Maria's review
bookshelves:
plays
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Read in February, 2008
This is the first Mamet play I have read (sacrilege, I know) and I was pleasantly surprised. My only prior experience was a production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago which I found to be dated (reasonable) and stilted (unacceptable). I also find it annoying that actors, in general find his writing to be so brilliant. Plus the scenes I have seen people do never sound natural: too many cryptic pauses and unfinished thoughts, not enough contractions, and Mamet's penchant for saying "do you see?" instead of "you know?".
Anyway Oleanna was a pleasant surprise because in reading the text it occurred to me that the language could be made to sound more natural if the actor works at it. So maybe what I have seen so far suffered at the hands of inexperienced performers. It has also made me listen more closely to my own conversations to see in what ways they differ from my writing. What I find is that there are many more incomplete sentences and that I do go back and ...more
This is the first Mamet play I have read (sacrilege, I know) and I was pleasantly surprised. My only prior experience was a production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago which I found to be dated (reasonable) and stilted (unacceptable). I also find it annoying that actors, in general find his writing to be so brilliant. Plus the scenes I have seen people do never sound natural: too many cryptic pauses and unfinished thoughts, not enough contractions, and Mamet's penchant for saying "do you see?" instead of "you know?".
Anyway Oleanna was a pleasant surprise because in reading the text it occurred to me that the language could be made to sound more natural if the actor works at it. So maybe what I have seen so far suffered at the hands of inexperienced performers. It has also made me listen more closely to my own conversations to see in what ways they differ from my writing. What I find is that there are many more incomplete sentences and that I do go back and search for the right word and make parenthetical statements. While I think Mamet's conversations are much more vague than mine seem to be, he has captured a lot of the imperfections of spoken language. The lack of specificity in his language also caused me to read the play much more slowly than I normally read because I really had to pay attention to what was going on in order to make any sense of it. Mamet also gives the actor a lot of delivery cues by italicizing words and adding "pause". Having read the play, I think it would be wonderful to see on stage because the actors would hopefully have taken a lot of the work out by having investigated the meaning of the text and made choices. This is true of any play in theory but I think it is much more of an achievement when the playwright is trying to accomplish something more complicated with the style and language.
As to the plot, it is a two person play so I kept trying to figure out who the protagonist is. For me it flopped around which was disconcerting having just read a fantasy novel where it was blatantly obvious who to root for. The complexity is interesting and seems more like real life but I also understand why I enjoy retreating into the comfort of "good/bad" because it requires a lot less of me as a reader. Bottom line: I found this play to be thought provoking and I'm no longer a Mamet-hater.
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Oleanna: A Play 
