"Running through April 12, Oleanna is a play worthy of repeated viewings."

 

"Not to be missed is the 6th Street Playhouse production of David Mamet's Oleanna.  Like Mamet's American Buffalo, it's an intense, tightly-scripted depiction of people in a hell of their own making.  The title purportedly comes from an old folk song about an imaginary utopia—as far from the dramatic reality as you can get.  John (Tim Kniffin) is a  pompous, overbearing university professor whose efforts to buy a home hinge on his being granted tenure. Carol (Gwen Kingston) is a timid undergrad who can't grasp what's being taught and asks for help—she needs to pass John's class to get into graduate school.  The dismissive unconcern he shows her in the first act comes back to haunt him in the second, when Carol returns as a newly-baptized radical feminist armed with a sheaf of sexual harassment charges. Their opposing agendas collide with devastating results.   Mamet's genius is that he doesn't take either side. Both characters are by turns sympathetic and despicable, and director Linda Reid slowly and masterfully turns up the heat from slow simmer to full boil.  Kniffin and Kingston are brilliantly authentic in this emotional, thought-provoking enactment of mutually assured destruction.  Running through April 12, Oleanna is a play worthy of repeated viewings".   Barry Willis

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Oleanna

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