Oleanna is an unforgiving theatrical treatise on sexual politics in a world constricted by political correctness. Julia Stiles (of so much more than 10 Things I Hate About You) plays Carol, a self-ascribed intelligent woman who for reasons other than potential is failing at university. Bill Pullman (who really should return to the screen as the leading man he undeniably is) plays John, the affable if oft distracted teacher of the class Carol is struggling to grasp. Pullman and Stiles are remarkable as John and Carol, two characters shaded in grey, with Pullman’s John significantly lighter than Stiles’ dark portrayal of Carol.
The play charts three meetings between John and Carol in John’s office over the course of a semester. But just what is a meeting? Language is wielded as an uncompromising tool by Mamet, and so in turn by Carol, so that one questions when a meeting is merely an appointment, or something more, perhaps an assignation or a tryst.
The first meeting sees Carol make a vulnerably impromptu appearance in John’s office to ostensibly discuss her academic troubles. Perhaps it’s John’s liberal white guilt, or his good mood at being listed for tenure, his distraction at purchasing a new family home, or perhaps he’s simply overcome with a pedagogical impulse to indulge in the Socratic mode of teaching, whatever his motives John injudiciously offers Carol an “A” if she attends six one-on-one tutorial sessions. Here marks John’s Fall.
The second meeting reveals Carol’s allegations of sexual harassment against John, his words recorded literally and without context are twisted until fully ensnaring. I failed to see the lecherous overtures in Pullman’s immensely likable John that Carol (and her cohort) perceive. Which is of course Mamet’s point – the power of words without meaning and the impotence of political correctness will blindside the best (and the worst) of us.
Carol is an interesting character, scripted with an ambiguity much like Shakespeare’s Portia. Portia’s courtroom triumph can be played as a moment of spontaneous legal brilliance or, perhaps more compellingly, as a calculated exercise in manipulating the law to suits one’s needs. Similarly, Carol can be played to either knowingly set out to ruin her university professor from their first fraught mid-semester consultation or she can be gradually swept away by a cause not of her making, used and abandoned just like John.
By the play’s end, gone is the Carol whose thoughts raced too quickly for her to articulate, whose stilted, half-started sentences hung limply in conversation with John. Here stands Carol, backed by an unnamed group, who knows the new state of play. I get the feeling that should Carol follow in Portia’s footsteps she’d be a black letter lawyer of the strictest kind.
“What a cold hearted bitch,” my theatre going companion and others commented after the actors took their bows and left the stage. Which is a fair assessment of Stile’s 2009 Carol. I do wonder whether Stiles was softer, more sympathetic, in her 2004 turn at the Garrick Theatre opposite Aaron Eckhart’s John. Slightly older, more knowing, more nuanced, and opposite Pullman’s well meaning John, there was an unexpected cruelty to Stiles’ current interpretation.
The crescendo of the play is reminiscent of Stanley and Blanche’s infamous tussle in A Streetcar Named Desire: “Tiger, tiger… we’ve had this date from the beginning.” By the final crashing scene you get the distinct feeling John and Carol were always doomed to their own pre-destined date.
PM: 8.5/10
Oleanna by David Mamet, d. Doug Hughes, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 12 June 2009
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