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It wouldn’t be surprising if a three-decade-old play exploring a specific social issue dated poorly. People don’t change that much, but mores, standards and expectations do, sometimes rapidly.
On the other hand, an artwork from the past can serve as a kind of prism through which to view those changing attitudes.
David Mamet’s play “Oleanna” revolves around a young woman’s claim that her college professor sexually abused her during a meeting in his office. It premiered in 1992, shortly after the explosive U.S. Senate hearings at which a lawyer named Anita Hill testified that her former boss, then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, had sexually harassed her.
Today, several years after the #MeToo movement potently highlighted just how ubiquitous sexual abuse is, the drama is back on a Pittsburgh stage.
“I think the play has really found its time,” says Kinetic Theatre Company founder Andrew Paul.
Back when it premiered, “Oleanna” was argued about as contentiously as any stage play might be, with audiences vociferous in their support, or denunciation, of one character or the other. Is John a well-meaning if somewhat windy educator, or is he exploiting his power over his student? Is Carol an innocent victim seeking justice, or is she deliberately misinterpreting John’s words and actions to her own ends?
In 1992, Mamet was near his peak as a key figure of post-war English-language theater, known for his distinctive spiky dialogue in plays like “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross”; his rep only grew with the release that very year of the latter’s film adaptation, now a cult classic.
Many who today wince at the mention of “Oleanna” (which got its own big-screen adaptation) are probably influenced in part by changes in Mamet’s own politics. The playwright surely alienated many with his 2008 Village Voice essay “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” These days, he’s an occasional Fox News culture wars commentator who writes essays for the British news site UnHerd with titles like “How the Democrats Betrayed the Jews” and “The Naked Persecution of Donald Trump.”
Mamet has also characterized diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as “fascist totalitarianism.”
Still, we’re left — if we care to be — with “Oleanna” itself. Kinetic isn’t the only company to stage it lately. British director Lucy Bailey led an acclaimed 2020 revival at the Theatre Royal Bath, and in 2021 she directed a production that ran for months at London’s Arts theater. Florida Rep just wrapped a new staging in May.
Kinetic’s production, directed by Paul, opened last week at the Rauh Studio Theatre, in the Cathedral of Learning. The play’s lone characters — John (played by veteran actor David Whalen) and Carol (Brooklyn-based 2019 Point Park grad Mei Lu Barnum) — square off in three short acts over 75 intense minutes.
John is on the verge of getting tenure and is distracted with trying to buy a new house. Carol is doing poorly in his class and has come seeking a better grade.
The first act is full of ironic foreshadowing and, if you’re looking for it, all the evidence Carol will marshal against John.
But while the play’s basic dynamic is the sudden power shift between the two, from professor to student, it’s notable how much Mamet flays academia itself. John is high-handed and uses words like “heterodoxy,” while Carol (in Act 1, at least) is at sea, baffled at having done all the note-taking, reading and studying her professor asked and yet still foundering.
John, it seems, teaches the subject of education itself. But he is deeply skeptical of higher ed, calling it “something other than useful” and characterizing tests as “garbage.”
All this seeming cynicism offends Carol deeply. She enrolled in college to ensure a path to success in life. “You have no idea what it cost us to come to this school,” she tells John.
All this too informs her transformation between the first and second acts, from an insecure young woman to someone confident and even scornful of her nominal mentor.
Barnum says she was “a little terrified” by the play’s history of some audience members villainizing Carol. “It’s always nerve-wracking to take on a role where you assume people won’t like her by the end of it,” she says.
Ultimately, Barnum says, she found the role too “meaty” to pass up. She says her challenge was to convey Carol’s humanity in a play that’s about more than who’s right and who’s wrong.
“She’s someone who has grown up seeing she has to be part of a system that she sees as broken,” says Barnum. She adds that the play also explores how people of diverse generations communicate differently.
For what it’s worth, Mamet, in a wide-ranging 2022 interview in American Theatre magazine, described “Oleanna” this way: “It’s a tragedy. You have two protagonists involved, each one of them acting from what they consider the best possible motives, and they end up destroying each other.”
“Oleanna” receives nine more performances through Sun., July 28.
