Word: carolling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...production values, at least, were clever in Oleanna. John's messy desk from Act One was rearranged into careful piles for Act Two, when he tries to maintain order against Carol's charges By Act Three, the desk was a mess again defeated like its owner...
...line buried toward the end of Act Three, John tells Carol, "And now I owe you a debt." That line is essentially John's death knell: an admission of obligation, of defeat at the hands of a student, explodes his entire notion of self. Davidson missed the line completely and others like it that show us who John is or might have been. Instead, he favored the longer speeches, merely growing louder as the play hurtled forward. With no real foundation on which to base his portrayal, he reduced an intricate part to a pathetic boor...
...lack of coloring in his delivery also made John relentlessly predictable, robbing him of the sneaky sexual danger that he must have for Oleanna to work. John is written to resemble a basic solution, bitter and slippery. To present him so broadly robs him of the charisma that even Carol concedes he possesses. She has, after all, taken two semesters of his classes, so she must have had some reason for coming back...
...when the actors had their moments, they really had them. The physical grappling that ends Act II crackled onstage with John's frantic self-doubt scraping against Carol's assaulted dignity. Kaye's daringly quiet, remarkably pointed reading of Carol's plea "Will somebody please help me?" cast a perfect pall over a notoriously uneasy intermission...
Truth be told, either actor would be good in a less psychological, less subtle production than Oleanna, which needs all the extra subtlety it can get. The play fails at being, in Carol's terms, "not [about] my feelings, but the feelings of women, and men." Mamet himself stacks the deck too unevenly and too erratically for that. This play can only work when focused around the feelings of this one woman and this one man, but amidst all the yelling, the pushing and the politics, Oleanna lost even its human emotional core...