THEATRE REVIEW: OLEANNA
4 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

If you’ve ever suspected that playwright David Mamet stacked the deck a bit when he created the power structure in OLEANNA, his controversial 1992 drama, you’re not alone. In his often bloody-minded dissection of the relationship between a self-satisfied university professor and a troubled young female student, Mamet doesn’t seem too concerned with fairness in a world where people eschew talking to each other in favour of talking at each other.

That said, one wonders just how Mamet himself might react to the production of OLEANNA that opened at the Young Centre Thursday under the Soulpepper umbrella. It is a production in which the director tips the scales so heavily that he all but destroys any illusion, however fleeting, that Mamet might have tried to create a level playing field on which to stage what is clearly an evisceration of gender politics.

For the uninitiated, OLEANNA encompasses three encounters between John, a smug and self-satisfied university professor, and a student named Carol, a wallflower who turns out to be a meat-eating venus flytrap in the course of the two-hour play. All three encounters take place in John’s office, beginning with a post-class session in which a tongue-tied and seemingly terrified Carol (played by Sarah Wilson) tries mightily to convey her academic ineptness to John (Diego Matamoros), who seems clearly more concerned with the house he and his wife are buying to celebrate his newly-achieved tenure, than with the problems of this mousey little student who can’t grasp anything he says. Still, something about Carol’s dilemma strikes a chord. He tries, in his self-absorbed fashion, to help her find her way.

In their next encounter, John is dealing with the shock of finding himself charged with professional and sexual malfeasance in his dealings with Carol, who has come to his office at his request to discuss the complaint she has made to the school powers — a complaint that threatens John’s hard-won and suddenly precious chance at tenure.

In the third, John’s smug world has been reduced to rubble, but a victorious and suddenly empowered Carol overplays her hand to such a degree that the play ends in disaster for both of them.

Director Laszlo Marton approaches the work with a heavy hand, reducing all of John’s sins to minor misdemeanors, while playing up all of Carol’s faults until they become cardinal sins, tipping the scales of sympathy so far in John’s favour in the process that even Carol’s most valid complaints seem ridiculous. Tragically, an out-of-her-depth Wilson furthers Marton’s vision, making Carol appear little more than a mouthpiece for dark and malevolent forces, instead of a full participant in the tale.

Not content with placing a heavy thumb on the emotional scales of Mamet’s work, Marton further muddies the waters with a set, designed by Teresa Przybylski, that is as visually skewed as the vision behind this staging. Worse, when Marton tries to incorporate it into the action of the play in the third act, it takes so long to establish that it is more than merely a malfunction of a flimsy set - it removes you from the play.

In truth, OLEANNA has long been seen as a bit of a rigged fight from the get-go, but in this staging Marton et al reduce it to the level of professional wrestling, replete with hot-button stereotypes of good men and evil women. In the end, Marton seems to have abandoned the conventional role of the director as an interpreter of the work and cast himself as judge of the characters. And while his decision may make for easier answers for the theatre-going public, it certainly doesn’t make for more interesting theatre.