It has been 27 years since Dead Poets Society taught youngsters to stand on their desks and declaim a line or two of Whitman. Its barbaric yawp has now returned in the Classic Stage version, adapted by the screenwriter Tom Schulman and directed by John Doyle. Jason Sudeikis takes on the role of the captivating English teacher John Keating, a part made famous by Robin Williams. Sudeikis is superb – earnest and impish – but in the intervening decades, the substance of the piece now seems cheaply sentimental at best and morally suspect at worst.
The story is a something like the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but with less sex and fascism. In 1959, at an elite New England boarding school, six callow young men fall under the sway of Keating, a pedagogue less concerned with teaching them to tell a sonnet with a sestina and more concerned with how to live. Suck the marrow. Gather rosebuds. Be the captain of your soul. His influence on the boys and the club they form in homage upsets the hidebound headmaster.
Perhaps that sounds like a fine story. Certainly, a preview audience received the play enthusiastically, which probably owed to Scott Pask’s handsome set, Doyle’s judicious direction and Sudeikis’s performance. His Keating is playful, serious-minded and immensely sympathetic. He also looks splendid in tweed.
But Keating’s ideology is not without its problems and the play’s argument for difference while erasing the experience of anyone who isn’t a middle- or upper-class man doesn’t sit well. There is one female character, but she is valued only for her beauty and barely speaks. That makes sense as language is apparently the provenance of men. “Why do we have language?” Keating asks. The answer: “To woo women!”
What is the play’s attitude to language? In this political moment, when there is such need for critical thinking rather than a wholesale acceptance of slogans, Dead Poets Society favors the indiscriminate embrace of poetry rather than searching analysis. And if one of the great uses of literature is the opportunity it affords for empathy with those unlike us, these young men are never encouraged to understand a poem in any way other than what it might mean to a more or less wealthy straight white man.
The poets they read are also all white men, with any hint of queerness elided. The theatrical version is savvy enough to excise a scene in which society members declaim Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race as they stomp around a fire, but it’s still only themselves they celebrate and sing.
Do straight white men need liberation, too? Sure. But Dead Poets Society doesn’t even offer that. Keating is an intensely charismatic figure and so the boys are merely taught to replace the ideals of a conformist system with those of a nonconformist one. Independent thought never really manifests.
Seize the day? Why not. Seize the ticket? Not so much.
