Educating Rita by Willy Russell will play at 7:30 PM on Thursday through Saturday for the next two weekends at Cite Des Arts, located at the corner of 3rd and Vine in downtown Lafayette.
The play concerns a young, working class woman from Liverpool who wants to get an education and the burned out writer who becomes her tutor. It is a version of My Fair Lady and like the musical, it ends with the female protagonist transformed from a girl to a woman, confident in herself and able to participate in a broader and richer world. The play is hardly a slog, though. The characters are witty and there are plenty of laughs resulting from digs at elitist and anti-elitist snobbery.
Educating Rita is a worthwhile theatre piece for two themes. One is that education is worth having in its own right and worth effort and sacrifice to attain it. And the second, equally important theme, is that education is not the same as training. Rita is not truly educated when she can knows the meanings and uses of literary theory. She becomes educated when she understands that these terms are the tools for creating art which is worth the reader's time and effort and which repays that effor with a deeper understanding of the world and the human condition. She becomes educated when she learns to recognize that the point of culture is not to know WHAT but rather to know WHY.
See Educating Rita to enjoy a fine production and to remind yourself that education and culture exist to make us happier and more resilient.
---Walter Brown
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