Word: oleanna
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...