PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Oleanna Teacher's Petting?
By Harry Haun
October 12, 2009
Meet the first-nighters at the opening of Broadway's Oleanna.
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You know the deck is slightly stacked when the first celebs to show up at the Oct. 11 opening of the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Oleanna are Lucy T. Slut, who practices sexual harassment as an Olympic sport, and the timid, milquetoast-y Rod. These two Avenue Q puppets, operated by Anika Larsen and Seth Rettberg, were there to welcome Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles to the Golden, where the puppets had just spent 6½ years, prior to downsizing and taking up residence Off-Broadway, as of Oct. 9, at New World Stages.
With a gender reversal and minor adjustments, Lucy and Rod echo the battle-of-the-sexes that Mamet masterminded back in 1992 in response to the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill furor and the PC fallout that followed it. He drew the battle-lines for this two-hander/bitch-slap between John, a vulnerable college prof whose new home is hanging by the frayed thread of tenure, and Carol, pleading tearfully and angrily for a passing grade. When he reaches out to console her, she turns the situation into an argument about appropriate behavior, and their miscommunication spins dizzily out of control, floor-boarding them to the abyss.
After this 80-minute assault, haggard first-nighters retired to the Blue Fin at the W Hotel on Broadway for stiff drinks and, at most tables, the debate continued.
Press interviews were done in Blue Fin's glass-walled bar at the corner of Broadway and West 47th , and the television cameras attending the event attracted a horde of tourists who had been lolling around in patio furniture that now clutters The Great White Way. All seemed to pack cameras of their own and drove the two stars crazy, banging on the glass to get their shots while the interviews were still going on.
"This is my favorite place for a big party," declared lead producer Jeffrey Finn, who previously used it in 2005 for On Golden Pond (albeit, James Earl Jones and Leslie Uggams were not interviewed in the goldfish-bowl bar area and Broadway had not become a suburban thoroughfare).
"I just adore this play," he admitted. "It makes people talk, and that's what good theatre is about." Which is why he has set up a series of post-show discussions to follow the main event. "People are just staying in their seats, riveted. They want to talk about the play because there are so many issues to explore. They've had this incredible experience, and they want to keep it going. We have special panelists who are experts in their field of education or media or politics or celebrity and a great moderator for every one of them. I like to refer to it sometimes as a second act."
Finn did not employ a casting director to line up such a dead-on cast. "I did it myself," he confessed proudly. Pullman, the stumbling, sputtering Everyman sinking into a mire of miscommunication, and the gorgeous Stiles with a jaw-line of granite determination and a raw intelligence that betrays the possibility of calculation these solidify the war zone and bring Mamet's diatribe of a play into sharper focus.
"It's a very different take than the original primarily because we're seeing it in 2009. The original production took place in a certain moment in time, which made that production unique and made it the talked-about event in New York City for two years. We hope to do that again now because we have a whole new view of it. Where a lot of people think it's just about sexual harassment, it's really about power. That's such a large, large, overriding issue. It's a power game. It's a power play."
Next on Finn's agenda, pegged for Broadway in 2010, is the stage premiere of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the old Spencer Tracy-Sidney Poitier-Katharine Hepburn clambake. "We're working on it now," he said. "We just did a reading of it with Jesse L. Martin, who was terrific." William Rose, who won 1967's Best Original Screenplay Oscar for it, has died; the new adaptation will be by Todd Kriedler, who, Finn pointed out, "was the dramaturg for August Wilson and was heavily involved in the writing of Radio Golf." Huddling in a corner in the second-floor dining area was Michael Ritchie, talking on a cellphone to wife Kate Burton, who had just landed from L.A and was winging it toward the party. Ritchie is artistic director of the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles (specifically, the Mark Taper Forum where Oleanna tried out).
"We'd started doing the show before I realized I had no idea what Oleanna meant, and I had to look it up," he admitted. "It's the idea for a Utopian community I believe, in upstate New York the idea that all people could live in harmony."
In the published play, Mamet clears all this up in his hazy fashion by quoting from a folk song: "Oh, to be in Oleanna, / That's where I would rather be. / Than be bound in Norway / And drag the chains of slavery." There. Now, you know.
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"I'm going into rehearsal Tuesday morning for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. That's down at New York Theatre Workshop. It's a superb adaptation by Rebecca Gilman of Carson McCullers' great novel. I'm doing it with Henry Stram and James McDaniel."
The "double-dipping" he has been doing of late, he tended to downplay. "I had the advantage of having done the show in L.A. I think one of the advantages of doing a play successfully in one incarnation and knowing you're going to get a chance to do it again is to really reexamine it, which we did. We went back to work on the production very, very seriously. We didn't just remount the play. I'd meet the actors at nine every morning, and I'd work for five hours, and then I'd join the Royal Family company, which was in previews at that time, so that worked out very well. I walked through the parking lot between 45th and 46th, cut through the Edison Hotel, go over to the Friedman, and I'd see my company. It was a great privilege for me to be able to walk back and forth between two incredible companies of actors."
Otherwise, he conceded, they were worlds apart: "To direct The Royal Family is a fabulous assignment as a battlefield commander, and to direct Oleanna is a little taste of what it must be like to be a psychoanalyst."
Precise casting made his task easier. "I think these two play it hell-for-leather. Oleanna is an extraordinary play, and I think it's a genuine tragedy of democracy."
Political correctness, when cut too fine, creates casualties, and the question of Carol's commitment to bringing John's world down around his ears is still subject to debate, like the ones that spill over after the show. There's a certain lady-or-tigress question mark hovering over the play, and Hughes leaves the door open (as he did with his big Tony winner, Doubt) to opposite interpretations.
