Martin Millerchip
THEATRE REVIEW

Oleanna by David Mamet, direct-
ed by Glynis Leyshon. A
Vancouver Playhouse production
to Nov. §. Reservations: $73-

AS AN audience member or
as a director I have attended
many a “talkback” session
following a performance.

As a general rule less than 10%
of the audience will stay to talk or
listen to a cast member on the sub-
ject of the production and on such
occasions dialogue can be painfully
sporadic or numbingly inane.

Not so at the Playhouse Jast
week.

Twenty minutes into the audi-
ence discussion of David Mamet's
Oleanna hands are madly waving
at the external (non-Playhouse)
moderator as a remarkable number
of people are still trying to say
what they feel about one of the
most controversial plays written in
the last two years.

Like it or not, and many people
do not like Oleanna, I defy you not
to have en opinion about it if you
go.

And you should. This is a rivet-

ing production of a truly successful

script.

Successful in the sense that the
script does what the author intend-
ed. Provoke. .

Mamet, arguably the best of the
current American playwrights, is a
master of both conflict and Jan-
guage. In Oleanna he constructs
conflict from the misuse and mis-
apprehension of language.

John is a university professor in
his 40s with the self-professed self-
image of a “maverick.” But this
niaverick is up for tenure and try-
ing to buy a new heme by phone
when we meet him. John wants to
be part of the educational system
he decries as “ritualized hazing.”

AS a teacher he contradicts,
interrupts and dominates while he
equivocates with words like “I
think.”

Carol is a rawly nervous student

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LESLIE JONES and North Vancouver actor Bill Dow are mes-
merizing in the Playhouse production of David Mamet’s
provocative new play, Oleanna, abcut the abuse of power and

language.

in her 20s that John is about to
flunk. She is not unintelligent but
is desperately failing to understand
both the abstruse language and the
abstract intent of John’s teachings.

Totally lacking in self-confi-
dence she is, like her notebook, a
blank page waiting eagerly to be
filled with somebody else’s words,
although she lacks the life experi-
ence to challenge or adapt them.

Unfortunately (or not, depend-
ing on your point of view) John’s
brand of education fails her and a
shadowy (off-stage) support group
feeds her both confidence and a
rhetoric of her own as the play pro-
gresses.

It has been argued, as it was by
audience members on opening
night, that Caro! quickly becomes
an unsympathetically extreme
character and that Mamet trivial-
izes the importance of sexual
harassment by creating what Doug
Collins and his ilk might term a
“feminazi.”

I understand the charge but can
only respond that I found Carol to
be psychologically rooted in some
dark, childhood terror that is only
hinted at in terms of her self-per-
ceived “badness.”

Her transformation may be sud-
den in terms of the play’s length
but I was willing 10 accept Carol’s
uncompromising extremism as typ-
ical of newly found empowerment.

It doesn’t mean that I liked her,
but then I didn’t like John either.

Bill Dow as John and Leslic
Jones as Caro! are alternately bril-
liant. They may both be brilliant

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together but I found it hard to
watch one for fear of missing
something in the other.

Dow manages to find the
unconscious smugness in John and
balance it with the desire to honest-
ly do the best that he is able. On a
technical level his telephone con-
versations are a virtuoso display.

Jones made sense, for me, of an
impossible role. Her commitment
to the raw energy that fuels Carol
is as uncompromising as Carol her-
self. I was sure I could feel Jones’
blood pumping as Carol waited for
John to finish one of his intrusive
telephone calls.

Director Glynis Leyshon must
share the credit for navigating a
complex and chailenging script so
successfully.Two quibbles relate to
the two-dimensional blocking cre-
ated by the desk placement and,
perhaps more importantly, the final
line of the play.

I won’t reveal the shock of the
ending but Carol’s final words as
she responds to the ultimate male to
female accusatory expletive (it starts
with c!) must relate, as I read it, to
how she understands herself, not
how she understands John’s actions.

One final plaudit must go to
Pam Johnson for her set (and cos-
tumes, which perfectly parallel the
changing status of the players).

Her Simon Fraser-inspired edi-
fice to education simultaneously
entraps the combatants and thrusts
them into the audience where, of
course, the responsibility for a
commitment to communication
resides.

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