MAINSTAGE  Buy Tickets Now! Download the Educator Resource Kit     "Winning an Oxford scholarship, Alan Bennett spent the '50's preparing for a career as a medieval historian, until his addiction to appearing on stage culminated in a legendary collaboration with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller, in Beyond the Fringe (1960)." - MICHAEL BROOKE, BIOGRAPHER     The History Boys, winner of an astonishing (and record breaking) 6 Tony Awards, uses staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence to provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it. In it you see two dueling professors at an English prep school fighting for the hearts, minds, and exam results of a group of boisterous and whip-smart high school boys. This comic school drama uses musical numbers, scholarly debates, and the acting-out of vintage movie scenes to counterpoint moments of shocking emotional nakedness. Through it all, Bennett creates a compelling debate about the nature of history and the purpose of education that will radically redefine the way you look at the world... and everything that ever happened in it.     The boys in the play perform dazzling feats of poetry, spouting lines from poets like Auden and Owen and sparking one of the great debates of the play - what's the purpose of literature in education?         Sponsored By: Bob & Janet Conklin