Last Saturday, I saw Office Hour at Berkeley Rep (it runs through 3/25).
Office Hour is about a writing teacher who tries to reach a student so disturbed that other teachers are afraid he’ll shoot up the school.
Guns and gunshots are involved.
I was with Melissa, another writing teacher, and Marcus, a teacher at a middle school, where three students have been expelled in the last two weeks for threatening to kill their teachers and peers.
In other words, it’s timely.
The script is by Julia Cho (I’d seen another play, Aubergine, by her before). Lisa Peterson directs.
It was thought provoking, provoking-provoking (a woman seated behind us gasped loudly several times), and very well done overall.
There were a few things that bugged me, though–that have been bugging me since I left the theatre.
One is that one of the teachers complains about intellectual freedom. In the play, intellectual freedom is presented as something that restricts the teachers from telling a disturbed student that he can’t write about violent rape and murder in a way that is triggering the other students.
Teachers can tell students what they’re allowed to write about for an assignment. Intellectual freedom protects teachers–we can bring in the works we want, make the assignments we want for a class, even if some of the students don’t like them.
In other words, teachers don’t complain about intellectual freedom.
The second issue we had was with a particular moment. A teacher is afraid of a student–concerned that he may be a shooter. He goes to leave her office. She yells at him that he has to stay.
Um, what?
I can’t imagine anyone yelling at a student to stay in an office hour. Much less one you’re afraid of. When you’re alone.
There’s also a new character added in the last few minutes–confusingly & distractedly.
Finally, the two main characters of Cho’s script are Asian-American. At one point, another character says one character should be able to “reach” the other because they share that race. The audience cringed. But later, it seemed to be true. So what was the message?
Berkeley Rep is a great theatre–I have season tickets.
I do recommend this play. I’m still thinking about it, after all.
