THEATER REVIEW : Casting’s Just One Bug in ‘Oleanna’ : Mamet Insufficiently Draws the Characters in His Political Tract

The controversial casting of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” for its Los Angeles premiere has made a bad play worse.

Mamet insisted on casting a longtime colleague, Lionel Mark Smith, as the professor who’s accused of sexual harassment by one of his students. Producers at the Mark Taper Forum, where the play had been scheduled to open last month, objected and canceled their production. Smith, who is black, charged the Taper with racism--a charge the Taper emphatically denied.

Now the play is at the 99-seat Tiffany Theatre, a better home for this small-scaled clash between two characters than the more expansive Taper would have been. It’s much easier for the audience to feel trapped, along with the man in the play, at the Tiffany than it would have been at the Taper.

Yet “Oleanna” still doesn’t work. And while the casting of Smith and Kyra Sedgwick is part of the problem, the larger problem is the play itself. It has only one thing going for it: timeliness. Otherwise, it’s a shrill political tract.

“Oleanna” is as rigged as a play can get. Its hero-victim is a professor, preoccupied with his own searches for tenure and a new house, who nonetheless takes a few moments in his office to bring a personal touch to his instruction of Carol--a young, troubled student of questionable intelligence.

In Act One, we observe the two of them misunderstanding each other. Then, after intermission we learn that Carol has accused her Mr. Chips of improprieties. By play’s end, she has metamorphosed into what Rush Limbaugh would call a femi-Nazi.

She outlandishly charges the professor, John, with attempted rape, and submits a list of books that he must ban in his classes if he wants any relief. Finally, her criticism of one of his casual comments drives him over the edge.

Why would John ever consent to a second private interview with this creature, let alone a third? Apparently he’s overly confident of his own persuasive powers. Ah yes, a tragic flaw--and who says they don’t write classics any more?

If the play were presented as a cartoon, Mamet’s caricatured Carol might suffice. (Such a presentation also might have the leeway to explain that opaque title, “Oleanna,” which refers to a 19th-Century Utopian community.)

But here we’re in the land of Mamet hyper-realism, complete with the usual complement of 4,800 half-finished sentences. Here, we ought to be able to take the characters as seriously as we take the issues.

But when Mamet creates his characters out of straw, his point of view seems equally flimsy.

Sure, there probably have been PC commandos as outrageous as Carol. But the play would hit much closer to home if Carol were a person instead of a symbol. Or if we saw some representative of the mainstream--someone who, like most of us, isn’t sure who to believe when it’s one person’s word against another’s. Or, for that matter, if John himself weren’t quite so blameless in the first scene.

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As played by Smith, John’s biggest fault is that he can be slightly pompous or too easily distracted by the telephone. He doesn’t betray a trace of sexual interest in Carol, even to himself. Yet Sedgwick, despite heroic attempts to appear disheveled in the first scene, is a very glamorous-looking Carol. Under these circumstances, the play’s complexity suffers along with its credibility.

Then there is the fact that Smith is black. This is hard to overlook when John ironically grumbles about his “white man’s burden”--a phrase that Carol later throws back in his face. It becomes even more perplexing when Sedgwick, who is white, hectors John about his power and privileges and compares them to her own struggles. Even though she tells him it’s not his race that brought him down, she still begins to sound like a racist as well as a feminist.

Perhaps Mamet wants to say that extremists of all stripes sound alike. But it’s likely that a white feminist might pointedly refrain from targeting a black professor, so as not to dilute her own cause with questions of race, as Mamet has done here in his casting.

Director William H. Macy created the man’s role in the original production, and Smith and Sedgwick have mastered most--although not quite all--of Mamet’s rapid-fire exchanges. It’s not as if strangers have mangled Mamet’s intentions. No, blame this one on Mamet himself.

* “Oleanna,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Sunday matinees, 5 p.m. Indefinitely. $22-$25. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. *

Kyra Sedgwick: Carol

Lionel Mark Smith: John

David Mamet’s play, produced by Paula Holt in association with Patricia L. Glaser and Timothy Ford. Directed by William H. Macy. Production design Barry Robison. Costumes Taylor Kincaid Cheek. Fight choreography Randy Kovitz. Production stage manager John Hagen.