Word: oleanna
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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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...