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.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less