Word: oleanna
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...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...