Word: oleanna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When actors become singers, the results can be as painful to experience as a dental appointment with a meat packer who moonlights as an orthodontist. Actress Rebecca Pidgeon (who starred in the plays Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna off-Broadway) has released her first U.S. album, The Raven. Her husband David Mamet (who is the author of the plays Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna) wrote or co- wrote lyrics to five of the CD's songs with her. All of this suggests an unlistenable vanity project...
Selma, a big Paul Rudnick fan who has seen Jeffrey three times -- "Is that more than David Mamet's mother saw Oleanna, do you suppose?" -- recalls that her son was a clever child. "But he was not the Paul we see today," she says, "because parents don't really see that. A parent is always trying to get a child to do what he doesn't want to do. And Paul's response to this was, 'No, I won't clean up my room.' At the time, I didn't find that particularly witty...
...Oleanna...
...fiercely funny and trenchantly topical plays by three of the nation's leading dramatists. But if the theater seemed reborn with relevance last week -- thanks to Larry Kramer's poignant gay Bildungsroman, The Destiny of Me, David Mamet's lapel-grabbing vision of political correctness cum intellectual terrorism in Oleanna and Wendy Wasserstein's drawing-room comedy with claws, The Sisters Rosensweig -- Broadway was not part of the buzz. For reasons ranging from finances to the tyranny of reviews, the producers of all three chose to open off-Broadway. Artistically, the week couldn't have been much richer. Economically...
...Mamet's Oleanna sets up an innocent-looking encounter between a baffled and seemingly despondent college student (played by Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) and a haughty and fashionably iconoclastic professor (William H. Macy). His office remarks to her, lashed to a Procrustean bed of rhetorical propriety, wildly and perhaps willfully misinterpreted, become her basis for bringing formal disciplinary charges. He is accused of everything from sexual harassment to disrespect for the learning process. But his worst crime in her eyes is the "elitism" of daring to think that having something to impart makes him more important than those...