Faculty Room, The

It's unlikely any role model teachers with even a slight resemblance to Mr. Chips, Miss Dove or Miss Brooks could stay the course at Madison-Feurey High School, the setting for Bridget Carpenter's The Faculty Room, the third entrant in this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville. The teachers stuck in this ugly small mid-America suburb -- "a burnt-out strip mall with a few side streets," as one describes it -- get through the school year by viewing their work with cynical detachment, needling each other, and bemoaning intellectual inadequacies of students caught up in excited contemplation of "The Rapture" that's supposed to lift them to Heaven, and recoiling from aggressively Christian parents who look on the school as free day care. Burned out, the teachers regress to rebellious juvenile behavior as they drink, smoke, curse and use drugs (sold to them by students) in their between-classes haven.

This sounds pretty grim (and let it be said that real life teachers, while recognizing some underlying truths, would not be inclined to identify too closely with the playwright's creations) but Carpenter's smart, sharp dialogue provides crackling good entertainment, and the laughs come easily until the shocking ending that's plucked straight from headlines about school shootings and student-planned violence. Zoe (Rebecca Wisocky), teacher of speech and drama, Adam (Michael Laurence), the English teacher, and Carver (Greg McFadden), who teaches world history, are most often found in the faculty room. Sometimes the ethics teacher named Bill (William McNulty) wanders through in a speechless haze. And at play's end, a student (John Catron) penetrates the inner sanctum.

There are frequent, heartily inane announcements over the p.a. system from the unseen Principal Dennis (Colin McPhillamy) ,a jocular sit-com character who doesn't like to leave his office. His two-way device allows the clueless administrator to eavesdrop on teachers. Zoe and Adam, surprisingly, were Madison-Feurey graduates who came back to the school as teachers. Even more surprising, they were once married. Adam hasn't stopped loving her but Zoe is unmoved. They taunt each other by talking about which students they've chosen as girlfriends or boyfriends. Carver is a new teacher, idealistic and eager to make a difference, but he left his previous post at a big-city school under mysterious circumstances that Adam, jealous of Carver's growing friendship with Zoe, uncovers.