The good, the bad, and the ideologically irresolute

JULIA TIERNAN/YH A minor skirmish in the ongoing battle of the sexes pits professor against student in Andrew Eggert's, MC '00, production of David Mamet's 'Olenna.'

At the Democratic National Convention in 1992, Republican pranksters circulated a flyer advertising a phony book called The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook. The Republicans, who would need a few more years and the help of a special prosecutor to pull off a really big prank, were concerned with parodying the pious, contorted revisions of language that leftists were supposedly imposing on the populace. Their flyer included sample entries from the "dictionary" like "sore loser: an equanimity-deprived individual with temporarily unmet career objectives." David Mamet's Oleanna, which premiered in New York a few months after the convention, taps into the same vein as the Republicans did but with a violence and precision exceeding that of even the most inspired partisan lampoon.

Director Andrew Eggert, MC '00, and his two-person cast bring an admirable production of Mamet's ferocious satire to the stage. The play thoroughly examines the corrosive effects of political correctness on a mediocre college professor, John, played by Tom Woodrow, ES '00, and his student, Carol, played by Heidi Altman, SY '99. In Act One, Carol visits John during his office hours in order to discuss a poorly-received paper that she wrote for his class. This everyday scenario quickly unravels into a mess of miscommunication, power plays, and moments of psychological and physical brutality.

Both characters are committed to the idea that they've been cheated, but lack the wherewithal and forthrightness to articulate what it is they've been cheated of. They're sore losers whose self-characterizations we suspect would rely on the type of strained euphemisms found in The Official Politically Correct Dictionary. John's feelings for the committee that's evaluating him for tenure waver between sincere but narcissistic contempt and glib, equally nar-cissitic appreciation. Carol refuses to tolerate a low grade in the pro-fessor's class, despite the fact that she handed in a paper with the line, "I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author's feelings in a way that he intended, based on his results."

As the play unfolds, Mamet artfully prevents the audience from forming a consistent opinion of either character; at the same time, he raises the need for such a judgment to a high pitch of urgency. On the thinnest of provocations, Carol files a sexual harrassment charge against John: he touched her once during their first meeting and referred vaguely to the difference in "copulation" habits between the rich and poor. The groundless charge should be intolerable to us, but John defies our sympathies.

It's not enough to say we resist taking his side because he's a pompous bore, prone to smug rambling about the "heterodoxy of his orthodoxy." Perhaps it's that Mamet temporally stuns our judgment by way of the viscerally affecting transformation of Carol from a meek, inarticulate cipher into a coldly confident woman who can proclaim, "You believe not in freedom of thought, but in an elitist, protected hierarchy which rewards you." But as quickly as we're impressed by Carol's new boldness, we're sickened by her cant and her underhandedness.

Both Altman and Woodrow bring maturity and refinement to their roles, doing full justice to Mamet's tightly wound writing. Some of the most subtle moments in the play come when John is on the phone with his wife. Woodrow is a master of phone patter, precisely timing his lines, sputtering impatiently through his terse "fines" and his curt "yesses" and combining exasperation with a devout though patronizing affection. When he addresses his wife as "Baby," his tone is appropriately mundane, and the remark hardly registers with us. Carol, however, picks up on it. As she prepares to leave his office in the final minute of the play, she turns to John with a hateful righteousness. "Don't call your wife `baby,'" she orders. And when John bursts out with sudden viciousness, our opinion of these two characters finally begins to stabilize.

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