Self-conscious social critique of 'Oleanna' wins

STEVE YBARRA/YH 'I assure you, my interest in your breasts is pure academic.'

In Oleanna, Mamet uses language to pit so many forces in natural opposition against one another—female and male, student and teacher, youth and age, feminism and chauvinism—that every statement overlaps with something else and reverberates with questions of power in its various forms, relating to higher education, to academic freedom, to violence against women, to political correctness, to materialism, to elitism. It's no surprise that the play, written in the early '90s in the wake of Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas, has been seen by some critics as merely a controversial polemic, a pared-down politicized soap-box of a play that lets the dialogue between the two main characters speak for Mamet's own thoughts on the dangers of obsessive political correctness or the limits of free speech.

Politicized or not, Oleanna is a play about speech as much as it is about characters. Robert's production features a sort of acting that pays unusually skillful attention to the play's need to let ideas, speech, and character fuse into one. At first, the speech revolves around the enormous frustration that Carol (Nell Rutledge-Leverenz, PC '03)—a meticulous, hardworking, underprivileged student at an elite liberal arts college—feels with her college's generally inhospitable academic climate. She's bothered, in particular, by her failing midterm grade in a class taught by John (Greg Yolen, SY '04). From the start of the first conversation between the two characters, Leverenz's exasperated Carol—with her masterful shifts from a quietly violent effort to jot down John's every word to a frantic, shrill shouting directly into his face—conveys a strange mixture of indomitable, naïve resolve and a jaded but raw vulnerability.

In an office cluttered by newspaper clippings, tattered books, and small yellow post-its all over the walls, Carol faces the constantly fidgeting, not-quite-jocular John, who is not unlike the hippies-turned-academics among Yale's faculty today. In the first scene, he's invariably gasping for breath as he presents Carol with his critiques of higher education in the dizzyingly analytical language of academia—language that Carol admits she just doesn't understand. John is struck by something about Carol—perhaps it's the way she furiously writes down everything he says in her notebook or the way she assertively cries that his class, like the rest of her college experience, has made her feel utterly stupid—that he vows to give her an A in his class if she will continue to meet him in his office throughout the remainder of the semester. Why is he willing to do all this for her, Carol wonders? "Because I like you," John responds, with the half-smile of a strutting pendant who's finally found someone to listen to him. All the while, the exasperated Carol continues her compulsively comprehensive notetaking.

But it's not John's motivation that really matters here—it's what he says and does for Carol that sets up the increasingly tense confrontations between student and teacher. As the play goes on, the talk hinges less on the naked speech of the earlier scenes and more on the way Carol has started to "read" what she has heard and experienced—a patronizing word or a suspiciously reassuring touch here, an inappropriately suggestive diversion in the conversation there. It's hard not to be struck by Carol's transformation into a still indomitable but almost frighteningly mature young woman, who speaks in the same elevated diction that once maddened her. It's also easy to be sucked into the she-said game of interpretation that ensues: is Carol right, with her infuriated, unflinching insistence that her notebooks are filled with nothing but her encounters with John rather than cruel allegations, or is John right in thinking that as a professor he is not himself an academic subject, but instead someone who's paid simply to get people to think? Does it mean anything that the speech between Carol and John must suddenly collide with "real life," with John's attempt to gain tenure and Carol's heightened political and social consciousness? Thinking—and talking—about the questions that Mamet's script raises seems to be the best response to the speech that's been unfolding onstage.

Thanks to Yolen and Leverenz, it's possible to raise these questions of speech, of ideas, of meaning, without stumbling over the "ritualized annoyance"—as John refers to the average student's college experience—of overdone acting. Just as Mamet would have it, the actors speak, and it's almost impossible not to listen.

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