Behind the Scenes: Oleanna (Mamet, 1994) with William H. Macy and Debra Eisenstadt

I don't understand what anything means. And I walk around from morning till night with this one thought in my head. I'm stupid. No one thinks you're stupid. No, what am I? I think you're angry. Many people are. I want to know about my grade. Carol. I have to pass this course. I have to pass it. What do you want me to do? What is it you would have me do? How can I go back and tell them the grades that I've? I'm sorry for you. You told me to buy your book and read it. Everything you say, I, everything. Look, I'm not your father. We'll start the whole course over. Your final grade is an A. But the class is only half over. Your grade for the whole term is an A, if you will come back and meet with me. Why would you do this for me? I like you. What is everyone talking about? I don't understand. I don't know what it means. I don't know what it means to be here. You tell me I'm intelligent, and then you tell me I should not be here. I don't understand. What do you mean? Easy. Listen to me. Easy. With a student moved to embrace said student. He put his arms around. Do you deny it? Do you know that I tried to help you? What I know I have reported. Don't you have feelings? I have a responsibility. To? To my group. Your group? You are to be disciplined. That is what the tenure committee has said. They're going to discharge me. Do you know what you've worked for? Power. What have I done to you? Dave Mamet sent me the script, and my first reaction as it's been with many of his plays is, oh Dave, you can't do this. It was sort of outrageous. It was, it was politically dicey. The girl was heinous. I mean, she, even on paper, I thought, I hate this girl. And I thought she was lying, and I thought, I felt like Dave was getting into dicey territory. I didn't know if he was exercising demons or what. But of course, he's an old pal, and when Dave Mamet sends you a script, you give it a second read. And the more I read it, the more I started to get her point of view, what a prig he was, and what a condescending fellow he was, and how he held his students. And I saw her point of view just enough, but I still thought we were in dicey territory. Not that it couldn't happen, but it sort of hadn't happened. So I guess I'm more timid than Dave is. No, we aren't going, we aren't going to lose the house. The other thing I thought about it was that he'd gone even farther with the dialogue. Dave has a tendency to strip out everything, to strip out, even though they seem wordy, he strips out as much exposition as he can. He didn't tell the audience anything. That freaking phone call at the beginning there, it just went on and on and on, I got it, but I worried about acting it so that the audience would know what was going on. It turns out, as with so many things, Dave's smarter than me. Dave's smarter than just about anybody I know. And it just flowed, it was a nightmare to memorize, but once you get it, you got it, it became so real to me. So Rebecca Pigeon did it first, and we started it in Boston at the Hasty Pudding, which is a pretty liberal place with a heavy feminist population, and I thought, well, this is gonna be fun. It was in the spring, so a lot of the kids were finishing with their finals, and oh, there's a new David Mamet play. Well, he writes sort of dirty stuff, you know, sexual perversity in Chicago. This would be a great date play, they thought. And there was no publicity on it, and they had no idea what they were coming in to see. And Dave scared the out of me when he said, Billy, you'll look after my wife, won't you? I mean, I don't know that people are gonna come over the footlights, but in case they did, you'll take care of my wife. I said, yeah, hadn't thought of people coming over the footlights after us, but I made my plan, you know? I thought, when they get up, it's a high stage. They're gonna have to be in an awkward position, and I thought, well, if I see someone coming in, I'm just gonna dropkick them right there before they can stand up, and then grab her and run off the stage. It really terrified me, though. So we opened the play, and we were booed. I'd never been booed in my life, and we were not booed by feminists or women. We were booed by the professors, almost to the person, because I've never heard that sound before in my career, thank God. I heard booing, and I sort of squinted through the footlights. Are you booing, as if to say? And there they were. They were all white. They were all middle-aged professors, and they were booing, and we had a lovely moment when I went, oh, my God, you're booing me, and they went, oh, my God, you're seeing me boo you. I'm not booing you. It's about the play. So everybody was sort of fecakta for a second there. And then when we got to the part where he slapped her and then lifts the chair, they started calling out, kick her ass, kill her. These are professors who are yelling at the stage, kill her. It's an experience like I've never had before. It was something, and oh, the poor people who went with dates. Not a lot of people got laid after seeing that play, but people just couldn't put it down. It gnawed at them. They had to know, what did they miss? Is she crazy? Am I crazy? Then when they would hear what their significant others thought, they were beside themselves. How can you say that? It just tore people up. Then we moved the play back to New York. We did it at a theater downtown, and the bigger audience just brought more feedback, more shouting at the stage, and also the bigger audience somehow made it more volatile. I think in the smaller theater, somehow it was contained, but more people just made more emotions in the room. And sometimes