The representatives of famed playwright David Mamet moved
swiftly to shut
down a production of his drama Oleanna
recently after only one performance. Why? Because the company kept secret,
until the curtain rose, its decision to cast a male actor in the lead female
role.
The 1992 play Oleanna
centers on the violent tension between a professor and a female student who
accuses him of sexual harassment, echoing the controversy a year earlier in
which Anita Hill charged Supreme Court then-nominee Clarence Thomas with the
same. The Alchemist Theatre in Milwaukee acquired the right to produce the play
and proceeded to cast actor Ben Parman in the role of Carol, the student. They changed
none of Mamet’s words; Parmen played the role as a male but was still referred
to as “Carol.”
Mamet’s reps also nixed this, sending a cease-and-desist
letter the day reviews of the show appeared. Blogger Ann Althouse points
out that the play “is about the relationship between a male and a female.
It’s specifically all about the male teacher/female student relationship. If it’s
about 2 men, it’s a different story.” Not only that, but Alchemist must have
known that the playwright wouldn’t approve – hence its secretiveness. Pundit
from Another Planet blogged
that concealing the casting choice also hinted at “an attention-seeking stunt,”
which is very likely.
The theatre responded with a statement that read, in part, “We
auditioned for this show looking for the best talent, not looking for a gender.”
That’s disingenuous; the very fact that they auditioned Parman (and probably
other males) for the role of Carol demonstrates that their gender experimentation
was intentional. The statement continued:
When Ben Parman auditioned we saw
the reality that this relationship, which is more about power, is not
gender-specific but gender-neutral.
We stayed true to each of David
Mamet’s powerful words and did not change the character of Carol but allowed
the reality of gender and relationship fluidity to add to the impact of the
story.
“Gender elasticity is the preoccupation of our time,” wrote
Pundit from Another Planet. This is a sad commentary on a culture gone astray,
because gender is “elastic” or “fluid” only in those with a narcissistic
obsession with sexual identity.
Mamet is notoriously protective of his work and has dealt
with similar casting attempts in his plays before. In 1999, his people shut
down an all-female production in New York of his Goldberg Street, explaining that “David Mamet does not permit any
gender changes.” In response, Thomas J. Brady objected
in the Philadelphia Inquirer that “Gender-bending
is nothing new in drama. Plays in ancient Greece were usually staged with men
playing female roles. Shakespearean characters of both sexes were traditionally
played by men or young boys.”
That’s different from the Alchemist situation. In those eras
men were playing female roles costumed
as women, and the audiences
understood and accepted that those characters were to be viewed as female.
The difference in the Alchemist production is that Ben Parman
was a male costumed as a male in a female role, playing either transgendered or
no-gendered or any-and-all-gendered, it’s unclear which. The production’s
director wrote
that “On any given day, in any given act, Carol might identify as female or
male or both or neither.” In any given act? So throughout the course of the
play “Carol” is exhibiting multiple personalities?
Once a director makes that
choice, the audience’s entire focus of the play, act by act, even moment by
moment, shifts from the dramatic relationship of the two characters onstage and
becomes instead: “Who or what is Carol, and why?” That element doesn’t “add to the
impact of the story,” as the Alchemist owners put it; it dominates the story. This confusion may suit the misguided
gender-erasing agenda of the production company, but anything that jars the
audience out of their suspended disbelief, out of the tale itself, is
detrimental to the story, and audiences deserve better than that.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/30/14)
