Tynan's Anger

For better or for worse, David Mamet is the most important American playwright of the past 30 years. He's the only playwright who, at this point in time, can draw a national audience to the stage. By that I mean he can be talked about on Entertainment Tonight in a purely theatrical context.

That's the audience the producers of the Broadway premiere of Oleanna are catering to in a deeply cynical, almost reprehensible revival. This >Oleanna seems less an attempt to expose one of the most important plays of the last quarter century to a Broadway audience, and more like a production meant to play to the lowest common denominator of Mamet stereotypes. In the process, director Doug Hughes reduces the play's exceedingly complex ethical, pedagogical, and political themes to a series of stereotypes about the cultural wars, feminism, postmodernism, and Mamet himself.

Of all of Mamet's plays, Oleanna is his most controversial and his most historically significant. Not only was the play of the first to expose the darker side of the postmodern breakdown of academic absolutism.  Oleanna is also an essential text of the political correctness era, which earned Mamet as many accusations of misogyny as it did heroism. To a modern audience, the play no doubt favors the case of the falsely accused professor John. In 1992, after the Anita Hill trial, it was the first play to address academic issues on a directly personal and political level. Audiences cheered during its initial run at Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theater, much to the aghast of academics raised on women's lib.

All that controversy obscures the fact that Oleanna may be the best play David Mamet has ever written. It is the only play that combined Mamet's trademark use of capitalist manipulation with a deeply personal display of devastating emotional weight. Oleanna is tragedy of the breakdown of the sanctity of the line between teacher and student, but one that, in a nod to its era, removes all the catharsis that normally comes with tragedy.

The script of Oleanna features a sudden reversal the second and third scene, where the traditional role of John the gruff teacher and Carol the troubled student suddenly turns into a game of deception, when Carol takes advantage of the politics and institutional policy of academia when John cannot provide her the pedagogical help she needs. In his performance in the play's initial run and subsequent 1994 film, William H. Macy cemented his reputation as the master of the sad sack. In the original production, Macy reached point over the course of Oleanna, starting off as a smug, classically condescending professor, who after being wrongfully accused, completely breaks down into the violent monster Carol had claimed he was outside the office.

In Hughes' Oleanna, conversely Bill Pullman is sad sack from the start, without any condescension. Pullman, no doubt a charming lighthearted actor in his film roles, has a difficult time playing drama with a straight face. His John seems pathetic immature, and easy to manipulate from the start. Pullman's performance essentially takes out all the shock of the play's second half. Mamet's script thrives on exploring the grey areas in sexual harassment, and leaves much room open for interpreting John's guilt. Yet, Pullman's John doesn't just lean towards the innocent; his performance is so simplistic that it's almost farcical in all the wrong ways.

Meanwhile, Julia Stiles, a Mamet veteran who has had an up-and-down film career, is a natural as the manipulative contemporary femme fatale, using her studiousness rather than her attractiveness as her chief weapon of exploitation. The only problem is that Stiles is too good at playing Carol's manipulative side, and inconsistent at best at displaying any sign of Carol's humanity.

In the larger, Hughes has staged an exceedingly cold, uninspiring production of Oleanna. He uses a highly technological set design by Neil Patel, an increasingly annoying trend on Broadway, that really has no place in an otherwise stodgy professor's office. He also directs Pullman and Stiles's speech patterns to the most ridiculously extreme stereotypes of Mametspeak, sacrificing any naturalism in the process.

Because production plays to the extreme end of John's innocence and Carol's evil, don't be surprised if the production receives the same uncomfortable cheers it received in 1992. The difference, however, is how the debates on political correctness have changed in since 1992. After the Naomi Wolf, Kobe Bryant, and Duke Lacrosse case, the concerns false rape accusations is now a almost the dominant mainstream viewpoint. There's also a growing backlash to those cases that is in many ways much scarier than any false accusation.

Audience views on this production of Oleanna will no doubt be tied to their views on sexual assault allegations. It will be sure to expose some uncomfortable reactions from the audience members, which is a product of the play's continuing vitality. Regardless of where you stand however, renting the movie will ultimately be a more satisfying outcome than paying Broadway prices for this production.

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Oleanna is being performed at The Golden Theatre (252 West 45th Street).

Tickets are now available for purchase through visiting www.telecharge.com or by calling (212) 239-6200.  Tickets range from $116.50 to $76.50.  The performance schedule for OLEANNA will be Tuesday at 7PM, Wednesday through Saturday at 8PM, with matinees Wednesday and Saturday at 2PM and Sunday at 3PM.

Photo by Craig Schwartz