Did Critics Give School of the Americas a Passing Grade?

Che Guevara is everywhere: The deceased revolutionary is the star of movies, T-shirts and, of course, the London revival of Evita. Now he's on the New York stage in Jose Rivera's School of the Americas, a co-production of the LAByrinth Theater Company and Public Theater that opened July 6 at the Public. Did critics feel educated about the late Guevara portrayed by John Ortiz after attending this School?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "School of the Americas comes to praise, not to bury this Latin American Brutus; offering neither a bracing revisionist corrective to the T-shirt-wearing 'cult of Che' nor a particularly stirring call to arms for the faithful, Rivera's play mostly burnishes the legend. Even the indignity of Che's final quarters—the bare, dusty schoolroom evoked with rough-edged acuity by scenic designer Andromache Chalfant—acquires the distinct glow of a martyr's manger. The play subtly exalts Che's selfless struggle unto the end rather than counting its squalor as abject defeat."

Jason Zinoman of The New York Times: "Mr. Rivera deserves credit for trying to humanize a mythic figure, but he ends up making Che smaller than life. He's so ordinary that you might find yourself wondering what all the fuss was about… Like Copenhagen and Stuff Happens, this drama uses historical fact as a frame to pose intriguing questions about what might have happened. The director Mark Wing-Davey and his designers have done their part, nicely invoking the loneliness and dusty environs of a ramshackle Bolivian town. But what Mr. Rivera comes up with is a fairly banal, undramatic romance."

David Rooney of Variety: "The play is an awkward mix of political screed, melodrama and intrusive experimental touches. Mark Wing-Davey's production never fully succeeds in bringing the iconic face on the T-shirt to life as a human being. A charismatic actor capable of breathing nuance and compassion into even stubbornly remote roles… John Ortiz is inhibited here by a drama that carves out a human angle yet remains bogged down in didacticism."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "The legend of Che Guevara takes more than a few dramatic lumps in School of the Americas, an inert reimagining of the Cuban revolutionary's last days… [Rivera's] Guevara is hardly a charismatic figure, particularly in John Ortiz's deliberately low-key impersonation. Ortiz, co-artistic director of LAByrinth, deflates the man's magnetic personality, turning him into a true believer who has lost his way. As Julia, Patricia Velasquez is suitably feisty and one would like to know more about her character's life."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "What the late revolutionary [Che Guevera] had not been until now, however, is a bore. School of the Americas, which the LAByrinth Theater Company opened last night at the co-producing Public Theater, is a hokey and heavily rhetorical imagining of the last two days of Che's life… [Ortiz] makes a big, matted, egomaniacal bear of a Che with warm eyes and a tendency to pontificate as if he doesn't quite remember the meaning of the words."