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Oleanna

by David Mamet
review in San Francisco Weekly August 12, 1998 (Michael Scott Moore)

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Teacher’s Pet

Oleanna. By David Mamet. Directed by Cindy Ann
Sicchio and Roger Michael McNall. Starring Lawrence
Radecker and Danielle Kerley. At the Exit Theater, 156
Eddy (at Mason), through Aug. 22. Call 673-3847.

David Mamet likes to deal in babble. He’s done street babble,
business babble, the babble of academic politics; and this last
category is the language of Oleanna, his 1992 play about a
professor accused by a female student of sexual harassment
and rape. It may be the worst example of his taste for broken
sentences. The first act is like a Mamet parody, with the
arrogant, distracted professor -- “John” -- leaning back in his
office chair, trying to be profound to a student who can’t make
sense of his book. The phone keeps ringing because John is
buying a house. Carol, the student, sits hunched over her
notebook and feels inferior. They talk back and forth in what
might as well be different languages, never quite saying what
they mean; and the effect, at least in this production, is irritating.
Lawrence Radecker and Danielle Kerley don’t act with the
kind of energy that Mamet’s lines demand, but even with more
energy the babble would be hard to stomach.

John says a few stupid things in Act 1 that he pays for later: He
tells a joke about sex, and offers Carol an A in his course if
she’ll come to his office regularly, for special help. By Act 2
Carol has complained to the tenure committee about his
behavior, threatening John’s career; but it’s clear that in the
meantime John hasn’t followed up any of his suggestive talk
with even the mildest pass. This makes Carol’s claim
outrageous and John’s character hard to understand. Wasn’t
he thinking about sex? Or was he just being an idiot? Didn’t he
realize he was treading a line? We don’t know. John is too
incoherent in the second and third acts for us to learn. In that
sense the show is weighted on John’s side, which makes Carol
almost impossible to play, and Kerley, in fact, is stilted and
bland. Her broken lines have no conviction. “I come from a
different social -- ,” she says, and you know she means “social
class,” or “background,” or something, but the delivery makes
it sound as if Carol has just come from an ice-cream social.

Mamet did a brave thing by inflicting Oleanna on the early
’90s, which badly needed a public controversy about political
correctness on the stage. He drew the title from a folk song
that goes, “Oh, to be in Oleanna/ That’s where I’d like to be/
Than to be in Norway/ And wear the chains of slavery.” The
shifting balance of power between Carol and John shows that
Mamet was at least driving at the idea that men and women
both will lash out when they feel victimized, when they feel
“Oleanna” slipping out of reach. The problem is that Carol and
John are stick figures, relentlessly and dryly hateful, sketched
with only enough humanity for Mamet to make his point.

-- Michael Scott Moore
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