William Mastrosimone's reputation as a playwright is based in bunker-dramas premised on a few people in a small space exploring a single underlying question until its possibilities are exhausted. The thesis for this three-handed exercise—premiering in 1985 and twice revised since—is a variation on the homily "there's no such thing as a bad boy" and its forum, a barn and kitchen in rural New Jersey, where dwell prep-school professors Ty and Georgiane Fletcher. Setting the plot of Tamer of Horses in motion is the invasion of this pastoral setting by a teenage runaway named Hector St. Vincent—his surname a vestige of the charity hospital where he was born.
By endowing his personnel with intriguing backstories, Mastrosimone ascertains their investment in the outcome of the ensuing debate: Ty and Georgiane grew up in the projects. Ty and his brother were orphaned in a fire, the latter afterward turning to crime and dying in prison. Ty's classic-lit course has been cancelled for the semester, leaving him to pursue his hobby of refinishing furniture. Georgiane continues to encourage his academic aspirations, even as her own career thrives. Hector's childhood has been a succession of foster homes and "wolf-pack" robberies landing him in a juvenile reformatory from which he has recently escaped.
Given so many intertwined agendas, can the path of conflict be anything but tangled? Perceiving in Hector (and his mythological namesake) an opportunity to test the redemptive powers of education—and perhaps to atone for the wasted life of his sibling—Ty offers the disaffected youth shelter, along with literacy tutoring, trade skills and life lessons. Hector reluctantly agrees to this plan, leading to such showy classroom exercises as Homer's “Iliad” translated into street slang (with our rapper-wannabe calling foul on Achilles' acceptance of divine intervention) and instruction in pulling off a proficient mugging, all expressed in the kind of subtext-heavy dialogue actors savor like the pies that are Georgiane's reward for good behavior.
So does Hector abandon his feral imperative or has he been flimflamming his idealistic hosts all along? Since director Ron OJ Parson's target audience is school groups, his hopes are pinned on our declaring Ty's experiment a success, but the number of rewrites imposed on Mastrosimone's script, while making for a satisfying emotional catharsis, render its denouement as abrupt as it is ambivalent. What is certain, however, is that the cast assembled for this Teatro Vista production delivers intense performances steeped in conviction to command the attention of playgoers willing to temporarily suspend their cynicism.
