The issues explored in David Mamet’s controversial play on political correctness, education, and power politics, Oleanna, stand up to the test of time.
They have as much resonance today as they did when it opened to audiences in 1992.
The only problem is, while showcasing some of Mamet’s best writing, the play is ultimately mired by his inability to transcend his own personal prejudices.
Diego Matamoros & Sarah Wilson in Soulpepper's remount of Oleanna
Almost twelve years after directing the show myself, I went to see Soulpepper’s remount currently playing at The Young Centre. This isn’t a review, so I won’t be commenting on the production.
What stood out to me this time around, was just how flawed a play Oleanna is.
This comes partially from a great disappointment at how well the play begins, and how badly it finishes.
The first act has the promise of brilliance. Carol, a confused and somewhat neurotic college student, appears in the office of John, her professor, looking desperately for answers.
She is failing, and she can’t understand why. John has little time for her at first, more interested in answering a phone that rings incessantly and preoccupied with the impending purchase of his dream house.
John is the archetypal verbose intellectual, who challenges all excepted norms in his academic life, while happily accepting the spoils, both power and money, the profession rains upon him.
John is a wholly actualized character. Carol is not.
John’s great strengths and weaknesses are laid bare.
He is arrogant and snobby, and yet he makes the important decision to try and reach Carol in a less than orthodox way
If we’re going to take off the Artificial Stricture, of “Teacher,” and “Student,” why should my own problems be any more a mystery than your own?
He then goes on to talk about his predictable, upper-middle class dilemmas in a typically arrogant and paternal way.
Nice house, close to the private school… (He continues making his note.) … We were talking of economic betterment (CAROL writes in her notebook.) … I was thinking of the School Tax. (He continues writing.) (To himself:) … where is it written that I have to send my child to public school. … Is it a law that I have to improve the City Schools at the expense of my own interest? And, is this not simply The White Man’s Burden? Good. And (Looks up to CAROL) … does this interest you?
But despite his great flaws, he opens up a compelling discussion on the value of post-secondary education.
We shove this book at you, we say read it. Now, you say you’ve read it? I think that you’re lying. I’ll grill you, and when I find you’ve lied, you’ll be disgraced, and your life will be ruined. It’s a sick game. Why do we do it? Does it educate? In no sense. Well, then, what is higher education? It is something-other-than-useful.
When Carol challenges John on how he can disparage education, to those who have in many cases, “over-come great obstacles to get here,” he replies that it is his job to challenge and provoke thought in his students. Carol seems unable to grasp this idea.
So whether you like him or his ideas, John is a real character, at least somewhat worthy of our empathy.
Carol is less a character than a straw woman. Mamet uses her, simply as a vehicle, to drive Oleanna towards a conclusion that confirms his suspicions: that political correctness is used by feminists, in a witch hunt, that has as its ultimate purpose the removal of humanity from human interaction.
Whether you believe this or not doesn’t matter, because Mamet makes his case so poorly.
In the first act Carol is written, rather one-dimensionally, as seemingly inarticulate, desperate, angry, and completely lacking self-esteem.
Nobody tells me anything. And I sit there … in the corner. In the back. And everybody’s talking about “this” all the time. And “concepts,” and “precepts” and, and, and, and, and, WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? And I read your book. And they said, “Fine, go in that class.” Because you talked about responsibility to the young. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS AND I’M FAILING…
Simon Rice and Sara Wood also staged their own Oleanna in the pre-Praxis days with Bloody Theatre in 1998
Mamet reveals nothing of where she is coming from or what her background is. If she has a life outside of being a failing student, we’re not privy to it.
Remarkably when Carol returns in the second and third act, this time on decidedly less friendly terms, she has developed great self-confidence and a sophisticated vocabulary.
… It is a sexist remark, and to overlook it is to countenance continuation of that method of thought. It’s a remark…
… What gives you the right. Yes. To speak to a woman in your private… Yes. Yes. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You feel yourself empowered … you say so yourself. To strut. To posture. To “perform.” To “Call me in here…” Eh? You say that higher education is a joke. And treat it as such, you treat it as such. And confess to a taste to play the Patriarch in your class. To grant this. To deny that. To embrace your students.
Of course we still have no idea why Carol is doing this, or where she is coming from, only that she is single mindedly bent on John’s destruction.
I don’t care what you feel. Do you see? DO YOU SEE? You can’t do that anymore. You. Do. Not. Have. The. Power. Did you misuse it? Someone did. Are you part of that group? Yes. Yes. You Are. You’ve done these things. And to say, and to say, “Oh. Let me help you with your problem…
This is the problem with Oleanna. The questions it asks and tries to address are fascinating, and without easy answers. But Mamet tries to give us easy answers in his conclusion.
He wants us to feel that John is righteous and that Carol is a monster, and he succeeds.
A photo of Tehran Bazaar from ON THE BOARDS IN IRAN
Ross Manson, Artistic Director of Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, is currently in Tehran, Iran as part of a five-person jury adjudicating an international competition within the 29th Fadjr Theatre Festival.
It seems Ross has been quite busy: seeing everything from Faust to Bouffon – while getting caught up in a major demonstration, worrying about three Estonian theatre artists who got taken in by the secret police for issues relating to camera use, and finding time to blog about it all.
