Review: ‘Oleanna’ explores the idea of emotional safety,
by Wei-Huan Chen July 27, 2018
David Mamet’s “Oleanna” debuted in 1992, one year after the Anita Hill hearings, six years before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and 25 years before the era of #MeToo. Look at us now. Look at how everything, and nothing, has changed.
Back in 1992, the country was embroiled in the “culture wars,” a partisan, country-wide debate over topics such as abortion, homosexuality, the Confederate flag and gun violence. “Political correctness” was by then a household term, often wielded by the conservative right to describe how liberals and intellectuals advanced self-victimization and affirmative action and policed our everyday English in the name of sensitivity.
Twenty-five years later, the Landing Theatre stages “Oleanna,” starring Marty Blair and Skyler Sinclair, at 14 Pews through Aug. 11, at a time when the same culture wars have cycled back into existence. Blair plays a university professor, John, who talks and sweats like he’s a dude in a Mamet play. Sinclair plays the less-well-written Carol, an undergraduate seeking academic help.
After Carol claims she’s too stupid to understand the material, John cheers her up and says she’s not. He says he “likes” her and will help her with her grades if she promises to come back to his office. She doesn’t think it will help, and breaks down, close to tears. John places a hand on her back.
In act two, Carol, it turns out, has written up the previous events into a damning report of sexual harassment, which threatens John’s tenure. The audience sees that she’s twisted the events of act one into something that, read out of context, sounds worse than it was. Here is Mamet’s critique of PC culture via a portrait of a woman who utilizes the image of victimhood to take down an honest, if gruff, man.
But “Oleanna” isn’t partisan. Authorial opinion — from a right-wing, straight, white, male 70-year-old — feels elusive. John doesn’t get off easy. He’s annoying, masculine, condescending, hot-tempered and, depending on the actor’s performance, a bit of a creep. The play functions not as a statement but rather as a mirror to the audience’s personal views, possibly riling men and women in different ways, just as it did in 1992.
After all, look at how the New York Times review of the original production sounds now. Of Mamet, theater critic Frank Rich said, “one (cannot) glibly reject his argument against fanatics like Carol who would warp the crusade against sexism, or any other worthy cause, into a reckless new McCarthyism that abridges freedom of speech and silences dissent.”
Statements like these are less about “Oleanna” and more about what the speaker thinks about such issues. The Landing Theatre’s production, for instance, starts out feeling almost opposite to Rich’s interpretation, more in line with a feminist “Get Out” than a right-wing attack on #MeToo. Sinclair crosses her arms, a universal sign of self-guardedness. She moves a little away when the man huffing in front of her leans in her direction. Director Sophia Watt gives us signs of Carol’s discomfort, aided by scenic designer Afsaneh Aayani’s seeming-benign yet ultimately-claustrophobic office.
John is not purely a villain. Blair is exceptional here. He plays him as Woody Allen-esque, with prim gesticulations that suggest a man obsessed with himself and his ideas. As sweat trickles from his sideburn to his cheek, you wonder what makes him sweat.
Here is where the production says something that the play never did, honing in on the idea of emotional safety. It asks us, through Sinclair’s body language, whether the definition of safety should be defined by the perpetrator or the victim. “It’s not for you to say,” Carol tells John, calling him a “yapping little fool.” By act three, John’s shirt is untucked and vest-less, while Carol sports a sweater over her previous outfit (Krystal Marie Uchem is keen on character transformation with her costume design).
The costume change suggests a shift in power, which today would feel cathartic, except the script fights back. Mamet’s writing feels forced here, placing Carol in a room and giving her words that don’t seem honest or natural. Yet it’s precisely his ambivalence toward sexual harassment that makes “Oleanna” more complex than a traditional issue play.
A better, more modernized script about sexual harassment would have, perhaps, a little sense of satire or irony, or at least introduce more thought-provoking ideas about where the line is drawn. Carol appears to cross a line in her “crusade” that today doesn’t seem so unreasonable. John crosses a line that everyone would agree is bad behavior, but what about all the other actions that led to it? By having the benign actions lead to something terrible, the audience is given a pass. We don’t need to judge the microaggressions on their own terms.
Mamet, in the end, fails to be truly self-conscious of the failings of powerful “smart” men. Watt almost wrangles a newfound sense of sincerity out of the script, however, while Sinclair wrestles with a character that’s never given the respect she deserves. The result is a strange bird of a production, a 25-year-old take on sexual harassment that has aged strangely but not altogether terribly. “Oleanna” is more of a social experiment than a statement of any sort. It would be a necessary ticket purchase if we weren’t already bombarded with similar stories in real life.