The publicity picture featured for Open Admissions in The New York Times on January 30 is a work of art. The scene it depicts would warm the heart of any teacher. In front of a blackboard an attractive young woman is bending over a youth, reading to him. The woman is white, the youth is black; neither is looking at the other because each, captivated by the book she holds between them, is focusing on some point far out on the horizon of imagination—that line we sometimes glimpse between what we already know and what we have only just fathomed there is left to learn. The young man’s mouth is slightly open as though in dawning wonder and the teacher, leaning a little forward with pedagogical urgency, holds one hand slightly aloft, thumb and forefinger together, as though to catch the precise meaning of the glorious lines she reads—or no! Not “reads,” because she is not looking at the heavy volume balanced in her outstretched hand. Whatever the student is hearing, it is something the teacher knows so well that it is engraved on her heart.

Publicity stills, as a rule, are unenlightening. Cluttered, blurry and obscure, they tend to leave the newspaper reader at a loss to make out what is happening in the photo, let alone in the play being reviewed alongside. This photograph from Open Admissions was different. So fine was the detail and so eloquent the composition that (multum in parvo) it