Welcome to the York College Oleanna Blog

Adrianna and Solomon, welcome to my Oleanna blog. As with Anna in the Tropics, I will use this blog to chat about my feelings about rehearsals, concepts, and use it as a place for you to comment on what is said and any questions that you might have.

I have included in this first Blog a link to good Mamet resources for you. The first link is the David Mamet Society which has several links, commentary, and reviews about most of Mamet’s plays, films, etc. The following is a nice essay I thought might help shed a bit more light on Oleanna:

How important is the structure of Oleanna in assisting our understanding and enjoyment of the play?

This title is not intended to deflect you from a personal response to the play. Rather, it offers the possibility of moving beyond the analysis of character and plot, to consider some of the devices which Mamet uses to capture and hold the attention of the audience…..

So……. Where should we start? Well, perhaps by telling the story. The interesting thing about this is that the story is very simple and probably not very credible as a paraphrase. Would Carol really be capable of such radical change between Act 1 and Act 2 and could we imagine John allowing himself and his liberal teaching style to be so desperately compromised by an apparently naïve student.

And so we come to ‘suspension of disbelief’. Whatever Mamet is doing in Oleanna, he is managing to hold the attention of his audience, even though John’s diatribes are often quite difficult to understand and Carol’s later monologues tend to be endlessly self righteous. If we knew people like these in real life, we might choose to steer clear of them. Mamet’s bringing them together, observing unities of place, if not of time, make their explosive interaction totally compelling.

So, there must be elements in the structure of the play which help us to focus on the dialogue, accept the dramatic escalation which occurs from the beginning of Act 2 and to suspend our own disbelief to such an extent that we come out of the play, or of the book, feeling deeply engaged by the argument and often dogmatically partisan as well.. When I saw it, I wanted John to hit Carol with the chair. Even though I knew I was in a theatre and watching two actors - one of whom I’d seen playing Inspector Poirot on the tele….!!

What, then, is ‘structure’? Imagine a building; your house; your room; a cube, small, large, four walls, ceiling, floor, furniture, etc. Every room will be different, even though we all know what we mean when we say ‘my room’ What makes your room different from everyone else’s is its structure; the way in which all of the parts fit together to make the place and produce the ambience which can exist only within it. In the play, structure means much the same. There is a stage, an audience and actors. There is a story, but the story could be told differently if it were a novel, or a diary, or a newspaper report. The structure is what makes the piece unique and within the context of the theatre, there are conventions which can be observed or ignored in order to achieve specific effects.