Reactions to infamous allegations of sexual harassment fall into three camps – he’s right; she’s right; I don’t know who’s right. I suspect that the new production starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles of David Mamet’s play “Oleanna,” which he wrote 17 years ago, shortly after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, will also provoke three responses: There will be those who will find it searing and provocative; those who will dismiss it as sexist and pedantic; and those who will be confused, ambivalent, uncertain how to react.

The producers of the new production of “Oleanna” at the Golden Theater are smartly taking advantage of all three reactions by holding a “talk back” after every performance, where members of the audience engage in conversation with invited guests. The particular talk-back I attended — with former New York City Mayor David Dinkins and comic actress Jackie Hoffman – may have been the most stimulating part of the evening.

This is no snide put-down of the production, which is well-served by the two performers, Julia Stiles in her Broadway debut and Bill Pullman who previously appeared on Broadway in Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?”, both better-known for their film roles but fully at home on the stage.

Stiles plays Carol, a college student who in the first of the play’s three short acts is in the office of her professor apparently to discuss her grades. Pullman is John, the professor, distracted by telephone calls from his wife and his lawyer about the pending purchase of a new house, which was made possible by his having been promised tenure. The student is feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. The teacher, although wrapped up in his own self-satisfied intellectual theories, makes an effort to try to help her. In the second act, we learn that what we the audience just saw as the teacher’s largely innocuous comments and actions have been twisted into something offensive, and form the basis of a complaint the student has filed with the college’s tenure committee. The professor’s efforts to work things out make things worse, and in the third act, everything ratchets up; Carol is now acting on behalf of an unnamed group, making demands, with violent consequences.

With Stiles making the hard-to-like Carol more sympathetic than the original actress in the role (she seems truly upset, bewildered and unnerved) and Pullman making John tentative and distracted and less professorial than I would have expected, the new production may produce a fourth camp of reactions — they were both wrong!

When it was produced Off-Broadway in 1992 starring William Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon (six months after its debut in a production in Cambridge), New York Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote: “As if ripped right from the typewriter, it could not be more direct in its technique or more incendiary in its ambitions…. ‘Oleanna’ leaves us feeling much the way the Thomas hearings did: soiled and furious”

Less known than Rich’s review is the strong reaction to the play, and to Rich’s review of the play, by playwright Theresa Rebeck, whose play “Spike Heels” had been produced shortly before:
“Frank Rich’s response to Spike Heels, an essentially dark comedy about sex and power which hinges on an episode of sexual harassment, was to compare it to pillow talk,” Rebeck has written. [Note: Here is Frank Rich's review of Spike Heels] “He clearly didn’t understand the play and dismissed it as half-baked fluff; four months later, when Oleanna opened off-Broadway he wrote ‘finally, someone has written a play about sexual harassment’ and commended it as a searing commentary on our times. Apparently, when a woman writes about an actual incident of sexual harassment, it’s pillow talk; and when a man writes about a woman lying about sexual harassment, it’s a searing commentary. At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder why it’s not okay for me to have a feminist agenda, but it is okay for Mr. Mamet to have a misogynist agenda.”

Clearly someone in the “sexist and pedantic” camp.

David Mamet has not stopped confronting his audience with provocative issues — among the shows slated for this Broadway season is a new Mamet play entitled “Race.” But now that the Thomas-Hill hearings are more of a distant albeit still bitter memory (and nothing is ripped from a typewriter anymore), it may be possible to view “Oleanna” as something more than just a look at the issue of sexual harassment and the culture of political correctness. “Oleanna” (named after a failed 19th century Utopian community) seems to me just as much a play about the loss of language and the failure to communicate.

Here is an example of an exchange between John and Carol early in the play:

John: What I am trying to tell you is that some, some basic..
Carol: I..
John: …one moment: some basic missed communi…
Carol: I’m doing what I’m told. I bought your book, I read your..
John: No, I’m sure you…
Carol: No, no, no. I’m doing what I’m told. It’s difficult for me. It’s difficult..
John: …but…
Carol: I don’t…lots of the language
John: …please
Carol: The language, the ‘things’ that you say…

You can call this basic Mamet-speak, but there is something exasperating about this exchange, and others like it. They never seem to be communicating clearly (either to each other, or to us.) First Carol and then John keep on saying “I don’t understand” or “I don’t know what you’re saying.” Throughout the play they debate the meaning of various words and phrases (“term of art,” “elitist”), often admitting that they do not know that these words have any clear meaning. At one point, Carol begins to say “all my life…I have never told anyone this,” but is interrupted by one of the many telephone calls that John receives, and he (and we) never get to hear what it is she was going to say. Isn’t Mamet being prescient here, anticipating all the since-invented electronic devices that paradoxically get in the way of basic communication? At another point, John says that a simple conversation about the weather “is the essence of all human communication,” because it’s a signal that “we both agree to converse. In effect, we agree that we are both human.” But they are unable even to have that simple conversation about the weather.

There may be a clue to this loss of language and humanity before either character even speaks. We see in Neil Patel’s set the windows of the professor’s office showing a grand old college campus. But just as the play begins, the blinds on the windows roll down, shutting out the world…and civilization?

Oleanna by David Mamet
at the John Golden Theater, 252 West 45th Street
Directed by Doug Hughes
Cast: Bill Pullman, Julia Sties
Scenic design: Neil Patel
Costume design: Catherinze Zuber
Lighting design: Donald Holder
running time: 75 minutes with no intermission.
Tuesday @7pm; Wednesday - Saturday @8pm; Wednesday and Saturday @2pm; Sunday @3pm
Ticket prices range from $76.50 to $116.50

Photographs by Craig Schwartz, courtesy of the Publicity Office

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