Victimizations

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

OPEN ADMISSIONS by Shirley Lauro

Calvin Jefferson is a black college student with a B average, reading skills arrested at the fifth-grade level and an anguished, angry awareness that the false hopes raised in him by the educational policy from which this play takes its title are lies. Ginny Carlsen is a white college teacher reduced to showing students how to project an educated image for personnel directors, but prevented from providing substantial learning to sustain their careers or their lives. Playwright Shirley Lauro also has a second meaning in mind for her title, as she crudely but forcefully maneuvers her principal characters toward open admissions of their mutual victimization.

That confrontation constituted the sum total of Lauro's one-act play produced off Broadway in 1981; one can see why she was encouraged to develop it to full length for Broadway. Calvin and Ginny may be symbolic representations, but they are also potent characters in their own right. The student's basic gentleness makes his rage, when it surfaces, all the more terrible to behold. The teacher's harassed decency makes the brisk cheer with which she tries to sell deceit to her self and her students the more poignant.

In these emotionally rich roles, Calvin Levels and Marilyn Rockafellow, under Elinor Renfield's forcefully realistic, behaviorally sensitive direction, are at once strong and subtle. They are so good, in fact, that they point up the superficiality of the out-of-school lives the playwright has concocted for them. They seem to have been plucked out of sociology texts rather than absorbed from life, expanding the play's length without usefully expanding our understanding of its people. Nonetheless, the heart of the play is sound, and its beat is worth listening to.