So, as you may have already gathered from the headlines, there is big money in higher education. You can bet that university administrators and board members have been reviewing policies and procedures from top to bottom after the recent cheating scandal that brokered influence, fraud and cash in exchange for a prestigious degree. Any one of those headlines could have emanated from the fictitious New Hampshire town in Theater Wit’s “Admissions,” where the Hillcrest Prep Boarding School produces high-quality candidates for the nation’s top schools. Sherri Rosen-Mason (Meighan Gerachis), the prep school’s by-the-numbers head of admissions, knows all sides of the equation. She is on a multi-year quest to improve student-body diversity, which in turn benefits her husband Bill (Stephen Walker), the school headmaster. In the meantime, their idealistic son Charlie (Curry) has multiple college applications pending. One application is to Yale, where his buddy, Perry, the product of a biracial marriage, has also applied.
The Mason’s upper middle-class home is rocked when Perry’s mother Ginnie (India Whiteside) receives a phone call saying that Perry has been accepted to Yale. When no similar call comes for Sherri, things start to implode as both Sherri and Bill face the prospect that Charlie’s academic future is in jeopardy. When Charlie returns and recounts his anger and humiliation at cultural bias and the unfairness of an admissions system that favored Perry, his parents are conflicted, which, in turn, allows Charlie to make a radical decision of his own.
