Fascism isn't funny but it offers huge targets for satire.
The premise is familiar: an eager novice takes up a new calling, infused with idealism, and finds that not only is the actual day-to-day work grueling but the authorities are self-serving, hypocritical and exploitative.
Dead White Males is a valentine to those teacher-victims and a savage attack on administrators of educational systems. The Sustainable Theatre Project stretches a bit by linking the play to recent battles over the Texas education curriculum, but that wouldn't bother the likely audience in Austin for this staging. In fact, the company gave the intro an Alamo Drafthouse feel by running news clips and cartoons for the twenty minutes or so before the start of the live action.
Downs sets the tone from the very first moments, with a trio of evaluators sitting in on one of the first classes of tender, earnest Janet, a newly recruited teacher. Janet (Molly Fonseca) struggles to maintain discipline in the class from hell as the administrators interrupt her with impossible, smarmy instructions and corrections. Our villains are a useless Ph.Ed named Dr. Ozzy Mandias (flashing neon sign here! cf. Shelley's poem of the same name about the statue of an ancient, vanished mighty king), a sycophantic "master teacher" Woods (Beth Burroughs) and non-committal Principal Pettlogg (Dennis Kelleher Bailey). The lesson is a fiasco, mostly because poor Janet never gets the opportunity to present it.
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