Black Forest

At an elite women's college in Massachusetts, two minor crises emerge during the fall semester: the philandering head of the English Department decides to callously end his affair with a colleague, and an aging professor is caught making unwanted sexual advances toward a student. But in the academic world of the early 21st century, there is no such thing as a minor crisis. For Jacob Freundlich, an English professor approaching middle age, the sudden necessity of making moral choices, rather than just teaching books about them, leads him into a devastating midlife crisis of his own. A comedy about the necessity, and the exquisite pain, of making choices. "Honest, intelligent...the play's dialogue has the exactly right academic-faculty sound to it; clearly, Giardina knows of what he writes." Variety "A class act...a play well worth auditing... Giardina balances his banter about the great writers with penetrating looks into the lives of the male teachers." Hartford Courant "In BLACK FOREST...the playwright Anthony Giardina says volumes about changes between the '50s and the present ... Attitudes toward transitions in educational, social and sexual attitude inform Mr Giardina's new play..." Alvin Klein, The New York Times "Edgy and biting and funny." Chronicle of Higher Education