Word: oleanna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
...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...
...doesn't discourage frivolous or irrational complaints. As Mansfield pointed out, the booklet as currently written constitutes "a veritable incitement to make a mountain out of a mole-hill." While only the most desperate or evil students would take advantage of this fact (along with students who have watched Oleanna too much), the brochure offers those who feel they've been treated unfairly a way of getting back at their professor. "Tell Someone" should be renamed. My nomination: "Tell Someone Lies, Tell Them Sweet Little Lies...