The Broadway Oleanna has posted a January 3 closing notice. Despite a movie-star cast of its own (Julia Styles and Bill Pullman), it has not lived up to Steady Rain standards for star-driven, two-character 90 minute plays. Last week, it did only 65% capacity, barely more than Brighton Beach when that closed. According to Playbill: "As of the January close date, Oleanna will have played 15 previews and 97 performances."
Maybe the closing notice is a ploy to boost sales. Personally I blame the ad campaign's tag line for being too prophetic: "Whatever Side You Take, You're Wrong!"
Riedel offers his take today, focusing on the backstage bickering over those "Take A Side" talkbacks:
I don't think the talk-backs sold many tickets. But since the show ran just 80 minutes, they were a way of making the evening seem less chintzy. "They definitely added value," says a production source. Alas, Mamet hated them. He never attended one, but he's against them on principle, believing that his play should stand on its own and not be picked apart by "experts" on the law, feminism and campus sexual harassment policies."The talk-backs added a lot to the show," an investor says, "but we were told by David's agent right after we opened that he didn't like them."
Mamet couldn't stop them. Writers control only the script, not what happens onstage after the final bow. But he had a trump card to play. When the show opened to mixed reviews, the producers had to cut expenses and asked Mamet to waive his royalties. His price? No more talk-backs. Production members are bitter that Mamet nixed something they believed was helping the show.
"This is a play that's supposed to generate controversy, and the audience wanted to talk about it," a source says. "Mamet was basically saying 'F - - - you' to his own audience. We'll never know if the talk-backs could have become a selling point because he shut them down so quickly." (They ended right after the show opened.)
That's right, without a stupid contrived talkback panel of random "experts" the audience will
never talk about the play.
I say, good for Mamet. The whole tone of the talkbacks, as advertised, demeaned as not just a civics lesson (which it clearly, uh, isn't) but a cheap tabloid style civics lesson at that.
Maybe the talkbacks turned people off--people who care about serious theatre that is. Maybe some who would be interested in seeing a decent production of an interesting Mamet play were not interested in going to a Montel (actual panelist) Williams show with dramatic prologue.
Anyway...What did I think of the show?
Like
Brantley I too had trouble getting the terrific 1992 William Macy Off-Broadway premiere out of my head. And Mamet's original minimalist staging--on a bare-bones, almost black-box set in the pre-
Stomp Orpheum Theatre downtown--enhanced the play's intensity much more than the bloated version that had to be expanded onto the John Golden stage. (Neil Patel's a good designer, but too bad he was required to build a cavernous faculty office for this struggling, not- yet-tenured professor that was fit for a Provost!)
But putting those memories aside, I still appreciated, even if I didn't prefer, Bill Pullman's far more genial protrayal. Pullman can't
not be likeable, I've decided. A fine stage actor who's made a specialty of sexually-beleaguered Albee men lately, he gave the character layers of almost
nebbishy self-doubt that the script otherwise would not suggest. Which unfortunately has a deleterious effect on the play, especially when the other character, the troubled female student, is played by an actress less talented and even less likeable: Julia Styles. I won't deny that
Oleanna may be a sexist play. But at least with the original cast, the professor came off as a tragically arrogant pedant and the student a perhaps misguided yet justifiably motivated complainant. In this production, I get the feeling most of the audience is wondering what that cold little fembot could possibly have against such a charming mensch as Bill Pullman!
Maybe
that's what kept people away.
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