Joe's View

A fantastic acting ensemble.
A powerful — albeit flawed — lost play from the 1970s.
That’s the combination making the Signature Theatre Company’s production of “The First Breeze of Summer” a terrific start to New York’s fall theater season.
Leslie Lee’s play about strife in an African American family living in the Philadelphia suburbs was well-received when the Negro Ensemble Company first produced it in the mid-1970s. That staging moved from off-Broadway to Broadway where it received a Tony nomination for best play.
In the subsequent four decades, however, “The First Breeze of Summer” fell off most people’s radar, as did the pioneering work of the Negro Ensemble Company. The 1960s theatre troupe dedicated to black writers and actors never officially disbanded, but lost its home many years ago.
The Signature Theatre Company’s mission is promoting the work of writers — dedicating each of its seasons to a single playwright — but this year Signature decided to focus on the NEC in an attempt to reassert the troupe’s important position in modern theater history.
“The First Breeze of Summer” has kicked off Signature’s 2008-2009 season with a bang, garnering strong reviews and packed houses at the company’s wonderfully intimate Peter Norton Space on West 42nd St.
Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has assembled an awesome 14-member ensemble that digs into Lee’s play with explosive results. “Breeze” is a messy but potent family drama that explores the truth underneath family history.
Leslie Uggams plays the beloved matriarch of the extended Edwards clan — Lucretia Edwards — who is getting ready for a family celebration in the summer of 1977. Lucretia’s past has been embelished and sanitized by her family, as we see in a series of flashbacks to her youth. “Breeze” is about the collision between the myths the elderly woman has spun about her youth in the South and the much more complicated truth.
Lee’s play deals with the rarely explored topic of the youthful sexual history of our parents, and the way that we tend to prefer not to imagine what might have gone on in our parents’ love lives before we arrived on the scene.
A young actress making her professional debut — Yaya Dacosta — plays Lucretia in the flashback sequences and matches Uggams in terms of power and depth.
It was interesting to see this angry family play in the wake of last season’s Broadway smash, “August: Osage County.” Lee stirs the domestic pot in a similar manner, but avoids the soap opera excesses of the Tracy Letts hit.
Lee arrived on the theater scene several years before the great African-American playwright August Wilson — and Lee didn’t manage to sustain his New York theater success the way that Wilson did in the 1980s and 1990s — but he is clearly a major voice in the modern American theater. Let’s hope Signature’s production results in more attention being paid to the writer — Lee’s new play “The Book of Lambert” is set to open at New York’s La MaMa E.T.C. next Feburary.
(“The First Breeze of Summer” is set to run through Oct. 19 at the Signature Theatre Company. For ticket information call 212-244-7529.)

Anisha Lakhani’s “Schooled” was the most entertaining and informative novel I read on vacation over the past two weeks.
While the cover makes the book appear to be another frothy chick lit novel, Lakhani delivers a scathing satirical glimpse into the world of the private schools attended by the children of Manhattan’s richest parents.
The mix of expose and humor reminded me of that 1960s blockbuster novel, “Up the Down Staircase,” by a New York public schoolteacher named Bel Kaufman.
Kaufman targeted the bureacracy of public schools 40 years ago in her winning tale of a new teacher struggling to cope with an assignment at a tough Manhattan school. The novel became one of the biggest best-sellers of its time and inspired a popular (albeit slightly watered down) 1967 film version starring Sandy Dennis.
“Schooled” is a gloves-off journey into a world where rich dopes cruise through schools by hiring “tutors” who actually do most of the kids’ homework and papers.
Lakhani’s initially naïve heroine Anna Taggert enters an East Side private school with dreams of being a great teacher, but quickly runs into resistance from the administration, the parents and the students, none of whom appreciate the newcomer’s idealism and determination to inspire her students.
Anna realizes her pauper’s wages will not go far in the slice of New York City in which she lives — and that her budget-minded fashions will not play in a world that combines the most shallow and materialistic aspects of “Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City.”
Anna soon gets sucked into the subculture of high-paying tutoring that afford her a new lifestyle and, ironically, greater respect from nearly everyone in the school.
Here’s the teacher’s reaction after a meeting with the agent who arranges private lessons: “I floated down Park Avenue like Peter Pan on crack. I gave the doorman a mad grin as I was leaving. He looked a little scared. Jesus H. Christ. If I did as Francine suggested and charged $200 an hour, I would be making a minimum of $600 a week. That would be $2,400 a month. That was more than my monthly teaching salary. I could eat! I could shop! I could pay my rent on time! What had just happened?…It was like the skies had opened and rained money on me.”
The teacher quickly schedules even more tutoring sessions and is able to shop at Barneys and dine at the chicest restaurants in Manhattan. Of course, Anna eventually sees the error of her ways, but not before Anisha Lakhani completes her devastatingly funny and horrifying glimpse into “education” on the Upper East Side.