Stage Notes: Sophistry

Sophistry is a revival of a well-received, off-Broadway comedy done in 1993, written by Jonathan Marc Sherman and directed by James Warwick. Set at an American college, Sophistry begins when a male professor is accused of seducing a male student. The play takes us from there to the hearing, to the disgraced professor's dismissal, and to the cover-up that follows. The word “sophistry," from the ancient Greek, originally referred to a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric, but it came to apply to a person who was clever at proving a point, and not necessarily imparting the truth. I spoke with the playwright.

Well Jonathan, you must be able to see some differences in college life from when the play was first done.
What amazed me was how quickly it became a period piece. For one, college in the early ‘90s was pre-Internet and pre-cell phones. And it’s a play about a moment when colleges were just starting to figure out what “sexual harassment" was. How was it pronounced? What it meant? Now a decade and a half later, the superficial things are different, but people are still trying to figure those questions out.

There are certainly enough lawsuits around.
At heart it’s a play about sexual confusion, and how subjective sexual experience is. And that hasn’t seemed to change a bit. People seem to be just as confused about all that stuff as I was when I was in college, or when my parents were in college. That’s a universal place of confusion for young people.

Tell me about the characters. I understand there are eight in the cast.
Essentially, the characters are a college professor, the college president, and six students -- four males and 2 females.

In almost all of these sexual harassment cases, it’s two people in a “he said, she said” situation.
The things I was most interested in were, how can you be present for an event and there can be two different sides to the situation, and both of them plausible. That is the overriding thing that got me interested in writing it.

Could you elaborate a little on that?
Colleges are hot-beds for this stuff, because someone can tell a story about sex and then you hear another person tell the story, and both sound real, and maybe the details are the same, but the crux of the story is different. And, this might be the case even if you could see the event.

How does this work in the play?
There are two primary events. One we never see and one where we do see exactly what happened. In the first act, we hear the professor tell his side of the story to a friend, and then we hear the student tell his story to a college committee, and we see both stories enacted from each person’s point of view. Then in the second act there’s an event between two students. We see it, and later we hear them tell their own versions to their friends, about something we’ve just seen.

So it’s like how eye witnesses to a crime often tell different stories.
Yes, the eye and the mind can really play tricks on us, and knowing that, how do we navigate through the world? Especially the four years of college, which you experience when you are trying to figure out who you are sexually.

Samuel Beckett Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., (212) 279-4200. Previews Apr. 22, opens May 5-June 6. Tues., 7 p.m.; Wed.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m. Sun., 3 p.m. $47.50.