Word: oleanna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...equal care animating all of these (and other) characters, regardless of their time on stage. She places Angels in America where it belongs: in a complete moral universe of heroic risks, mutable ethics and terrible punishments. Altman's most recent directing project, last spring's revival of Mamet's Oleanna, was a wobbly production that tried to let its controversial subject matter speak for itself; it didn't. Here, however, she shows a sureness of perspective that recalls that other Altman, Robert, the filmmaker behind the human panoramas of Short Cuts and Nashville, and whose name has, in fact, long...
...most unrealistic of all the characters. She rants about gardens and masochistic mutilation, but her lines are written in such a convoluted and start-and-stop manner that she is the hardest to understand. Add to that Pidgeon's stiff and formal delivery style reminiscent of Carol in Oleanna. But ultimately she could be nothing but a direct projection of Bobby's warped view of her as the ex-wife...
...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...
This 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...
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...