Word: mamet
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...David Mamet's Oleanna is about many things, but above all else, it's about interpretation. Language, at least in this play, always has more than one meaning. Nothing like a "pure statement" ever exists. Oleanna is a linguistic battleground, a three-act power struggle between two characters whose points of view, sensitivities to nuance and emphases of thought are constantly...
That's a lot to pack into a brisk hour and a half, and Mamet himself cannot quite pull it off. Oleanna plays a little too fast and loose with its characters to be quite as compelling as one would like. The production of Oleanna mounted last weekend at the Loeb Ex, however, further compromised an already flawed script. In adapting a play about the complexities of meaning, director Leah Altman '99 and her cast took a fatally broad, superficial approach to their tricky material...
...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...
Davidson had trouble locating his character within the dialogue. He knew what John said, but he did not always know why, leaving the character without an arc. The concertina of pride and panic that Mamet composes for John was stripped of its subtleties. Instead, in each line, he strummed the same self-satisfied note...
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...