Mother Russia and the Socialist Fatherland: Women and the Communist Party of Canada, 1932-1941. By Nancy Butler
With specific reference to the activism of Dorothy Livesay and Jim Watts.
by Michael Wheeler
Because Praxis Theatre has been researching 1930s Toronto artist/activists off and on for the past year-and-a-half, I assumed I was already aware of the content of a link sent to the creative team by Jesus Chrysler performer Christine Horne in an email she sent titled: “giant essay on jim and dee”.
The link to the Next Year Country blog led to the document above: a 467-page Queens University PhD History thesis Nancy Butler posted for all to read via embed-able free online publishing software. (As the director of an earlier iteration of this project that included significant access to our content and process, I appreciate the availability of this work online.) The focus of Butler’s thesis are the two protagonists of the Rhubarb stage of our show Jesus Chrysler going on this week at The Rhubarb Festival: Director Jim Watts and poet Dorothy Livesay.
So if you would like a little light reading on an academic perspective of what we have been working on lately, here’s a summary of what the thesis investigates:
Through a close examination of the cultural work of two prominent middle-class female members, Dorothy Livesay, poet, journalist and sometime organizer, and Eugenia (‘Jean’ or ‘Jim’) Watts, reporter, founder of the Theatre of Action, and patron of the Popular Front magazine New Frontier, this thesis utilizes the insights of queer theory, notably those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, not only to reconstruct both the background and consequences of the CPC’s construction of ‘woman’ in the 1930s, but also to explore the significance of the CPC’s strategic deployment of heteronormative ideas and ideals for these two prominent members of the Party.
I am going to try a little something here. It’s not often that I have the opportunity to unite my practices of performance-making and fine-art-making, but the Praxis blog seems like the perfect place to give it a go on a regular basis.
So, how am I going to do this? Well, the questions I’ve chosen to explore are: what does process look like? What kind of image would I make or select if I had to find a way to visually represent a process of creating performance?
Here’s what I’m going to do. It’ll be en experiment that I’ll share with you every month, right here. It’ll be a personal exploration that I’d love you to witness, respond to and try to figure out alongside me.
I’m going to sit in on some rehearsals. I’m going to watch all sorts of processes. I’m going to profusely thank those who let me in to their rehearsal rooms to observe what they do and how they make their work. Then I’m going to make something as a response to that particular act of creation. It could be any form of visual representation – a painting, a collage, a dress, a meal – I’ll let what I see determine what I make.
One Block - Click to enlarge
I’ll try my best to choose work that will be in performance close to the posting dates, so that you’ll have the opportunity to actually see the piece.
I know that this work will be personal to me, that you’ll have to see these processes through my eyes. My big hope is that, by taking a close look at How We Make Things, we can start a conversation about how different ways of art-making converge and deviate.
One last thing: I’m not going to write much about what I saw and how I came to make what I’ve made. Sometimes I may not write anything at all. But I will always tell you what materials I’ve used and what piece I’m responding to.
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Images:
The Room asked me to make pieces for The Red Machine as a response to the brain’s temporal lobes, commonly thought of as the religious centre of the brain. The top images are personal photographs with found images (2009).
A work-in-progress piece responding to One Block. I’ll probably keep adding to this as the process continues. Encaustic and oil with found archival photographs and images donated by anonymous Toronto residents.
Shira Leuchter makes performance stuff and other art stuff. She is currently working with UnSpun Theatre on a new piece that will be performed as part of Harbourfront’s HATCH program this April. She collects all of her shallowest thoughts here.
Last week in this space, we told you about the Toronto culture consultations. The first of those public consultations is today from 2pm to 4pm at the Assembly Hall in Etobicoke, and I’ll be there “live tweeting” for Praxis. You can follow our Twitter feed here, and if there is a hashtag for the event, I’ll come back and add it to this post so you can follow along with everyone else.
In the meantime, you might be interested in looking back at that earlier post about the consultations to see what happened after the events document was circulated, and then read the even more interesting comments to our post.
Nine days away from week one of the Rhubarb Festival- a lot of content has been going down on the Rhubarb blog.
The experimental performance festival has taken over the Buddies in Bad Times blog – running features and interviews with many of the artists involved leading up to the festival. In a core feature of this content, artists from various projects interview each other about their work and what they’re up to at Rhubarb.
This approach has led to some interesting discussions with 2Fik, Johnnie Walker, Morgan Norwich, Nicholas Billon, Erin Brandenburg, Out of Line Theatre and Alicia Grant. Using various combinations of text, image and video in their posts these discussions go beyond the basic overview you might read in a preview through traditional media. (Can you tell we’re fans?)
Stay tuned for an upcoming conversation between Praxis Theatre and bluemouth inc.
Tara Beagan is captured by iPhone being announced as Native Earth Performing Arts new Artistic Director on January 26 at The Theatre Centre during the Weesageechak Festival. Photo courtesy PJ Prudat
January 2011 was a pretty good month for Jesus Chrysler playwright Tara Beagan:
Congrats to our friend and collaborator on both of her well-deserved successes. Tara replaces out going Artistic Director Yvette Nolan – who was also a great friend to Praxis Theatre.
Yvette sent us some well considered notes on her experience and thoughts surrounding Praxis productions, and she has been an ally as an artist and community member. Congrats to Yvette as well; she passes on a company in great shape to exciting leadership and we generally like it when things work out this way.
“After the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations, we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”
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