"And Miles To Go" Has Miles To Go

Disadvantaged students. A disheartened administration. A disintegrated infrastructure. In Chad Beckim's AND MILES TO GO, Adele Priam has seen the very best and worst in her 40 years as a teacher in the classroom of a New York City public school. As the Board of Education considers shuttering the school, this teacher and her community will forever be changed. A play about the frailty of life, the legacy we leave, and our broken education system.

Devika Bhise, with Randy Danson

"And Miles To Go" sounds like a very promising play, but it falls short of that very promise.

In the show’s opening monologue, Adele Priam (Randy Danson), coming upon her 40th anniversary of teaching at the school, issues a juddering jeremiad about the intractability of the institution’s problems and the futility of putting “a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

Then the tone shifts jarringly, the first of what will ultimately be two major mood swings in Mr. Beckim’s herky-jerky script.

If the first act was “Dangerous Minds,” the second is “Breakfast Club,” mostly populated by mouthy, unsupervised teenagers unusually inclined to disrobe on school property and break into locked closets.

Reference: Sounds Like a Haven for Troubled Students. It’s Not.

Writer Catherine Rampell gives away that second major mood swing.  So if you plan to watch the play, and don't want to know what happened in that third act, then hold off on reading her article which I reference above.  But below are the films and the poem she alludes to:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost