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Oleanna Frustrates, But Does It Very Well
If you’ve always been intrigued by David Mamet’s most famous, most controversial play, if you’ve always meant to catch the show but never quite managed to get there—go see Soulpepper’s production of Oleanna. The acting is excellent, the direction is smart, and the production is very well-executed.
If you’re already familiar with the play, if you find it heavy-handed, artificially polemical, inhabited by impossible characters, and dated—well, yeah. You can still stay home.
Oleanna is a play with baggage. Born in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, it explores the paranoid era of political correctness that followed that very public examination of sexual harassment. As offices clamped down on public displays of human contact of any kind, women tried to articulate the manner in which workplace environments could be stifling, and rhetoric reached a new height of frenzy, all of North America, it seemed, became obsessed with the issue.
Much of the discussion back then relied on any number of caricatures: ideology-obsessed feminists, lecherous older male bosses, hapless secretaries, and complicit human resources departments—the working landscape seemed entirely riddled with landmines of one kind or another. (This is not to deny that there were real, systematic problems, just to say that the public discussion about them often resorted to glib stereotyping.) Some of these caricatures seep into Oleanna as well—specifically in the form of Carol, played with assurance by Sarah Wilson. When the play opens, Carol enters as a halting, insecure university student seeking help from her professor; by the play’s end she’s somehow (and the “how” is very much left unclear in Mamet’s script) been transformed into a slogan-spitting, doctrinaire, group-think cardboard cutout of a feminist, accusing that professor of rape simply in virtue of trying to keep her in his office to discuss her concerns further.
That professor, John—played by Soulpepper vet Diego Matamoros—is a little hapless himself, and certainly unaware of the power dynamics that can be in play when an older male professor assists a young female student. At no time does he show the slightest romantic or sexual interest in Carol; it’s certainly the case that he takes a great interest in her, but his mistake is being patronizingly parental rather than sexually inappropriate. The consequences that follow for him from Carol’s accusations are entirely out of proportion to his insensitivities, as infuriating to the audience stuck watching helplessly as they are to him as he loses his job and his house.
It’s an interesting choice, to stack the deck so heavily in favour of one of the characters, when director László Marton could have had John guilty of at least a few leers or gropes. The effect is to turn this production of Oleanna into a commentary on the public discussions of sexual harassment in the early ’90s as much as a commentary on harassment itself. To that extent, the play still feels relevant. But it is also the case that we’ve largely moved beyond that kind of inflammatory rhetoric, and revisiting it has limited appeal.
It’s a very good production—just of a play that isn’t aging all that well.
Photos by Bruce Zinger and provided courtesy of Soulpepper.