"She's somebody who has a viewpoint that she desperately wants to be heard, and so does he, and thereby hangs a tale," Hughes summarized simply. "The greatest plays arise out of impossible situations. Oleanna is a marvelous shift of power, an exertion of power, the use of power, the desire to acquire power that's what we're all about at Oleanna, and that's what we're all about in our society."
Mercedes Ruehl, who was last in the Golden rivaling a goat for Pullman's affections in Edward Albee's Tony-winning The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, missed the paparazzi coming and going, arriving last minute at the theatre and late to the party, but she was overflowing with praise for Pullman: "He never dropped his concentration for a second, and the climax consequently was a huge payoff. He was really, really marvelous. We were talking about it an hour after we left the theatre. I'm in no position to be proud of him, but I'm proud of him."
Not many actors can make a convincing case for goat love and Pullman followed that with another arduous Albee opus, Peter and Jerry, in which he provoked a stranger in the park to kill him. Now, this! "I don't know why, but these are the roles that I'm getting in New York," he shrugged haplessly. "There are times when it feels very energizing to play these characters, but they are wringers."
He is happy to have finally settled into a regular Broadway run. "Now that we're doing it on a fairly good rhythm, there's a certain weight you feel that comes beforehand. You never know quite how it's going to go. It's so clichι that these plays are different every night, but this one has really different audiences. Sometimes they are absolutely quiet, and then other times they're raucous as hell, and they'll try to take the play away from you. Some people are just shocked. It's awkwardly awful, and then other times people are going, 'Yeah.' I can't believe the blood-lusting out there."
And does he believe that, from the very beginning, Carol was a calculating Circe bent on John's destruction? "For my money, outside the play," he said, "it doesn't quite seem like she came in with such an agenda, but she's had another agenda all her life. People who live in anger, I think, choose to stay there because it activates them."
The self-assured, self-activated Ms. Stiles didn't seem remotely burned out by her blowtorch performance. "It's exhilarating, actually," she replied coolly. "After the show is over, I have so much energy because you get really fired up during it. It's a very aerobic show, too very physical so I always feel, because I do so much screaming and crying, it's cathartic, and I come out of the show feeling terrific."
It troubled her not a whit that the audience is usually not in her corner. "I think it's a really liberating thing to be playing a character that doesn't care if people like her. She's so confrontational and aggressive, and it's beyond the point of compromise."
But she and Pullman fine-tune their performances from night to night. "Some nights, it's different. Some nights you can see there's maybe a little connection with the two characters or there's a moment where they might come to terms, and then some nights it's a full-out brawl. Tonight, I felt Bill and I were communicating. The audience seemed hip to the play so I think they came in with preconceived ideas. I could hear a lot of dissatisfaction with my character."
Did she notice how Carol's vocabulary improved after she filed a report against John with the tenure committee? She nodded yes. "That was always the question people had in L.A. People would say, 'Well, how come she doesn't understand anything, and then later she's so articulate?' so I actually changed my mind about the character. I thought, 'Well, what if I go into the first scene thinking that sometimes she doesn't understand and so she doesn't agree with him?' You know, you can say, 'I don't understand,' but, if you say it with the subtext 'I don't agree with you,' what you're saying is illogical and she's smart from the get-go." Also, she admitted her character could be getting a little coaching on the sidelines by vested interests. "One thing the play is critical of, or points out, is that people feel empowered when other people are telling them they're right he's propped up by the institution, she's propped up by her group and the idea that there's power in numbers is dangerous.
"David Mamet and his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, who was the original Carol, came to opening night in L.A., and they were enthusiastic. I think that they like that we had our own interpretation of the play. He sent me notes, but I don't think he wants to influence my take on it."
Old TV co-stars (Ana Gasteyer and Chris Parnell of "Saturday Night Live") and new (Edie Falco and Paul Schulze of "Nurse Jackie") led the opening-night guest-list. Gasteyer was also representing The Royal Family, as was majestically Rosemary Harris. "I saw Ana on opening night, and she's fantastic," raved Parnell, who admitted it gave him a hankering to do theatre. "I'm a little chicken. I've been away from it for so long. It takes certain muscles that I'm not sure I have toned right now. I hope I get the opportunity to."
Vanessa Carlton, a pop-music pal of Stiles', showed up as did Eddie Kaye Thomas of "American Pie," who went to high school with Stiles. "This show is what I love about the theatre," opted the latter. "It's a wonderful example of how theatre can settle you into your seat and then kick you in the teeth."
In Hughes' camp: Kate Jennings Grant ("I'm not a Fiancιe. I'm The Girlfriend. Everyone's marrying me off"), who just returned from filming "Love and Other Drugs" with Jake Gyllenhaal in Pittsburgh, and Hughes' actress mom, Helen Stenborg, who had missed his Royal Family opening because she was gainfully employed Off-Broadway (in Vigil at the DR2). A buddy of Hughes, Chris Pine of the last "Star Trek" feature, caught the Oleanna opening in L.A. but decided to skip this one rather than endure the paparazzi-pelting he got when he attended the Royal Family launching.
Also attending: Alan Alda, in town working on a PBS science show, and wife Arlene Weiss, who writes children books and illustrates them with her photographs ("Hello, Goodbye," from Tundra Press, is her latest), Sherri Shepherd from "The View," Vogue's editor Anna Wintour with her pretty daughter (who's not an actress but an intern at Manhattan Theatre Club) and Heather Randall with director Ethan McSweeny.
Most conspicuously, and predictably, M.I.A. was Mamet himself, a notorious no-show for his Broadway openings. He was believed to be on the West Coast but was expected to be in town in time for Pidgeon's night at Joe's Pub on Oct. 15. Then, he gets to work directing his latest opus for Broadway, Race, with James Spader, Richard Thomas and Kerry Washington. It opens Dec. 6, giving him for two seasons in a row two plays on Broadway.