You need to give people what they want in ways they don’t expect.
This is exactly what David Mamet’s “Oleanna” and the Duke City Repertory Theatre have done marvelously.
Mamet’s script gets in and out with just enough dastardly wit and haunting ideas to provoke you before you realize you were messed with.
The most polarizing issues (sex, power, class — you know, all the good ones) are mocked and justified in the same breath. It’s like Mamet is telling you to be serious, then laughing at you, and ultimately drops you on your ass and tells you to deal with it.
The play is short and punchy, barely 90 minutes long.
It would be easy for a play, which at its bare bones is three scenes, two characters and one setting, to coast over the details, but here that is simply not the case.
Duke City Rep, which performs out of The Filling Station, is one of Albuquerque’s two professional theater companies — FUSION Theatre Company, which performs out of The Cell, being the other. While a lot of local theater is classifiable as being at a “professional level,” these companies are quite special.
The Filling Station is a 30s, old-style Route 66 gas station that’s been converted into a 99-seat performance space. Normally, the stage leaks around the sides of the two opposite facing seat banks, but not here.
The stage is clearly defined — a small square section of the ground outlining an office in the middle of the space.
Even better, there is actually an added ceiling suspended above the island mass — an ugly white office ceiling, one you might have spent hours staring at in grade school.
This little box universe is even more rigorously delineated by the actors’ entrances, and, as the soft, unassuming house lights dim, the actors appear and wait on the border of the box. Once they actually cross over, the first image is the soft glow of a desk light before the disorienting fluorescent lights in the faux ceiling snap on instantly.
Lighting like this is never used in theater, and the difference between it and the house light is immediately noticeable, making the embrace threatening and alienating.
It is effective.
The most noticeable abnormality, though, are the two wooden supports dead in the middle of the action, a permanent part of the building. When the space was being used to perform “Moby Dick” the beams were splintering naked wood, but now they are painted over and even used in the perfectly staged violence.
Theater in a space that was not intended to be a stage allows for any number of possibilities.
These possibilities are explored in depth through the dialogue between John Hardy, playing John, a university professor about to receive tenure, and Amelia Ampuero, playing Carol, one of his students.
Sitting on John’s desk is a phone that in many ways acts as a third character, ringing quite often, like the outside world peeking in to interrupt actors’ small world and larger struggle.
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The actors master their tiny space and are mesmerizing to watch. It would be easy to have the audience’s favor tip too strongly toward one character or another, but that doesn’t happen here. You feel the power struggle wrench back and forth as your own feelings do. To pull this off without any sort of coy ambiguity is a task, but the actors blast it out of the park.
Hardy has much experience, having directed “over 100 professional productions,” which seem to include every Shakespearean play known to man. Plays he wrote have gotten international tours, and he received a Lifetime Achievement Award. The list goes on and on. The man knows his stuff.
That is not to say that Ampuero has no hand in what goes on. Her role is by far the more difficult one, and her ability to combine villain and hero with power and weakness is something that stands out.
If the relatively high price of tickets are what scares you off from seeing most theater, make this your exception. A $12 student rate is a steal to the see a uniquely professional production.
