Life lessons Those Who Can, Do has a lot of class BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Oh, what a tangled web those ad-meisters weave — for them as well as for us — whenever they practice to deceive. At least that’s what Brighde Mullins’s Those Who Can, Do would have us believe. The production at Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theatre (July 28 and 30) pummels us with that message like a hammer-on-anvil Anacin commercial.

Multi-degreed Ivy Leaguer Ann Marie Burke (Crystal Finn) is tired of churning out ad copy on Madison Avenue for big bucks. She wants to do something more meaningful with her life, such as teach inner-city kids literature and thereby unencumbering her conscience enough to let poems pop out of her imagination instead of jingles.

However, she’s peremptorily informed that she doesn’t have the education credits to qualify for teaching kids, that she’d better settle for college students. So Staten Island Community College it is. Ninety students are thrown at her in three classes. She has to bluff through media analysis and restudy Paradise Lost in order to teach them, but she’s in her glory — the plum class of 20th-century women’s poetry is hers for the asking.

Be careful what you wish for. Education on this occasion being a consumer enterprise, customers must be indulged and kept around at all costs. Abusive and even threatening language, Ann Marie finds, is actually free speech. Plagiarism, even when a student doesn’t bother to change the mixed type fonts from an online cut and paste, is really creative appropriation.

Into her class storms a mad, aspiring poetess with all the fury but none of the charm or skill of Sylvia Plath. Celia (Robin Galloway), who apparently has never left a thought unexpressed, interrupts her lectures with a bellowing voice and manner that would make poetry slam champs sound timid. That is, when she’s not noisily wolfing down taco salads like a water buffalo in the bush.

Complaining to the English department chair, Marion (Jessie Austrian), does no good. Celia has been a millstone around the collective neck of the faculty for 17 years, and now it’s Ann Marie’s turn to sink or swim. Celia started taking classes in the ’80s, when mental institutions were releasing patients into the streets with a bottle of meds in their hands.

The central irony here is that the do-gooder assistant professor, who left advertising because she felt she was losing her soul, is far less prepared to be a poet (shorthand for being sensitive to life) than is a madwoman. Of course, since we’re not in the age of a Thomas Szasz deifying schizophrenia as preternatural wisdom, Celia is just some loopy lady, however much we might feel for her. Yet she really is the more complicated and interesting person, given the more urgent tensions roiling within her. But while we might give her the audience award as the most compelling character here, this play is not, in fact, her story.

The acting is first-rate all-around, especially Galloway’s managing to not go over the top with a character who is incapable of even recognizing extreme excess. The actor does this the old-fashioned way: by inhabiting a mentality, making it her own. As Ann Marie, Finn is convincing, merging altruism and self-centeredness into one plausible person. Austrian is delightful as the department chair, playing her as cheerfully oblivious more than scheming in manipulating the young teacher.

Under the direction of Laura Kepley, the tone in every scene is fine-tuned to precise purpose. For example, the early encounter when Ann Marie is told she isn’t qualified to teach children is snapped with whip-crack abruptness by a no-nonsense bureaucrat (Darius Pierce).

A central weakness is that the play charts a moral failure but treats it like an inevitability. Focusing this tale on the extreme case of one misfit makes Ann Marie’s experience anomalous rather than representative. Our sympathy for the disillusionment of a yuppie idealist is strained when, by the end, she has given up on helping all the struggling lower-class students she say she admires, not just the stray psychotic. Nevertheless, the interplay of these characters is fascinating to watch as they hurtle about, striking sparks at every clash.