The slouched shoulders, the lank hair that swoops across the eyebrows, the suspicious, ever-present stare. Kyle Curry shows all the high-school student signifiers in his consuming performance as Raymond, the student with a bit of a chip on his shoulder in Stephen Massicotte’s Ten Questions…, which received its world premiere production at Next Act Theatre lastweekend.
But when Kyle’s animus breaks through his aloof teen façade, it isn’t because he’s cracked the 17th level in Halo: Spartan Strike or scored some good weed. His passions are biblical, and the “ten questions” he has for his biology teacher go far beyond “Will this be on the test?”
They are, in fact, the mildly infamous “Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution” (which is the full title of Massicotte’s play), a list composed by Jonathan Wells, a fellow at the Discovery Institute, to challenge scientific dogma and advocate for the theory of intelligent design, a God- and Bible-centered explanation of life on earth.
Ten Questions, the play, pits the stubborn teen Raymond against biology teacher Ms. Kelly (Deborah Staples), for whom his classroom advocacy is more nuisance than world-shaking philosophical challenge. Her supervisor and acting principal, Mr. Lester (David Cescarini), is mostly no-nonsense as well—he’s trying to keep things running smoothly, and first on his list is persuading Ms. Kelly to sign her contract for next year. Things get even more complicated when Raymond’s mom (Mary MacDonald Kerr), an aggressive advocate for the Old Testament, threatens to pull him out of school.
Massicotte’s covers similar ground to Catherine Trieschmann’s How the World Began, which was staged by the Milwaukee Rep in 2013 (also staring Staples as the teacher). But while Treischmann successfully used the Creationism-Evolution debate to dig deep into the psyche of her characters, Massicotte seems more interested in strolling through the well-trod arguments against intelligent design. His characters have their mysteries, but they aren’t revealed until the play’s last minutes, and thus don’t really resonate with the push-pull between religion and science that occupies much of the drama. Instead, Raymond and his mom are given fundamentalist platitudes, which only serve to give the audience a chance to cluck and snicker (and at the Saturday afternoon performance, they did).
It’s too bad, because Raymond’s story—a sensitive and large-minded teenager trying to latch on to something true—has great promise. And you can sense hints of it in Massicotte’s play and in Curry’s excellent, searching performance. The cast supports him well. Director Shawn Douglass helps the ensemble keep the emotions low key, but the actors find the fire in the right moments. Staples, in particular, shines–subtly showing that there is something simmering beneath Ms. Kelly’s regimented concern over lesson plans and homework. The final meeting of minds between her and Raymond, in fact, is quite touching. But its satisfactions speak more to what Ten Questions… could be than what it is.
