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Friday, October 20, 2006
We've all been there.
I say something (with a frown or That Look or with my back
to you as I dry the dishes). You, in turn, hear ... well,
maybe something or maybe something else. We argue about it
—at the time or weeks later, when it surfaces under
the camoflauge of who took out the garbage last. Without a
referee, the argument descends into he-said-she-saids where
no one's right and no one's wrong: They're just what they
are.
Communication is a tricky, tricky thing.
Never more so than in David Mamet's complex drama "Oleanna,"
which the Gulfshore Playhouse opened earlier this week at
the Lab Theatre, Florida Gulf Coast University's black box
theater. The play runs tonight through Sunday — the
company's first full-length production after years of fundraisers
and small productions — at the Norris Center in downtown
Naples.
Like pretty much all Mamet, "Oleanna" is a dense
piece of business. And in this little set piece, he juggles
his trademark dialogue, which at times is so mannered it verges
on code, to his typical mobius end: At its core, "Oleanna"
is a riveting master class on the subjective intersection
of language, of identity and roles they play in the exchange
of power.
It begins with a puzzling first act in which John (Alan Campbell),
a college professor, has called a young student, Carol (Aurora
Nessly), to his office to discuss her inadequate rendering
of an assignment.
"I'm just trying, I'm just trying," Carol sputters
with anger that you eventually reason is about more than just
her confusion about his loop-de-loop lectures.
"No." Pause. "It will not do."
"No." Pause. "I'm doing what I was told. I
bought your book. It's ... difficult for me."
He's blustery, the kind of intellectual who facilely plays
with ideas the way kids swing from one monkey bar to the next.
For the joy of it and because they can. And John smirks at
just about everything, including the notion of his role as
all-knowing teacher and the vital nature of the college education.
Instead of blooming under his scrutiny, Carol shrinks as he
presses her to put aside the rules, to abandon her obsessive
notetaking and think for herself. She yearns for something
he can't quite give — the cool certainty of the one
right answer, a One-and-Only Point of View.
As they dance around Mamet's version of academic gobbledygook,
the third character in this little minuet, the telephone,
drives (unhinges, compels) their accidental intimacy as John
brokers a teetering house purchase — the culmination
of his pending tenure approval.
That's right, isn't it? Or was something else going on? What
did I actually see in that stark little office? The brisk
two acts that follow take off from the ambiguous proof of
Act I, prodding those questions of perception into your mind
as the drama plays out.
By the start of Act II, power has shifted from John to Carol
as she threatens to derail his tenure and his priviledged
life with an accusation of sexual exploitation, whatever that
is. And in Act III, it gets ever darker. As Carol gains idealogical
steam and John falls steadily apart, Mamet guides the two
to a surprisingly brutal climax.
Anyone familiar with Mamet's work — from the raw feint-and-parry
of "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" to the testosterone
seige of "Glengarry Glen Ross" — knows that
it's a thankless job to star in a Mamet vehicle. That's because
in a piece by this Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, it's
all about Mamet — the O. Henry plotting, the fragmented
dialogue, the shadowy way subtext, not the text, steers the
story.
Which is to say, the actors are absolutely critical to making
"Oleanna" more than an oblique morality play starring
Barbie and Howdy Dowdy.
Alan Campbell, all bespectacled and corduroy-jacketed, is
the perfect picture of the rumpled, desexualized college prof.
It's his second turn as John: The first in August in Raleigh,
N.C. Both performances were under Gulfshore artistic director
Kristen Coury's direction. It shows. Campbell, who received
a Tony nomination for his role opposite Glenn Close in "Sunset
Boulevard," navigates the challenging dance of Mamet's
language with considerable ease, careful to let the dialogue,
which is sometimes flat-out mumbo jumbo, stand on its own.
It's supposed to. His descent is compelling, a disturbing
picture of a man caught in a trap, perhaps of his own making.
Aurora Nessly opens with Carol as a smudge of a girl: indistinct,
insecure and simmering over unknown hurts. Carol returns in
Act II and III, like the prow of a ship — confident
and strangely accomplished with glimmers of her former self
unexpectedly flashing through. It's a tough role: Mamet, who
wrote the piece in the early '90s in response to the Clarence
Thomas Senate hearings, is a man's writer. Still, Nessly,
who was cast in New York City only weeks ago, pilots Carol
believably, although not always sympathetically, and creates
the dimension required to accomplish the play's sad end.
It's nearly flawless. Nearly. The crucial rush to that denouement
felt a little too forced on opening night. The result, probably,
of a first-night fumble for actors who rehearsed a difficult
work a scant 10 days. Happily, such wrinkles are easily smoothed.
Coury's direction is nearly invisible here, which is as it
should be. The lighting, costuming and set decoration Minimalist.
I might have liked less of a set, forcing us to look beyond
the bid for the real — the tufted wing chairs, the fake
ficus and that suspiciously well-appointed desk — and
into an even more intense "No Exit" of an evening.
One telephone, two characters and a story that you're happy
is not your own.
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