POWER PLAY
‘Oleanna’ professor-student drama foreshadowed #MeToo movement
David Mamet locks a man and a woman in an office where, depending on one’s point of view, an act of sexual harassment occurs.
Taking on the topic well before the #MeToo era, (it premiered in 1992), “Oleanna” detonates the fury of sexual exploitation through a power struggle between a pompous college professor and a female student who accuses him. The Vortex Theatre will open the play on Friday, Aug. 17. It runs weekends through Sept. 9.
“It’s misunderstandings, misperceptions and ‘He said, she said,” and it really destroys lives,” director Marty Epstein said. “You sit in rehearsals, and you go, ‘Who’s the bad guy here’?”
The playwright has been quoted as saying he wants to make his audience members choose as they squirm and hyperventilate over the onstage fireworks.
“He wants to create debate and discussion,” Epstein said.
John, the professor, is gaining tenure and buying a house. He’s constantly distracted by his wife’s telephone calls. His student Carol arrives in his office to discuss her failing grade.
“He says a few things he thinks are totally harmless,” Epstein said. “She comes from a culture very different from his.
“By the second act, she’s misinterpreted everything.”
And she’s turned from a naive student of questionable intelligence into an angry activist. The script implies she has joined a feminist “group” that has stiffened her spine.
By the third act, John has lost almost everything.
“The arc of the play goes from him as the person in power to her being the person in power,” Epstein said.
The director himself recently retired after 20 years of teaching accounting at Central New Mexico College.
“I’ve never had anything like that (happen), but it was always on my mind,” he said. “I saw myself indirectly. I’ve always been careful about off-color jokes. I joke around; you want to keep students in accounting awake.
“If we do it well, people will walk out of the show debating.”
The title refers to a folk song describing a 19th century escapist vision of utopia.
“Oleanna” stars Zoey Reese and Bob Jesser.