.
We're immediately introduced, in an opening scene filled with so much exposition that the playwright should be embarrassed, to Kevin, a wealthy single, gay father (yeah, he's gay, just so we're clear that everything that follows does not happen because he wants to get into a woman's pants) who has a job in Finance and knows everything there is to know about Finance and making money and being successful. He knows because he wasn't very privileged when he was younger so he pulled himself up by the bootstraps, slummed at Boston College (boo hoo! he didn't get to go to Harvard like the other boys!), and made something of himself! And now he's passed this privilege onto his slacker, uninterested son Connor who doesn't feel the need to even read the books assigned to him in his English class. But we shouldn't worry about Connor because Kevin has enough money and clout to make sure Connor is headed towards the path he truly doesn't deserve.
No, we should worry about Cara, Connor's English teacher at the good school in town. Cara, who we're told makes $81,000 a year and owns a house, has an intelligent and talented daughter Angela, who, dun dun duhhhhhhhh...goes to the bad school in town because well, Cara and Angela aren't as wealthy and can't afford to live in the same school district as Kevin and Connor and their pretentious friends. (In a plot point that is introduced and doesn't really develop well enough, there is an impending vote to combine the two school districts. Kevin, of course, is against this. Can you imagine sending all of these middle-to-lower class kids to the same school as his precious Connor? We're also told that the poorer school is so terrible, out of touch, and the kids are so worthless that they'll only have a chance at...shudders...community college! Not one of them could possibly be as smart as the rich kids! They'll just bring the rich kids down!) But don't worry, Kevin is here to rescue them, and be condescending and arrogant and mansplain how money and the stock market work to poor little Cara! See, she's just a lowly ol' female teacher (teaching English, you know, not a serious subject.) Her life with Angela, no matter how content she thinks she is, is not working according to Kevin. If she listens to him, he can make her so much money that she can move to the wealthier school district and Angela can go to the better school for her senior year and go to the college of her dreams, Vassar. (Never mind how Cara is going to pay for four years of Vassar, on top of all of her other expenses.)
We have a few problems here, logistically and dramaturgically. First of all, the transcripts that are sent along with college applications typically only include your grades from the first quarter of your senior year. So, too little too late. All of the opportunity in the world wasn't going to help Angela by that point. And really, colleges don't look at where you live or went to high school. They look at grades, SAT scores, extracurriculars, your recommendation letters, your admissions essays. They won't be like, "Ah, this girl only read Exodus while this kid read Beloved. Better accept the latter." I am pretty sure the admissions department doesn't toil over every applicant's address either. And the way I understand it, they admit kids from every percentile of grades. So clearly Giardina is way way way out of touch with how colleges and their admissions processes work.
Another problem is that we don't know anything about Cara. We know she was married to a guy who basically abandoned her and Angela, and doesn't support them financially (convenient, eh?). We know she's a teacher and doesn't have a drinking problem, she just likes to drink. (She also has a working class friend named Kathy, a fellow mom at the poor high school, who is of course, loud and uncouth, because she's not rich!) But we don't know anything about her upbringing, the path she took. We just know she married the wrong guy and got pregnant! I mean, who is she, Fantine? And are we supposed to just feel like she made the wrong choices that led her to being a single English teacher? I don't know, to me she seemed to have a pretty good life. And there in lies another issue: I never felt like we were supposed to be on Cara's side. I think it was pretty clear that Kevin, for all of his pushiness and for all of the boundaries he crossed, was the one who was right. Of course, who wouldn't want to be richer? But I felt like Kevin was the author's advocate, and Cara's story is a cautionary tale for those who work hard, not smart.
I also found the whole thing to be so sexist. Cara knows next to nothing about the stock market, how money works, so of course she needs to be rescued by a man! And most unbelievably, when Cara starts to lose money on the stocks she buys, she is dumbfounded. Because she is so dumb and doesn't know that's how stocks work. C'mon, everyone knows that! Playing the stocks is akin to gambling.
And in the end, it's Angela who suffers. She has to stay in the bad high school (which, moving her out of her school and away from her friends in her senior year is selfish and cruel) and gasp! Go to a community college for two years and then maybe, just maybe, she'll get into Vassar. (In Giardina's world there are ivy leagues and there are community colleges and nothing in between apparently.) What the playwright doesn't acknowledge is what will happen to Angela after college. She's a poet, so if she's going to major in Creative Writing, what will happen to her after she graduates? Will she too become an English teacher? It doesn't really matter because the end game for these kids is the ivy league apparently. And as for Connor, with his 2.35 GPA who can't bother to read The Great Gatsby and can connect with Death of a Salesman and not Kazuo Ishigaro or Salman Rushdie (who teaches Salman Rushdie in high school!?), I told you not to worry about him. He's off to Oberlin. Just like the son in Admissions.
Giardina doesn't even scratch the surface of the politics surrounding who gets a good education and who doesn't. Race never comes into play here at all. And quite frankly, it's easy to tell people how easy it is to be successful when you're already rich and successful. Sometimes it's not easy for people to rise up from their status, and I don't think Giardina's writing understands this at all.
(On a positive note, it was nice that the production used Animal Collective music.)
