Date: Fri 10-Nov-1995

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Illustration: C

Location: A-13

Quick Words:

D'ART-Oleanna-Mamet-theatre

Full Text:

(rev of Oleanna , D'ART Theatre production)

D'ART Stages An Aggravating Mamet

(theatre review)

(with photo)

By Julie Stern

DANBURY - The radio soundtrack which sets the stage for D'ART's current

production of David M amet's Oleanna is a melange of sound bites mixing

reports of a campus rape, the Senate hearings on Bob Packwood, the OJ Simpson

trial, and a violent FBI Swat Team raid ordered on a Wisconsin commune called

Oleanna in the mistaken belief the Norwegian religious sect was a paramilitary

militia group building up an arms supply ("No weapons found.")

I guess this was meant to suggest the twin themes of the pervasiveness of

sexual abuse and the arrogant misuse of power, as an introduction to the Mamet

drama about a confrontation between a confident male professor and a timid

female undergraduate.

Personally (and sadly), I think there is more thematic relevance in the

tendency on the part of religious extremists to demonize anyone who disagrees

with their views and their agenda, leading to the kind of paranoid killing

that took place in Isreal last weekend by a young fanatic who asserted he was

carrying out the will of God, who disapproved of peace treaties with the

Arabs.

Peace treaties require negotiation, dialogue and communication. Mamet, who is

known for his realistic rapid-fire non-conversations, is a master of dialogue

without communication. His characters stumble, repeat themselves, bluster,

trail off into unfinished sentences and invariably fail to listen to what the

other person is saying, all because each one is so absorbed in his own train

or thought.

At his best, as in Speed The Plow or Sexual Perversity in Chicago , crackling

with profanity and outrageous riffs, Mamet is very funny in his sardonic

send-ups of modern cultural mores and delusions. In Oleanna , however, which

is relentlessly un funny, the lack of communication is just plain aggravating.

John is a professor who has published his first book and has just been

recommended for tenure, on the strength of which he and his wife have just

contracted to buy a house in a good neighborhood near an excellent school for

their young son.

Carol is the student who comes to his office to seek clarification of the low

grade she received on her paper, and who, in the course of the play, becomes

increasingly assertive and aggressive, bringing charges of sexual misconduct

that ultimately cause him to lose his job.

Some people have claimed this is an example of the "Rashomon" genre, in which

the truth changes depending on the perception of the participants and it is up

to the audience to figure out the truth of what actually happened. Personally,

I think Mamet is heaping scorn on the academic establishment and the feminist

movement alike, skewering both with equal contempt.

John fancies himself a revolutionary maverick who attacks the establishment

with refreshing honesty. In fact, he is the kind of smug pedant who enjoys

preening before an audience of students in self-congratulatory poses,

confounding them with the news that the existing educational system is

hopelessly rigid and dogmatic and only he is in a position to liberate their

minds by forcing them to think independently.

Carol, who compulsively scribbles down every word he says into a voluminous

notebook, keeps saying "I don't understand." She seems an example of the

totally concrete mind who cannot grasp metaphor, irony or abstraction of any

kind. Since John has been trained in philosophy, he persists in trying to

explain his points in a discursively analytic manner, using the ornate

rhetoric of 19th Century humanists - language which goes entirely over her

head, as it does with many modern students.

But Carol is a duplicitous young woman. We see her slyly observing John as he

is absorbed in a telephone call. She understands him and his vanities far

better than her posture of flustered confusion lets on. If John had any sense,

by the seventeenth time she exclaims "I'm stupid! I don't understand what

you're saying!", he would send her packing to the university counselling

office.

Instead, he is tempted by the challenge to his skills as a communicator.

Because he imagines himself such a dedicated teacher, he will play Socrates to

this young lump and make an intellectual out of her by demonstrating his

flexibility and willingness to acknowledge her grievances. When she whines

that a low grade may ruin her life by keeping her out of graduate school, he

makes a sweeping gesture of promising her an A for the course if she will only

listen and let him explain.

When she complains about his abstract examples, he resorts to a clear sexual

reference to make his point; when she accuses the faculty in general of being

remote and inaccessible, he leaves his desk and sits next to her on the couch;

and when she cries out that she is stupid and bad, he puts a comforting arm

around her shoulders.

In the spirit of discourse, he does not want her to leave the room until he

has succeeded in teaching her the content of his course. When he tries to

restrain her, she screams. End of Act One.

In Act Two, they are again in John's private office. This time, he tries to

dissuade her from bringing formal sexual harassment charges to the tenure

committee, but now the formerly inarticulate Carol is speaking in the rhetoric

of militancy. Referring to "my group" who is supporting her, she sees herself

as striking a blow for all powerless people, against the white males like

himself, who sit with the power to make decisions and give grades and so

control the lives of those weak and helpless members of the underclass, whose

whole economic future depends on academic success.

When he demands to know what he has done to deserve these charges, she

announces, "You said things like `have a good day '; you said `my, don't you

look fetching,' you said `you girls come over here,' that amounts to rape!"

By the third act, the nature of the power struggle has become even clearer, as

Carol stands triumphant in the knowledge she has destroyed his career and his

life, and then offers him, on behalf of "her group," an outrageous deal

whereby she would agree to retract all the charges if he will accede to their

list of demands.

"Now you know what it feels like to be students - and women," she tells him,

"subject to the arbitrary power of someone else, and so you are angry."

"I understand ."

When John picks up a coat rack at this point and clobbers her, using some

unprintable sexist language, some people have taken it to be a vindication of

Carol's contention that John was an exploitive sexist pig all along. I just

think it was well deserved (although I wouldn't have voted to grant him tenure

either).

The play was acted by Adam Vignola and Dawn Box, and directed by Michele

Russell-Slavinsky. I hope she didn't mean it to be a serious revelation of the

abuses of the patriarchy. As a woman, I would find that presumption

embarrassing.

The set design, by Leif Smith and the Lazy Masons, was outstanding.