In ‘Education,’ a Fictional Protest That Pales Next to Real Ones

NEW YORK — On Wednesday, thousands of students walked out of their schools in a forceful protest calling for gun control. And on the stage at 59E59 Theaters, one high school kid, Mick, tried to burn a dollar-store American flag.

It’s an art project, Mick (Wesley T. Jones) tells his principal. It protests censorship in schools and also, maybe, defends a woman’s right to choose and supports Black Lives Matter and opposes mass incarceration and critiques big pharma and mourns the breakdown of the Democratic Party and rebukes the failing separation of church and state and shames the overuse of mayonnaise “on everything, including batter-dipped fried cheese.”

If you haven’t already guessed it, Brian Dykstra’s “Education” is not an especially focused work of theater. When you create a character who walks around with lighter fluid in his pocket, everything starts to look like tinder. What seems like a play about free speech becomes a play about family dynamics and repressive religion and budding artists and young love and probably some other stuff, too.

Mick is supported by his uncle Gordon (Matthew Boston), a liberally minded law professor, and Bekka (Jane West), Mick’s sort of girlfriend, a performance poet with an explicit vocabulary. (Neither Jones nor West is particularly plausible as a high school student.) The principal, Kirks (Bruce Faulk), might be on his side, too. “I miss that part of me. The part that believes in things,” he says. So it can be hard to locate any actual conflicts. Bekka’s Jesus-loving mom, Sandy (Elizabeth Meadows Rouse), is an overly broad target.

Mostly these characters talk over and around each other, quibbling over semantics instead of articulating ideas. A lot of the dialogue is forgettable, placeholders enabling the next poem or rant. Honestly, the speech could be less free and less discursive. Several of the actors, directed by Margarett Perry, struggled with the lines. Only the delightful Boston, whose views seem close to the playwright’s own, appeared to enjoy the language.

The words themselves wouldn’t matter so much if the play and the arguments that undergird it were more credible. Dykstra seems to suggest that any art that isn’t commercialized is of value and that we should make it in defiance of consequence. “They make stupid movies and TV with Disney glitz in place of where the art should be, in order to keep us distracted and keep us from making art happen ourselves,” Bekka insists. The production promotes the hashtag #ArtIsActivism.

But all non-Disney art — conceptual, lyrical, theatrical — is not created equal. The piece that Mick and Bekka ultimately set alight is an effigy of Jesus built from origamied dollar bills and titled “The Almighty Dollar.” Like Bekka’s performance poems, it is unsubtle in its symbolism, obvious in its provocation. There’s a word for this kind of work: juvenile. Still, the play applauds it and it applauds them.

Outside the theater, real-life teenagers are organizing behind a political movement that is coherent in its aims and persuasive in its message. I don’t think they’d recognize themselves here.

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