In The World: Orleanna at Triad Stage

Mamet’s ORLEANNA at Triad Stage: A Provocative Evening of Theater
by Fred Canada

An Introduction via another Prologue
There’s this great deal of pounding coming off the walls of my family’s townhouse flat. The neighbors aren’t supposed to be home. They’ve even asked that my mother collect their news-papers for the weekend, but someone happens to be there, banging various sorts of aggression up against the walls.

I go next door. Ring the doorbell. J rushes awkwardly down the stairs and comes to the door. Her eyes are well-lit with tears. She wipes another collection of tears from her eyes, as her front door widens. She is seven years older than I am. I have viewed her as a friend and felt as close to her as I am to my mother’s three sisters. I ask, “What is wrong?” Ask if I can come in? “Sure,” J says.

Now J can no longer hold herself back from explaining what all is wrong with her. Before last weekend, I might have simply gone up to this 60-something year-old white woman and offered her a hug. But I’m not as spontaneous as I usually am. I can’t do anything but offer an index finger towards her; for only slightly less than seven days ago, I’ve seen Preston Lane’s di-rection of Orleanna at the Triad Stage, in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Three Recurring Acts in Motion
I sit inside Triad Stage where an audience member seldom sits. I can also look at others looking at me look front, left and right. There isn’t anyone at center stage. Not yet, anyway. This is, however, the stage and, soon enough, the players, Lee Spencer and Ginny Myers Lee, will arrive.

The set makes one think that they have side-ring seats at a boxing match. Though no ropes are visible, the set is simple. No bookcases or a couch as Mamet has suggested are available. This seems quite suitable for a potential staging of Orleanna. For as audience members, this will keep the intensity on the characters before us, as our distractions will be minimized as John and Carol begin their bout: a moment’s praise to Randall J. McMullen and Preston Lane on this fleet.

What keeps my attention at this interval of silence (I cannot even plunder on the fact of whether or not there’s any music at all, albeit there seemingly isn’t ever any fore-playing tunes at Triad Stage) are the pair of fluorescent lights mounted up above the arena. And with this ceiling’s view, one sees the usual brilliance of a set design that has become hallmark inside this location in Greensboro’s downtown renaissance on Elm Street. John Wolf has also added a couple of interior lights to this cubic dynamics of fluorescent shields that grants an almost inexplicable gesture that heavy weights are among us.

The ambience is perfect, but ambiguous. A phone rings when it is supposed to ring. An actor speaks and listens as if someone else is indeed on the other end of the line. (By the way, it could be any of us: and not to take anything away from Ginny Myers Lee’s state of anxiety in the role of Carol, that’s just how convincing Lee Spencer also is.)

The props, a desk and a chair, were not made with oak, pine or maple trees. They are metallic. And resemble furniture that one usually sees in the dominance of authoritatively institutional settings. This could be the office inside a library. This could be a corner inside a mental asylum. This could be a dwelling inside the barracks of an officer’s lodge. This could be inside the periphery of a university’s corridors. The fact being this, that Mr. Lane has managed to make it exquisitely universal; and this is what secures everyone, no matter which side they end up on, that Mr. Mamet’s piece is indeed controversial and timeless.

The lights dim. The rollercoaster ride begins. Mistakes are made: compounded with attempts at corrections. A cycle of communication recycles, but to no avail. The actors are at a plausible height with their adrenaline from the play’s outset. The music blasts out welcomingly harsh at the end of the first act, when the lights fade; then again after the second act; that’s twice, intensifying more and more with each closing act.

Third act: lights up: Kelsey Hunt’s ingenious hindsight as the Costume Designer erupts! Perhaps you yourself feel that you’ve just spent the last two nights out on the street with John. Ms. Hunt’s perfect details of a dress shirt dangling out of John’s jeans allow this to seem so.

Now, at the end, the director has found a bold statement of violence that Mamet hadn’t dared envisioned. This now becomes a feminist issue, if it wasn’t one for Carol and us all before the third act began: (Carol’s face pounding on the desk top: John kicking her in the stomach: exactly how many times I’ve seemed to have forgotten. I’m thinking about poor Rhianna at this point!) Then at last, back to Mamet, John stands over Carol with a chair as the counts of our breath shorten. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Triad Stage’s impeccably brutal, but worldly ripe production of David Mamet’s Orleanna.