As a former English and drama teacher, I can say with some expertise that Season 1 of English Teacher was a humorous but accurate portrayal of what it’s like educating the youths. The second season, which is now streaming, ups the comedic stakes. Because nothing is more dramatic (and hilarious) than drama kids—except maybe their drama teacher. In this case, that’s Evan Marquez, played by the show’s creator and star Brian Jordan Alvarez.
Three minutes into the premiere, I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. Right away, the team at Morrison-Hensley High is embarking on my well-trodden ground of putting on a play with the kids. And the play English teacher Evan has chosen to put on with his intrepid students? Angels in America by Tony Kushner.
If you haven’t seen a stage production of Angels in America, you watched the 2003 HBO series, like Coach Markie Hillridge did (because he’d watch anything with Pacino in it). If you have any familiarity with Kushner’s work, you’ll know that this play is a terrible choice for a student production.
That’s not only because of the “lightning rod” issues Morrison-Hensley High’s principal brings up when the idea is floated: sexuality, religion, and “dirty words, I guess.” The play, whose full title is Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is about the 1980’s AIDS epidemic. Roy Cohn is a main character (played by Markie’s fave, Pacino, in the HBO version).
No, the Pulitzer-prize winning masterpiece isn’t a bad choice just because of its content, but because it’s incredibly long—Part One, Millennium Approaches, runs about three and a half hours, while Part Two, Perestroika, has audiences in their seats for nearly four hours. So, to watch the whole thing at a go, you’re watching a play for the length of your whole work day. Now, if you’re a huge nerd like me, that sounds great, but only when done with professional actors. I would never, ever subject any audience to eight hours of student theatre, especially since student theatre tends to have interminably long set changes, extending the runtime even more.
The principal goes on to suggest they do Seussical the Musical, which is the butt of every joke about bad plays. However, um, I totally put on Seussical with my students and it was awesome so…No, need to call me out like that, BRIAN.
Sure enough, Evan’s students aren’t “connecting with the material” and decide to write their own play, which, because of their lived experience with the subject matter, will be called Covid in America.
I don’t know that my close, personal friend, Tony and Emmy winner Tony Kushner, would approve (I met him in undergrad when he watched a 10 minute play I wrote and was nice about it and it was the best day of my life), but it’s true that these students have been traumatized and galvanized by the pandemic. Afterall, they were in middle school, which means they’re weirdos (complimentary). These are the Gen Z kids who have perfected all the slang we cheugy millennials pretend to understand, who know what’s actually woke and what’s performative, and who will steal your soul with their Gen Z stare.
The play the kids come up with is technically impressive (Brain Fog!). As Coach says, “This is as good or as bad as any play I’ve seen. I think theatre might just be this.” This episode was a perfect piece of high school drama satire, much like this Saturday Night Live skit. The “cough with me” finale was reminiscent of Rent, which also gets a call out during the episode.
As they say, “It’s funny because it’s true.” I saw so many echoes of my time as a theatre student and teacher. The kids dancing “as the virus” in the COVID play was not unlike when I cast 12 kids in The Little Mermaid to play “waves,” which is not to be confused with the four kids cast as “water” (there were silks). But, as Gwen says in the episode, “It’s this classic thing in high school to make really bad art. Like it’s sort of a right of passage.” I could get on my soapbox about the importance of arts in our schools, but, instead, let’s appreciate the Tiger King in the COVID play.
We have these super-serious shows about high school, like The Summer I Turned Pretty and Euphoria (is that still on?), and that’s not to say that back in “my day” we didn’t take ourselves far too seriously (Dawson’s Creek, anyone?). English Teacher wants us all to remember that, even in this absolutely abysmal time in our history, where education is under attack, both in terms of legislation and because of violence in schools (I can’t even begin to get into it because I will have a panic/rage attack), it’s important to find the humor, even when macabre.
Because these kids had to hang out at home during the formative social years of their lives and lived parasocially online, they came out the other side with some of the best senses of humor of any generation, Skibidi Toilet notwithstanding. The students in English Teacher are deadpan and dead-on when it comes to how young people talk to their elders. I haven’t watched a show with more realistic high schoolers since Derry Girls.
The premiere episode ends with perhaps the most apt button for this story. Evan, who so indignantly thought it was “too soon” to do a play about COVID, is found on video in a one-man play about 9/11 (that’s not really Alvarez, is it?!). Now, if we judge Evan’s age to be approximately the same as actor Alvarez’s, that would put 9/11 happening when he was (hang on, doing math, wasn’t a math teacher) 14. So, only a few years later, here we have Evan putting on what is, potentially, a play in very, very bad taste. What would Tony Kushner say? Was not Angels in America put on in 1991, only a few years after what the kid in Evan’s class called, “the AIDsies?”
I don’t know what Mr. Kushner would think, but I laughed until I cried.
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