In the midst of a weekend piled high with music (the Jitro Choir Concert Friday night, Kenosha Solo & Ensemble Saturday morning, “Chicago” auditions both Saturday afternoon and Sunday) it was almost a blessed relief to sit in the audience of Carthage’s black box theater last night and take in a David Mamet play called “Oleanna” – a stark two-person play that had absolutely no musical elements at all …. not even a little piped in background music to set the mood. It was a night of words. And as I said, it was almost a relief to step away from music for a few minutes.
Except that to call this particular play a “relief” is utterly laughable if you know what this play is like, for it turned out to be an almost brutally intense experience like none I had ever had in the theater before. The play is about a college professor and one of his students and a session they have in his office when she comes asking for help with his course on education, which she fears she is failing. They are two very different people (although he tries to make the point that they are not nearly as different from each other as it might initially seem) and to see them grappling to make themselves understood to each other is quite riveting. But the play becomes still more intense in the subsequent scenes when it becomes clear that the two of them interpret very differently what went on in that first session – and things only become more painful and troubling from there. It’s a play that explores all kinds of fundamental themes, including what does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to really hear someone else? Really hear them? How is it that we can talk and talk and talk and yet communicate so poorly? In this era of equality in the sight of the law, what differences remain between men and women? And perhaps most fundamentally, what is the relationship between teacher and student supposed to be?
Having watched my wife learn the huge role of Florence Foster Jenkins in the RTG’s Glorious, I have a much richer appreciation for what it means to learn a role and perform it before others….. so I am not overstating it when I say that I was thunderstruck by the amazing work of the two actors in this play- Jane Burkitt and Brett Robertson. The roles were gigantic in terms of number of words, but also incredibly daunting because David Mamet writes in a style that is amazingly lifelike…. right down to the cutoff sentences, the broken phrases, the frequent interruptions, etc. So there are almost no tidy and polished monologues – but rather only raw, lifelike dialogue that had to be insanely difficult to memorize. How they managed it is beyond me. And of course, they did more than that: they also found a way to embody these two characters in a way that is exceedingly rare.
The real proof of that is in how engrossed all of us were, despite the fact that Carthage’s black box theater is actually a terrible space where almost every second of the performance was done to the unwanted accompaniment of rumbling pipes in the background, as though the play were being done in the basement of a factory. That these two actors, in a stark play devoid of any special effects at all, with that distracting sound in the background, were able to capture us and all of our attention so completely was among the most astonishing theatrical feats I have ever experienced.
Of course, much of that can be credited to the director of this production, David Duncan, who is a senior music and theater double major (and, like Brett, a voice student of mine.) I already knew of David’s directorial talents from the great work he did as director of Menotti’s Old Maid and the Thief back in the fall – but what he and his actors achieved in this play was truly extraordinary.
In some ways what was the clearest testimony to how powerful this play was for us who watched it is the fact that the Talk Back held afterwards was almost as riveting as the play itself. What happened is that David, Brett and Jane took the stage – along with stage manager Danielle Lemmermann – to lead a discussion about what people had just watched. WOW. I have been to some talk backs but never one like this – with all kinds of people chiming in with their comments, questions and observations. It was actually rather thrilling, which may sound like a strange, over-the-top thing to say, but to know that people had been moved and engaged on such a deep level was really truly inspiring.
David got it rolling by posing a question which was also given to us in the form of a simple paper ballot in our programs: When all was said and done, whose side did we find ourselves on? We could check one name or the other. There was no “undecided” box or “both” box to mark. We were supposed to choose. After having seen such a complex story with almost no blacks and whites- only shades of gray- it seemed laughably simplistic to have to make a clean choice between these two characters. But David explained that the members of the tenure committee weighing in on this particular professor and this incident would ultimately have to make a choice, no matter how conflicted they might have felt- and that was the point of this particular question being posed to us. By the way, David chose not to have the actors be part of the previous talk backs because he did not want anything said by an audience member to unduly alter anything that the actors were already doing. So this was Brett and Jane’s first (and only) opportunity to be part of this rich exchange with the audience- and I was so glad that they could be part of it and offer their own perspectives on the play and on the complicated characters they portrayed.
The play reminded me a bit of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable,” which remains my very favorite play. It’s just as intense but the drama is leavened with plenty of humor, while Mamet’s “Oleanna” scarcely serves up a single laugh all night. A striking difference between the two plays is that in “Doubt,” we never actually see the moment of contact between Father Flynn and one of his students which leads Sister Aloysius to believe that something improper has occurred. We are left to our imagination, which in turn leaves us in an even more acute state of doubt about what happened and whether or not Sister Aloysius is correct in her assumption. But in “Oleanna,” we watched the session between the professor and student with our own eyes….. and if anything, it left each of us even more uncertain about whether anyone was ultimately right or wrong here – and that very uncertainty was so exciting to experience.
I could rattle on all day about this (needless to say) but I just wanted to mention the title of the play. Someone asked about that at the talk back, and David explained that Oleanna refers to a Norwegian folk song about a lovely mythical place where. . .according to David, who may have taken liberties with the specifics in answering the question. . . the weather is always perfect, hens lay eggs ten times a day, where men and women work together in perfect harmony and cooperation, etc. Evidently, Mamet never explained why he chose this title, but maybe it was a way to draw a stark contrast between the idyllic loveliness described in the folk song and the unsettling, complicated imperfections that are a part of our lives. The key to this play is how bravely and unreservedly it portrays those imperfections and complexities, and leaves us wrestling with them on the drive home, and the next day, and the day after that. . .
pictured above: Brett, Jan and David in the midst of last night’s talk back.