Word: oleanna
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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...
...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...
After an uncharacteristic side trip into social drama with 1992's Oleanna, Mamet is back in territory he walks confidently. His new work is an elliptical, fragmented 75-minute conversation among three characters who use words, words, words to disguise (and maybe salve) their spiritual isolation. The boy's father, this very night, has left with another woman, and his wife is shocked to learn that the gay friend helped hide the affair. Mamet is venturing into family drama here, but so indirectly that you would hardly know...
With "the cryptogram" Mamet is presenting his audience with a new kind of puzzle. While the play lacks the compelling intensity of his earlier works such as "Glengary, Glenross" or the amazing "Oleanna," the intellectual challenge of sifting through the dialogue to try to hear what Mamet has to say is exciting. The actors, after some initial stumbling, carry off the piece with energy and subtlety. Presumably, since Mamet is directing, they are fulfilling whatever vision he had for the piece...