Oleanna
Mamet’s play about harassment, sexual or otherwise, has a well traveled past having premiered Off-Broadway in 1992. Since then, Oleanna has become a familiar offering at schools and colleges across America for what Mamet achieved was an actor’s tour de force: an opportunity to exhibit balance of acting prowess in a play about the balance of power. Now, almost 18 years after its premiere, the issues Mamet brings to the surface in Oleanna, seem dated and the seams of his work can feel threadbare. However, the warring factions are evenly conceived, which explains the enduring popularity of the play
The outcome shifts depending upon the strength of personality and charisma of one side or the other, and each team of actors attempting it seems to find its own precarious balance.
So, how does the Taper’s version add up? Let’s start with what kind of a play Oleanna is. It is a small play; by which I mean that it tells its polemical story without the aid of a vast complement of characters to explain the central idea. Instead two actors are asked to fill the stage with the power of their presences alone.
The Taper presents a stage picture consisting of a bank of windows structured horizontally along the back wall, along which there is a very neat bookshelf. Against this expanse stands a lone, sparsely populated desk and another chair meant for visitors. The setting exudes an almost antiseptic purity. At the beginning of the play, the blinds are lowered ponderously, slowly and irrevocably. The mechanism that guides them grinds and whirrs out of all proportion to their lowering. It feels as if the audience has become imprisoned for the duration, forced to watch “the shades of justice grind slowly” to conclusion.
When the lights come up, we find two actors, Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles, posed artistically in this vast expanse. They have been presented with the challenge of filling it up simply by their histrionic abilities. Mamet has stacked the deck by making his female student, Carol (Stiles), an angry radical feminist whom, in act one, unashamedly lays the trap that the professor, John (Pullman), walks into willingly. Act two turns the screw a notch as Carol’s notes become a formal complaint, and again, in act three, an indictment. The balance of power shifts with the willing participation of Pullman’s character, striving as he does, to pull himself out of quicksand, only to sink deeper with each protestation until he can only react with violence.
Director Doug Hughes can be credited with unstacking Mamet’s deck, coaxing his actors into an evenly balanced dialectic. He seeks to draw the audience from the perception of unlimited space that the set design (by Neil Patel) provides, gradually coercing it in every tightening circles of attention to the explosive conclusion. In his interpretation, the opposing forces trade power until Carol’s final line that remains, even here, an enigma.
Bill Pullman is an unparalleled actor who nevertheless has a hard time making us believe there is actually someone at the other end of his interminable phone calls. Julia Stiles brings Carol to life with an exacting attention to detail that allows the material, rather than invective, to indict her. Ultimately, their performances are skilled, well choreographed and precise; even the violence is carefully crafted with fight direction provided by Rick Sordelet. What’s missing, at least for me, is a messy sense of outrage.
Still, this is a handsome production, with the imprisoning blinds, back lit by Donald Holder, providing editorial comment, and dressing by Catherine Zuber bringing us back into the not-so-distant end of the twentieth century.
Oleanna continues at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 North Grand Ave., Los Angeles, on Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8:00 pm; Saturday matinees at 2:30 pm; and Sundays at 1:00 pm and 6:30 pm through July 12th. Tickets range from $20.00 to 65.00. Phone Audience Services at (213) 628-2772 or online at www.CenterTheatreGroup.org.