Oleanna @ Sweet Apple Productions
—Jill Sweeney
In a bold stroke for a new theater company, Sweet Apple Productions—a born-of-the-pandemic collaboration between two transplanted Texans locked down in NYC—opens their tenure in Fort Worth with a worthy staging of one of the most provocative plays from playwright David Mamet, a towering, if increasingly controversial, figure in American theater.
Oleanna, first staged in 1992, depicts a power struggle between college professor John (played here by Sweet Apple producing partner Ryan Brown), who is on the verge of gaining tenure, and his student Carol (Bethany Soder), who accuses him of sexual harassment. Widely perceived as a response to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate hearings in 1991, the play sparked impassioned responses when it premiered. In his October 1992 review, New York Times critic Frank Rich describes the audience between the play’s first act and the second as, “squirming and hyperventilating en masse, so nervous was the laughter and the low rumble of chatter that wafted through the house.” Criticism of later productions makes much of who the audience perceives to be “right” by the end of the play; indeed, the tagline for this production is “Whichever side you take ... you’re wrong”—and the program even directs the audience to scan a QR code and vote for their chosen side.
It might be easier to pick a side if the playwright so clearly hadn’t already. Though many argue that Mamet treats the characters even-handedly, I tend more towards the views of artistic director Oskar Eustis of The Public Theater, who laid them out in a 2022 Times article about Mamet: for Eustis, the writer’s earlier plays are “tremendously morally ambiguous and complex.” But with Oleanna, “he actually started to put his finger on the scale.”
The play’s first act introduces our players: having called Carol into his office to discuss her performance in his class, Brown gives the professorial John an air of casual intimacy and a sort of free-ranging physicality. Much like the character’s mind, he’s always in motion, performing a little soft-shoe here, or playing tennis against an imaginary opponent there. In a neat acting trick, Brown manages to make him feel simultaneously like your favorite professor (you know—the cool one, who talks to you like your friend, like a grown up), but also the one other girls might warn you to watch out for.
Soder’s Carol is initially a mousy, somewhat immature figure, hair in a bun and face hidden behind oversized glasses as she struggles to articulate her frustrations with John’s philosophies around education—and who deserves to have one. The actors do a nice job of showing that maybe, if things had gone a little differently, these two could have forged a real connection—but the moment is lost, and they can never get back on the same page.
Director Jennifer Bangs (the other producing partner behind Sweet Apple) does good work setting the stage for the conflicts that will follow, though the actors did struggle a bit in the first act with establishing the distinct rhythm of Mamet’s back-and-forth dialogue—though so-called “Mametspeak” is an acknowledged challenge for any number of actors.
So, the first act sets up the incident between the two that each perceives totally differently—John, as a productive meeting where he offered his help, and perhaps mentorship; Carol, as a moment of sexual harassment from a smug, privileged man asserting power over a woman in his private arena. As the play proceeds, Carol brings more and more formal complaints against John, first to the tenure board, but later to the police after another encounter sees John get physical with her. As she grows in confidence (and, some might say, in menace), Carol’s wardrobe and styling become increasingly mature, while John grows correspondingly disheveled and desperate.
Carol, it must be said, is less a fully-realized character on the page than John, seeming bafflingly dense in some scenes, cunning and eloquent in others. Soder’s interpretation of Carol came across to me as perhaps existing somewhere on the autism spectrum, which, if it’s the case, adds interesting dimensions to the character and her perspective on events. In any case, I enjoyed the way Bangs and Soder had Carol increasingly dominate John’s space as the play went on, rifling through the papers on his desk and hijacking his chalkboard to make her points more dramatically. The final moments, when Brown’s affability finally falls away and he snaps into violence, were effectively shocking—though it’s hard not to wonder if Mamet included that mostly to make both characters seem equally in the wrong.
In any case, the show is designed to provoke, and it does. For some, it may speak to our current moment, to the #MeToo movement or the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. For others, perhaps, it says more about the fraught relationship between students and their teachers on college campuses these days, or on issues of censorship. (Carol and the “group” that’s been helping her draft her complaints eventually seek to ban John’s book from campus, along with other texts they disapprove of.) No matter which side you end up on, the production was a bold statement of intent from an exciting new voice on the local theater scene. I’ll be excited to see what Sweet Apple Productions puts on for us next.
WEB: For more information, go to: sweetappleproductions.com
