Word: carolling
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John (Michael Davidson '00) is a professor, the kind who revels in assigning his own books. He takes for granted that all his words are both clear and correct. Unfortunately, they are neither of these things to Carol (Jessica Kaye '00), a student who has come to John's office to save herself from failing...
...meeting, to be sure, is less than successful. Carol has come for purely selfish reasons: "I want to know about my grade. Is that bad?" John continues speaking for a different selfish reason: to hear himself talk. But is that all he really wants? His off-color language and an attempted pat on the shoulder have convinced Carol by Act Two that she was the victim of sexual manipulation. John, to her mind, has demanded her submission to his specious, inflated academic authority...
...boldest power plays in Oleanna are those that the script plays against its own characters. In the first act, Carol's whiny narrowness is hopelessly outmatched by John's self-assurance. Davidson deftly expressed John's arrogance, reading the line "I love you, too," spoken to his wife over the phone, not as a response to her own affection but as a pompous self-affirmation. "I love myself first," he implicitly states, "and I also love you." Kaye, for her part, squeezed a few unlikely laughs out of Carol's anxious despair in the face of confounding verbiage like...
...turns the tables, though, to be as imbalanced in her favor as Act One is in his, and in this respect, Mamet's writing seems forced. Why can Carol suddenly attack John through the words of his own book which, in the previous act, she said she couldn't understand...
...reason for Oleanna's troubles was that Altman did not seem to have pushed her actors very much. Davidson and Kaye had learned their lines but were not living as their characters. At one crucial point in Act Three, Carol challenges John, "Do you hold yourself innocent of the charge of sexual exploitativeness?" Kaye bellowed the words with ardor, but as Davidson answered, her face and body went totally slack: her fists emptied, her brow unfurrowed, her posture slumped. She seemed to miss that rage exists in Carol's being, not in her words. The desperation, the wounded fury that...