Teacher-as-rehabilitator-of-troubled-youth is well-worn dramatic territory. Toss in a horse barn as the classroom, as William Mastrosimone does in “Tamer of Horses,” and you might think you’re heading into “Equus” territory as well.
But the horses remain offstage presences in Mastrosimone’s story, which he first wrote in 1985 and revised earlier this year for a production in New Jersey. It’s now in a sturdy and highly watchable staging with Teatro Vista under Ron OJ Parson’s direction. The title refers to the sobriquet for Hector, the Trojan warrior, but the real Trojan horse here is a different Hector — a gang member on the run from a juvenile detention center who holes up in the stable of Ty and Georgiane.
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As luck would have it, Latino Hector has stumbled into perhaps the only barn in rural New Jersey owned by a woman who grew up in the projects and a man who spent his own years in foster care and lost a brother to the streets and to prison life.
Ty (Juan Francisco Villa) and Georgiane (Sari Sanchez) are also both teachers at a private school, though Ty is on a break, disenchanted with trying to make bored, rich students love the classics as much as he does.
When the real Hector (an incendiary Joshua Torrez) shows interest in hearing the story of his namesake in “The Iliad,” Ty believes he can help the illiterate and angry kid choose a different path than the one that consumed his own brother.
He’s only about half-right. Thankfully, Mastrosimone doesn’t indulge in “Pygmalion” fantasies about overcoming a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a few days of lessons.
In the original production, Ty and Georgiane were black and Hector was white. Here, the racial and ethnic components feel muted, though Georgiane’s street cred as a survivor of the projects seems to resonate with Hector, who, in a bit of heavy-handed symbolism, survived a late-term abortion. (He runs off from Georgiane’s kind ministrations early in the first act, only to return when wild dogs — part of what Georgiane describes as “unwanted litters” — chase him through the woods.)
There are some interludes here that have more than a whiff of falseness or puzzlement. Ty derides his school’s curriculum for choosing Kerouac over Milton, for example, but he is beguiled by Hector’s ability to rap — surely a form of poetry that owes more to the Beats than to the author of “Paradise Lost.” And I wasn’t ever fully convinced that Ty and Georgiane would risk so much for the sake of this sullen kid.
But when Mastrosimone’s script, Parson’s take-no-prisoners direction and the actors’ go-for-broke performances all line up, it’s thrilling. Torrez in particular nails Hector’s paradoxical blend of vulnerability and utter inability to fully empathize with the people in front of him, even as he claims that the story of Trojan Hector’s death “shanked” him.
A scene where he demonstrates to Ty just how easy it is to pick a “suit” to mug quickly moves from funny to near-horrifying.
Sanchez’s Georgiane generally holds her own against the boys here, making it believable that Hector would try to act more “gentlemanly” around her.
Villa, who has explored his own family’s dark criminal history in his solo “Empanada for a Dream,” smoothly segues into playing a middle-aged man of reserve and half-buried resentments. But Torrez is the whirling storm at the center of this story, and what he kicks up on Brian Sidney Bembridge’s rough-planked set leaves a grim taste in the mouth.
3 STARS
When: Through Dec. 14
Where: Richard Christiansen Theater at the Victory Gardens Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Tickets: $25-$30 at 773-871-3000 or teatrovista.org