Lessons Learned At Night School

   Mrs. Farnsworth is different from her fellows in a night school writing class. She wears pearls, good tweeds, a big diamond. Her raincoat is lined with blue toile de Jouy for God’s sake. And she arrived by train from Darien.

   Her classmates, well, they are more like the rest of us, which is why they are sitting in the audience. We are all in school together.   

   In this fine production of “Mrs. Farnsworth†at the Ghent Playhouse, A.R. Gurney, who taught literature at M.I.T. before playwriting full time, delivers a few lessons of his own. He skewers President George Bush the younger, and the men who put him and kept him in power, and Republicans in general.    

   Class opens with instructor and would-be author Gordon Bell (Neal Berntson), a tall, driven fellow who lights up when he discovers Mrs. Farnsworth (Johnna Murray) wants to write, from personal experience, a book about one privileged bad boy.

   When the penny drops, Bell rushes to the blackboard. “Bush,†he writes in big letters. And then “Pregnant,†“Bribery,†“Abortion.†He is afire: This book could keep the president from winning a second term.

   But life is never that easy. And writing isn’t either. Mrs. Farnsworth’s tale is shaken a little by her rich Republican husband Forrest (Tom Detwiler), who, we all learn together, is not that crazy about Bush, either. Bush, he tells us, “pretends he wasn’t one of us in the first place.â€

   And Forrest worries, too, that writing such a tale might endanger his dear wife.

   In the end, Gurney warns us not to be narrow, gullible and tribal. People are complicated.

  And so are facts.

  And so is love.  

   Still, I say a lot of pain might have been avoided if Mrs. Farnsworth had been braver, even a “traitor to her class,†and written her book.

   — Marsden Epworth

   “Mrs. Farnsworth†runs at The Ghent Playhouse through March 28. For tickets, www.ghentplayhouse.org, or call 518-392-6264.