Stage
Weales, Gerald
GENDER WARS 'OLEANNA' & 'DESDEMONA he characters in David Mamet's Oleanna have names—John and Carol—but they might as well have been called professor and student or man and woman or accused and...
...A feminist play, then, but it is primarily a literary game in which MacDonald makes comedies— farces, more like—out of the tragedies and scatters hints of other sources—some lines from Hamlet and a ghost who drags chains and cashboxes as though Hamlet's father were Jacob Marley...
...He even puts his arm around her when she seems especially upset...
...Carol's confusion about the apparent split between subject and approach becomes an excuse for him to turn avuncular, autobiographical, and preachifying...
...Although the battle is unresolved, the play remains a fascinating disquisition on power, and it is impressively performed by William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon under the direction of the author...
...He may be sincere in his attempt to help her, but his language—typically Mametian (except for the absence of obscenity) in its mixture of pretentious vocabulary and broken sentences, its stops and starts—suggests either his own omissions or a calculated effort to convince her that she and he are alike—which of course they are not...
...Carol is either a victim of that structure or a radical feminist who wishes to replace the professor as power figure...
...He throws her viciously around the stage until both end in exhaustion, staring at one another, each indicating his/her perception of the other as enemy...
...There are funny juxtapositions, but the device finally defeats itself, dissolving into hysterical tedium...
...Neither character, in so far as the two are characters rather than opposing points of view, is particularly attractive...
...The play is mounted with great energy, four of the five actors playing all of the characters but Constance...
...The protagonist (Constance Ledbelly) is a very model of the conventional eccentric spinster scholar...
...Carol's only concern at this point seems to be her grade...
...GERALD WEALES Commonweal...
...Depending on where one stands, John is either a well-meaning professor at first intent on helping a confused student or a sexist and elitist whose every casual word is an indication of his comfortable place in the power structure...
...John professes to love teaching...
...The appeal of the production, however, lies not in the dexterity of the quick-change artists but in Cherry Jones, who makes a wonderfully beguiling character out of what is essentially a stereotype...
...Carol returns in the second act—her awkward jumper dress replaced by a mannish suit—after having filed a detailed complaint with the tenure committee which, acting out (Continued on page 20) 4 December 1992: 15 (Continued from page 15) of a need to get on with the play (or to indicate Mamet's suspicion that the forces of "political correctness" have taken over campuses today), has rejected his promotion...
...In the final scene, she agrees to save him if he accepts her group's list of books to be banned from class...
...As she goes, she tosses him the last straw ("And don't call your wife 'Baby'") which drives him to violence...
...She is an occasion for John to do his understandingprofessor turn...
...Carol and John's initial meeting is interrupted by phone calls from John's wife and his lawyer, indicating his expectation of tenure and of a house he is buying to celebrate his new security...
...He rides over her simple question about her grade with a deluge of presumed concern, affection, sympathy...
...ne of the charges against John is that he is pedantic...
...Each in his/her way is a whiner and completely self-absorbed although both explain their words and actions in terms of some larger idea or entity...
...A phone call lets him know that he has now been charged with attempted rape...
...She has spent the same ten years trying to crack the sorcerer's code of a manuscript which she believes is the source of Othello and Romeo and Juliet and which will prove that the two coincidence-ridden tragedies are really comedies and that Desdemona and Juliet are the dominant figures in the plays...
...The overstated characters balance one another, making for a standoff of the ideas they represent...
...When he finds his own book on the list, he explodes in rage and high moral rhetoric and orders her out of his office...
...Carol eventually speaks for her group (an unidentified gathering of arbiters of political correctness), the students at large, and the college...
...She has spent ten years writing the articles and speeches that have made her beloved, Professor Claude Knight, academically desirable enough to win him a chair at Oxford, toward which he heads happily, a younger graduate student in tow, leaving the abandoned Constance with only the prospect of a job in Regina and an unfinished dissertation...
...If, as she says, she does not understand anything said in class nor anything in the professor's book, she probably should not be in college at all, but this is not a real student in a real college...
...Through a bit of magic (i.e., a playwright's gimmick), Constance is carried off first to Cyprus and then Verona, where she disrupts the plots in progress, becomes the wise clown figure she expects to find and, joining forces with the two Shakespeare heroines, becomes her own woman and breaks her obsession with the professor...
...Pedant is used more positively (if comically) in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) at the Classic Stage Company Theatre, but the sexist, elitist university is in full swing in the Canadian playwright's Shakespearean pastiche...
...Presumed security...
...He sees himself as an ironist and an iconoclast, dismissing education, which is what he teaches...
...Their roles are now reversed, he is the petitioner, she the power figure...
...The first act provides the text for the mutual misunderstanding to follow...
...He continues to try to explain himself and when she starts to leave he holds her by force...
...GENDER WARS 'OLEANNA' & 'DESDEMONA he characters in David Mamet's Oleanna have names—John and Carol—but they might as well have been called professor and student or man and woman or accused and accuser, or simply victim 1 and victim 2. Judging by the conversations I overheard as I left the Orpheum Theater, the play is going to stir up a dollop of controversy...
Vol. 119 • December 1992 • No. 21
