Word: oleanna
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What ever happened to David Mamet? It may seem an odd question to ask about a playwright who is so constantly with us. No fewer than three of his plays--American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna--have been revived on Broadway in just the past year or so. His terse, fragmented, elliptical dialogue; his rogue's gallery of hustlers, con men and losers; his twisty, shaggy-dog plots; his cynical take on the American dream--Mamet's style and themes have seeped into nearly every pore of American theater. (Non-American theater too: Martin McDonagh, whose Irish black comedies...
...turning point for Mamet's theater work, it now appears, was Oleanna, his 1992 play in which a college professor's patronizing efforts to help a female student lead to an unjust charge of sexual harassment. Though the staccato dialogue was Mametspeak at its purest, a political agenda drove the characters in a way it never had any of Mamet's previous slimy, but at least self-directed, small-time crooks or real estate sharpies...
...Oleanna seemed to grow out of the authentic passions of a particular time (just after the Clarence Thomas hearings), when sexual harassment and political correctness were ripe issues. Race, by contrast, seems like a relic of another era. The advent of Barack Obama may not have invalidated Mamet's cynical view of race relations, but it has made it seem shockingly glib and opportunistic. "This isn't about sex. It's about race," goes the exchange that brings down the curtain in one scene. "What's the difference?" Make sense of that line, and you just might be able...
...August: Osage County, his multi-award-winning family drama that stormed Broadway nearly two years ago and is now on a national tour. Chicago theater's most celebrated export, David Mamet, will be represented on Broadway with two works this fall: a revival of his 1992 drama Oleanna and a new play, about black-white tensions at a law firm, titled Race. Meanwhile, hot Chicago director David Cromer--whose moving, teacup-size revival of Our Town is a megahit downtown--will tackle the work of that quintessential New York wiseacre, Neil Simon, directing revivals of his autobiographical plays Brighton Beach...
Huff's play outshines the two other Chicago offerings that have opened so far this fall: Letts' Superior Donuts, a relatively formulaic comedy-drama about a crusty inner-city doughnut-shop owner and the black kid who comes to work for him, and Oleanna, Mamet's scathing account of a bogus sexual-harassment charge that was too polemically freighted back in 1992 and has the added disadvantage of seeming dated today. But collectively, they showcase much of what makes Chicago theater so distinct and vital. The City of Big Shoulders produces big-shouldered theater as well--thematically ambitious, emotionally juiced...