‘Oleanna’ doesn’t deliver Mamet
I’ve always wanted to see “Oleanna,” the searing play by David Mamet about a professor charged with sexual harassment.
After seeing the opening-night performance at Interplayers, I still would like to see it. This production captured little of the roaring energy of Mamet’s writing.
It’s disappointing, because “Oleanna” is an audacious and thought-provoking treatise on sexual harassment.
It begins with a professor, John, meeting in his office with the young and seemingly naïve student, Carol. She alternately begs for help with her classwork and dissolves into self-pity about her stupidity.
The professor comes off as pompous and self-important, but he softens toward Carol and tries to console her. At one point, he puts a hand on her shoulder.
In the second act, we learn that Carol has gone to the faculty tenure committee and accused him of sexual harassment. He meets with her and tries to talk her out of it, a strategy that fails in spectacular fashion.
In the third act, well, things turn even uglier. When done right, the whole thing should come off as deeply unsettling.
That power is muted in this production. The biggest problem was a rushed and by-rote performance by John Henry Whitaker in the role of the professor. He recited his lines as if reading them off the script, with not nearly enough attention given to pacing or meaning.
This is an especially large problem in a Mamet play, because Mamet is a master of the chopped-off sentence, the unfinished thought, the repetitive phrase.
A typical passage in “Oleanna” goes something like this: “Look. Look. Do you see? Do you see? Do you understand? Look.”
In the hands of an actor skilled in Mamet-speak, these words can be loaded with meaning, with implication, with an imploring kind of emotion. Yet when delivered in a flat, rushed delivery, they turn into something resembling nonsense – not exactly the recipe for engrossing theater.
Piper Gunnarson, as Carol, does a much better job of loading her words and body language with emotion. She plays the innocent – then the inquisitor. Her tough-lipped zealotry and lack of pity is unnerving.
Gunnarson’s character is dominant in the second and third acts, which makes them more involving than the first act. Unfortunately, one good performance is hardly sufficient in a two-character play.
Mamet’s own cunning plan is to make the audience first feel sympathy for the woman, then for the man, then for neither. What we finally feel is an appalled shock at the polarized state of American sexual, social and academic politics. It’s the perfect vehicle for an after-theater debate about whether political correctness has run rampant.
Yet in the end “Oleanna” is about something more fundamental. It is, in essence, an unrelenting thesis on our tragic inability to communicate.
Neither John nor Carol can form a thought or finish a sentence. They cut each other off, they interrupt, they send the conversation onto wild tangents, but they never really listen.
This is deeply ironic, because each craves, above all, simple understanding. That’s why they keep repeating, “Do you see? Do you see?”
Whitaker is a professional Los Angeles actor with TV and film experience, so he’s not inexperienced. Director Karen Kalensky – who is married to Whitaker – deserves some responsibility for not forcing him to slow down, think about his timing, and deliver his words with some bite.
I suspect, however, that Interplayers simply didn’t have time to rehearse properly. The rights were not acquired until late in the production. If that’s the case, then “Oleanna” should improve as the run continues.