As soon as the play began, I couldn't help but think, "no, wait, I saw this play already." It exists in the same vein as Admissions, Joshua Harmon's better written play from last season. We're once again thrown into a prestigious Massachusetts suburban high school (this time a public one) with white parents worrying about their already-privileged children's future at college and beyond.
We're immediately introduced, in an opening scene filled with so much exposition that the playwright should be embarrassed, to Kevin, a wealthy single, gay father (yeah, he's gay, just so we're clear that everything that follows does not happen because he wants to get into a woman's pants) who has a job in Finance and knows everything there is to know about Finance and making money and being successful. He knows because he wasn't very privileged when he was younger so he pulled himself up by the bootstraps, slummed at Boston College (boo hoo! he didn't get to go to Harvard like the other boys!), and made something of himself! And now he's passed this privilege onto his slacker, uninterested son Connor who doesn't feel the need to even read the books assigned to him in his English class. But we shouldn't worry about Connor because Kevin has enough money and clout to make sure Connor is headed towards the path he truly doesn't deserve.
No, we should worry about Cara, Connor's English teacher at the good school in town. Cara, who we're told makes $81,000 a year and owns a house, has an intelligent and talented daughter Angela, who, dun dun duhhhhhhhh...goes to the bad school in town because well, Cara and Angela aren't as wealthy and can't afford to live in the same school district as Kevin and Connor and their pretentious friends. (In a plot point that is introduced and doesn't really develop well enough, there is an impending vote to combine the two school districts. Kevin, of course, is against this. Can you imagine sending all of these middle-to-lower class kids to the same school as his precious Connor? We're also told that the poorer school is so terrible, out of touch, and the kids are so worthless that they'll only have a chance at...shudders...community college! Not one of them could possibly be as smart as the rich kids! They'll just bring the rich kids down!) But don't worry, Kevin is here to rescue them, and be condescending and arrogant and mansplain how money and the stock market work to poor little Cara! See, she's just a lowly ol' female teacher (teaching English, you know, not a serious subject.) Her life with Angela, no matter how content she thinks she is, is not working according to Kevin. If she listens to him, he can make her so much money that she can move to the wealthier school district and Angela can go to the better school for her senior year and go to the college of her dreams, Vassar. (Never mind how Cara is going to pay for four years of Vassar, on top of all of her other expenses.)
We have a few problems here, logistically and dramaturgically. First of all, the transcripts that are sent along with college applications typically only include your grades from the first quarter of your senior year. So, too little too late. All of the opportunity in the world wasn't going to help Angela by that point. And really, colleges don't look at where you live or went to high school. They look at grades, SAT scores, extracurriculars, your recommendation letters, your admissions essays. They won't be like, "Ah, this girl only read Exodus while this kid read Beloved. Better accept the latter." I am pretty sure the admissions department doesn't toil over every applicant's address either. And the way I understand it, they admit kids from every percentile of grades. So clearly Giardina is way way way out of touch with how colleges and their admissions processes work.
Another problem is that we don't know anything about Cara. We know she was married to a guy who basically abandoned her and Angela, and doesn't support them financially (convenient, eh?). We know she's a teacher and doesn't have a drinking problem, she just likes to drink. (She also has a working class friend named Kathy, a fellow mom at the poor high school, who is of course, loud and uncouth, because she's not rich!) But we don't know anything about her upbringing, the path she took. We just know she married the wrong guy and got pregnant! I mean, who is she, Fantine? And are we supposed to just feel like she made the wrong choices that led her to being a single English teacher? I don't know, to me she seemed to have a pretty good life. And there in lies another issue: I never felt like we were supposed to be on Cara's side. I think it was pretty clear that Kevin, for all of his pushiness and for all of the boundaries he crossed, was the one who was right. Of course, who wouldn't want to be richer? But I felt like Kevin was the author's advocate, and Cara's story is a cautionary tale for those who work hard, not smart.
I also found the whole thing to be so sexist. Cara knows next to nothing about the stock market, how money works, so of course she needs to be rescued by a man! And most unbelievably, when Cara starts to lose money on the stocks she buys, she is dumbfounded. Because she is so dumb and doesn't know that's how stocks work. C'mon, everyone knows that! Playing the stocks is akin to gambling.
And in the end, it's Angela who suffers. She has to stay in the bad high school (which, moving her out of her school and away from her friends in her senior year is selfish and cruel) and gasp! Go to a community college for two years and then maybe, just maybe, she'll get into Vassar. (In Giardina's world there are ivy leagues and there are community colleges and nothing in between apparently.) What the playwright doesn't acknowledge is what will happen to Angela after college. She's a poet, so if she's going to major in Creative Writing, what will happen to her after she graduates? Will she too become an English teacher? It doesn't really matter because the end game for these kids is the ivy league apparently. And as for Connor, with his 2.35 GPA who can't bother to read The Great Gatsby and can connect with Death of a Salesman and not Kazuo Ishigaro or Salman Rushdie (who teaches Salman Rushdie in high school!?), I told you not to worry about him. He's off to Oberlin. Just like the son in Admissions.
Giardina doesn't even scratch the surface of the politics surrounding who gets a good education and who doesn't. Race never comes into play here at all. And quite frankly, it's easy to tell people how easy it is to be successful when you're already rich and successful. Sometimes it's not easy for people to rise up from their status, and I don't think Giardina's writing understands this at all.
(On a positive note, it was nice that the production used Animal Collective music.)
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