NORTHBRIDGE — Molding away at his desk in a small professor’s study stacked with books and liquor, middle-aged Frank is about to have his universe shaken to the core by a sex-bomb tiger of a young woman.

Enter Rita, a 26-year-old married woman who wants more out of life than her job as a hairdresser and her marriage to an unsympathetic husband and exclusion from middle class propriety can give her.

At first the audience shares with Frank the delicious humor of this overwrought young woman with her cockney language who, when introduced to E.M. Forster, denunciates that author because in the middle of a novel Forster says he does not care about the poor.

Although that point is bathed in humor, the joke is ultimately not at Rita’s expense. For she is earnest and while everything the professor tries to teach her is a minor revelation she usually misreads, she is for real and while he is always on the edge of sending her off into the blue yonder of wherever she came from, there is that little song in his heart that keeps growing and, in “My Fair Lady,” ends with Professor Henry Hi gins humming the tune in the musical about having grown accustomed to Lila’s face.

Rita, played brilliantly by Worcester resident Aimee Kewley, is so full of energy and youth it seems a wonder she wants to change. Her British accent is more than convincing.

But her big mission in life is to become different. The key to that change, she is convinced, lies in her becoming educated, so she has taken a first step by enrolling in a course for slightly older persons who want to go back to school and try again. In England particularly, there has for long been a scandal about the way the country cuts adolescents off from further education at the age of 14. Even at 11, they have to take an exam that pretty much determines their destiny. Thus you might have seen during the last century someone in Soho selling popcorn who in the United States might have been a chairman of the board.

However, “Educating Rita,” by Englishman Willy Russell, is not a tract but a play. Matthew Carr, founder and artistic director of Pilgrim Soul Productions, plays a role that, while demanding, is a kind of foil to the overwhelming majesty of the role Kewley owns with such astonishing power.

As the play, directed by Neal Martel and produced at Alternatives’ Singh Performance Center March 5, 6, 12, 13 and 14, unfolds, if you are a middle-aged or older man, you can completely empathize with Frank, who is a little frayed about the sleeves, but a wonderfully witty and extraordinarily competent guy. If you are a woman, you can probably understand how it is that Rita’s buying a new dress is a philosophical statement, a kind of existential act, to mark a new direction after an achievement. That will be lost on just about all men.

So right away there is a battle of the sexes going on. Rita has our complete interest and sympathy. We want her to succeed in her new vocation as a student. But we share Frank’s despair that Rita will ever get it. She just has too much terrain to cross.

On the other hand, we see that Rita can break probably any mold. Her energy is unfathomable to normal people. And one can probably ascribe to Kewley much of the uniqueness that can be seen in Rita. And that is a social and moral intelligence on the highest of scales driven by the engine of a kind of native genius that comes through in her cascade of insights about life in general and in her perceptions about Frank in particular.

Gradually he comes to grasp that while she has an uphill struggle fitting her genius into the already made molds of mediocrity that constitute measurement of student performance, she is something entirely to and of herself that he sees has inherent value. And more than value.

Authenticity.

He begins to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, her sui generis essence. Of course, the jokes about Frank’s heroes put the audience on Rita’s side, for in general the public, no matter how discriminating, is probably not fond of literary critics, which Frank comes across as.

One of the rarities about Rita is her capacity to learn completely new things. For example, Frank explains that a tree falling on and killing a man is not a tragedy in the literary sense. Not the way Macbeth is a tragic figure. Because Macbeth is destined to sow the seeds of his own inevitable destruction. Frank does not get into tragedy as purgation of the spirit, something achieved by allowing the audience to experience a vicarious downfall. But the word “inevitability” does the job for Rita’s comprehension of what her tutor means by tragedy in the literary sense.

One might think Rita could then say ‘poof ’ to such a literary notion, as many Americans, and perhaps many British, would feel.

But no. She respects Frank’s knowledge. Frank never becomes the guru of Eastern religions, unshaken as the Buddha.

He is not the Dalia Lama.

For most of the first act, Frank holds his self and his imagined edge over Rita intact. But the Red Sea will part. The audience feels it and knows it.

In Rita, it is in the presence of an earthquake.

There is never a moment’s sense of stasis with her, whereas Frank is all about stasis, preserving the status quo.

Inevitably, “Educating Rita” is about youth and age; vitality and retreat; health and sickness; native intelligence versus acquired knowledge; hope and despair; labor versus aristocracy, in this case, of the mind; native and emotional genius versus taste and a repression of feelings.

Even toward the end of the play, when Frank, having fallen drunk off a dais while lecturing, is asked to leave the university for two years of recuperation, the two protagonists display opposite responses to looming change.

Perhaps the most poignant moment comes when an impassioned Rita tells Frank why she looked through the window of his house at a party she was invited to but did not go to. She told him she did not want to be a comic figure, someone people found amusing with her cockney accent and lack of intellectual know-how. She let him know she was in dead earnest about becoming a new person, one who could command the respect both of the middle class and of intellectuals like, for example, Frank on his terms.

At one point, Kewley recalls Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady,” when she has mastered, she thinks, the language of the upper crust, only to yell an unpardonable word in Victorian society at a horse race.

Kewley as Rita sits bolt upright in a chair near Frank and recites a litany of aristocratic English.

It drives Frank crazy. This is not what he ever wanted. He compares himself to Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein.

It is of course to Frank’s great credit that he indeed not only prefers, but demands, the reappearance of the original, real Rita.

As the play unwinds, Frank ends one scene by pronouncing a word the way Rita would have.

In another scene, he acknowledges reading and enjoying one of the trashy romance novels that used to be the fare of his pupil. Meanwhile, Rita stands before the audienceand recites William Blake’s masterpiece:

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.


Later, she returns from a summer school full of literary courses and without meaning to obviously makes Frank jealous of the teacher who inspired his pupil to stand before the audience quoting Hamlet: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Once Frank sees a new horizon he becomes a babe in arms as to how to proceed. Once Rita scans a new horizon she licks her chops over the headiness of having the power to choose. That, after all, is what she sees her education as leading her to.

For him, education is a fait accompli. He does not convey what uses it has, other than that it is a somewhat cooled spark that has animated him over the years. There is, with Rita, a sexuality about to explode versus Frank’s hanging onto the edge of the raft in deep waters.

So the play is also an exploration of intergenerational ambience.

Sometimes the British Labor Party peeks through it all. As a hairdresser, Rita is conscientious while Frank as a professor has to dig deep to rediscover his onetime dedication to his profession. Rita is somehow clearheaded even as she swirls emotions around like a hurricane.

Frank’s self-delusion progresses in a way that is regressive to the point he gains Rita’s deepest admiration for poems he has written, then tells Rita the poems are worthless junk and he tears them up. She feverishly tries to put some of the scraps back together, but this Humpty Dumpty cannot be restored.

Perhaps on another level that represents the white male’s acceptance of more youthful values. But the irony here is that Rita has come to value Frank’s soul as it is eternally meant to be. In the end, whether Rita accepts Frank’s invitation to go off together to Australia seems playfully irrelevant.

The soul work has already been done for each of them.