Pluto Was a Planet

In a recent essay in The American Scholar titled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” a former Yale professor called into question the values of the Ivy League and other elite universities, suggesting they’re more interested in creating a regimented, homogeneous upper class of networked professionals than in challenging minds.

Yale alum Jacqmin has Ivy League reservations of her own, judging from her tightly wound new play about a Skull and Bones–like open-secret society at an unnamed elite school. Each of the play’s four students—two seniors, Cecilia and Abe, charged with initiating juniors Eugene and Sabrina—questions his or her place there for varying reasons. But it’s the initiation challenge issued by the anonymous “inquisitor” that sets the play on edge: Eugene and Sabrina must tape themselves having sex.

Jacqmin uses this tense setup to explore uncomfortable truths about the way race and class play out in top-tier schools and about the increasingly treacherous topic of sex in the “hookup” age. Happily, though, her characters are more than mouthpieces; they’re multifaceted, sympathetic young adults embodied by a dead-on cast. As for Pluto, the titular dilemma is an appropriate one for these kids who’ve made it into the elite but have no idea if their positions are at all secure: The onetime planet was a big deal until somebody decided to change the rules.