Seen from the perspective of the play’s protagonist, a middle-aged professor named John, David Mamet’s Oleanna is a nightmarish tale; John’s fervent and earnest attempts to educate and connect with Carol, his failing undergraduate student, backfire when she files a sexual harassment complaint with the tenure committee.  Suddenly, everything in John’s life is in danger of evaporating: his job, the house he’s about to buy, his reputation, and the respect and admiration of his young son.  All because of his innocuous efforts to educate his student.

Or are his actions so innocuous?  Is there something insidious and condescending about his offers to ‘help’ Carol?  Is it hypocritical of John to openly mock academic conventions in his course while simultaneously employing them?   Does Carol have a point about John’s patriarchal pomposity, or is she just using her newly discovered power to express pent-up anger unrelated to John’s actions?  

These are the questions that Mamet pursues with great dramatic craftiness in Oleanna, making it arguably the most powerful and intelligent of his works. The play is most exciting when both sides of the argument are presented with credibility; a successful production of this classically structured tragedy should have audience members rooting for John to persevere as they understand, simultaneously, that Carol’s arguments have merit.

Director Doug Hughes takes an even hand in this compelling production, and both characters come off sympathetically.  Bill Pullman’s John is appropriately agitated and concerned; he shows the professor as trying desperately throughout Act One to make up for his callous criticism of Carol’s writing.  His face betrays a trying effort to both repress and articulate his feelings and ideas in a clear and professorial manner.

Julia Stiles’ portrayal of the notoriously difficult role of Carol is also impressive. The actress finds some tender notes of humanity in Carol that I had not previously seen hit, but this is the third time I’ve seen Oleanna performed (including the film version and a production at Chicago’s Stage Left Theater), and I’ve never seen anyone really nail the part of Carol.  Stiles gives it an excellent go here, but her depiction of the plaintive student doesn’t have enough of a back-story.  The character claims at the beginning of the play to come from a lower socio-economic class, but this fact is in no way accounted for in Stiles’s performance.   It ends up being difficult to reconcile the leap she makes from not understanding the word ‘paradigm’ in the first act to sounding like a Rhodes Scholar in the second and third acts.

The production’s set is an enormous university office with windows that look out onto a woody, picturesque campus that is interestingly only visible between sets.  Once the action is about to begin, large metal blinds slowly cover the windows, blocking out the campus scenery with a loud continuous screech, evocative of a piece of heavy machinery that needs to be fixed.

The production also suffers from too much movement on the stage; the actors circle around each other incessantly, creating a tension that doesn’t help develop what’s happening between the two characters.  At one point, Carol moves behind John’s desk in what seems to be a too-obvious bit of metaphorical blocking.

In the show’s final moment, John is pushed not merely to violence, but to sadism, as if to show how low a person will go when oppressed by a relentless power structure.  The climax in this production is upsetting not because we care so much about John’s fate, but because the violence seemed sad and preventable.

Despite the fogginess of Hughes’ vision, this is a competent production of Mamet’s extraordinary play.

David Mamet’s Oleanna, Directed by Doug Hughes at the John Golden Theater on Broadway, starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles.