Thursday, January 27, 2005
Clear Stage presents 'Oleanna'
By Allyson Jacob
Clear Stage Cincinnati is about to open up a huge can of worms.
They’re producing David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” a play written in the early 1990s featuring John, a professor, and Carol, one of his students. In three acts, Mamet turns political correctness on its ear and sparks one of the loudest “he said, she said” debates ever to hit the stage. It’s a bold play and a bold choice for Clear Stage, and it opens Friday, February 11.
Michael Burnham, who directs “Oleanna,” thinks that even though the debates over political correctness are no longer at the forefront of every water cooler and carpool conversation, Mamet’s drama is hardly passé. “Thanks to Lawrence Summers’ recent take on women in science and engineering, the subject lives on,” Burnham explains, referencing the Harvard president’s recent slip-up on women’s alleged inferiority to men in math and science. “They’re perennial questions, the ones posed by this play. And maybe by now, we can only hope, we might be able to look beyond our knee-jerk reactions to the subject matter and see what’s going on in the people trapped inside this play. “
The play begins innocently enough. John is in his office, late for a meeting with his wife and his realtor, and Carol, one of his students, shows up with some questions about his class. The two talk at each other, rather than to each other, both becoming frustrated. She doesn’t understand what she is meant to be learning. He doesn’t have the time to teach it to her right then. Their lack of communication spirals downward, eventually ending in a sexual harassment charge.
Julianna Bloodgood and Dave Hughes will play Carol and John. The names might not be familiar to Cincinnati theatre audiences, but club hoppers might have heard of Hughes—he owned and ran the Warehouse on Vine St— and recently returned to his theatrical roots in a production with Ovation Theatre Company.
Bloodgood was a Cincinnati Entertainment Award nominee last year and is set to graduate from CCM in May. Burnham says “she got the part because she impressed Bob Allen and I with her audition, a lot; because the whole time she’s been at CCM, where I teach, I’ve never gotten to direct her; because when I asked her why she was interested in the part she told me she’d auditioned for the part when she was 18 (she didn’t get it) and has been haunted by the play ever since.”
He also notes that he observed an instinct in Bloodgood that made her perfect for the role. “I watched Julianna Bloodgood ask Barbara Wolf a question,” Burnham relates. “Since I was sitting closer to Julianna than Barbara was, I answered, only to receive the tiniest hint of an ‘I was talking to the Woman, Mr. Man’ glance from Julianna before she repeated the question, again to Barbara.”
One of Clear Stage’s major missions is to educate—to educate the community at large, as well as to provide educational opportunities to young artists. To that end, the company is employing both a stage management and an acting intern in “Oleanna.” Erin Carr is understudying the role of Carol, and Burnham says that he has never seen an understudy become so involved in a production.
“Because it’s Clear Stage,” he explains, “these interns are not just getting to be gofers on the production, but are playing an active part in its creation. The [stage management] intern has been entrusted with running a few rehearsals, and the acting intern is shadowing the actress playing Carol, understudying the role to a degree I’ve never seen before. They sometimes go off into the corner and huddle in character discussion. Rehearsals are stopped to answer their questions, whether they’re about the production or about issues raised by the production.”
Carr will have the opportunity to play Carol during the Saturday, Feb. 19 matinee.
As far as educating the community, Burnham knows that “there’s nothing more educational than a good argument and this play is nothing if not a good argument.” He hopes that audiences will come away with lots of questions and “with a sense of how easy it is to ‘put our foot in it’ when we think we know where we’re headed and take our eyes off the ground.”
Like it or hate it, “Oleanna” is sure to spark discussion which, it could be argued, is what any good piece of theatre should do.
Allyson Jacob is a freelance writer and playwright living just outside of Cincinnati.
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