they were funny. You would hear, we'd get 2 1⁄3 of the way through it, and you'd hear, shut up, you shut up. And they'd just be going, we'd just act through it. One guy went charging out of the theater. The ushers told me this. Went charging out of the theater in a rage, and the usher said that his wife caught up to him outside on the sidewalk, and she's going, dear, dear, and he stopped and he turned around and he said, that's it, no more plays unless they're revivals. He was in a rage. Rebecca did it for a good long time, and then Mary McCann took over. And same experience. The characters in that play are bigger than any actor that would do them. I mean, I've seen it happen before with Dave, and it's happened to me before with Dave, but sometimes his characters are so indelible and so outrageous and so well-drawn that they forget that you're in the play. There was a lot of press on this thing, and my memory is few people even mentioned that there were actors there. No one said a word. We ran it a good long time. Deborah Eisenstadt was the understudy, and she went on a couple of times, and then I left. Maybe Deborah ran it there, but at any rate, when Dave decided he wanted to make a film out of it, Dave, being the kind of guy he is, gave it to the understudy. Isn't that sweet? He could have had anyone he wanted. And Deborah was great. She had a naivete that Rebecca doesn't have because Rebecca's been around the block, and that added, I thought, a good bit. She acted and talked and was young, and it perhaps made a little more sense that a girl like that could be swayed by her group because that's an outrageous statement. When the character says, you tried to rape me, the audience lost their minds. They just lost their minds that it had gone that far. It was, Dave just kept upping the stakes on this thing, and with Deborah, because she's so young, you could see it, yeah. I don't know what it means to be here. It was difficult, and it was high-pressured for a couple of reasons. One, it's two people talking, and at once didn't want to throw out the performance I had developed on stage, but at the same time, I wanted to do it new and find it fresh, and some of the language is very formal with few contractions, and it's not with all his plays, but with that play, I think all of us always felt duty-bound to memorize it exactly, and we did. Here's an example. There was a line, oh, you put a gun in your mouth before you get these lines down, but the line was, no, I see, I see what you, it, but your work. Just imagine that on the page. No, I see, I see what you, it, but your work. There's an old thing in acting. You can't act the words. You can only act the objective, but boy, if you try to act the words, and you take a look at that line, you go, well, I'm, in the film version, I wanted to make it sound conversational. I mean, when the professor wanted to be professorial, I was okay with that, but at other times, when he let his hair down a little bit, I felt duty-bound to find new stuff to make it a little more naturalistic, if that's the word, so I was a little tense doing the thing. Also, it was a big shot. I mean, it was, as I said, two people on camera the whole time. It's not like you gotta fight for screen time, so I really wanted to be good, and usually that's a kiss of death of acting, trying to be good, but my memory of the set was that Dave was just tickled pink with the design, with the photography. He just loved it. Dave is a very courtly fellow, a wonderful guy. I've seen him say hello to 20 extras at 6 a.m., and at 9 o'clock that night, say goodbye to them all by name. He'd remember them all. He'd do things like, you know, he wears a baseball cap a lot, but he'd meet an extra, and he'd take off his hat and stick his hand out. He's very courtly, and as a result, people will just, they'll do anything. They'll leap out the second floor window if you ask them to, but he takes a lot of times, you know, there'd be a shot set up, and we'd all look at them on, and he'd go, well, is that amazing or what? And, you know, every once in a while, we'd stop and give applause to the designer, something like that, and it sounds a bit dorky, but lordy. You know, when the property guy gets applause from the company because the prop is perfect, you know, they, their heads are gonna explode. They may think, they may say it's silly, but they love it. I remember that freaking column, but I also remember that we didn't have a choice. It was structural in the room, and he decided to use it and take advantage of it and find a new location. He added that song, too. There's the anthem there. I think there were a couple of exterior shots, not many. Don't we, we do say what we mean, and you say I don't know. We didn't need a lot of stage directions because I had done it for a year. Dave knew it, Debra knew it, so it's not like we needed it, and Dave works with the same costumers and people like that over and over. He, I remember he was just hammering me on my voice, always. Our joke, and we still have it, was the first lines of the play are what about the land? What about the land? And Dave says, Billy, you're confusing the audience. Why are there lambs? I said, there aren't lambs. I'm saying land. He says, no, man. You're saying, what about the la? And I said, okay, and it got to the point where when I knew he was in the audience, I would say, what about the land? What about the land? And he said, okay, back off. I say, college education. There's this phrase, the warehousing of the young. She keeps bringing it up to the professor that he said education is nothing but warehousing of the young, and I think Dave was speaking of himself because he has the same attitudes often about school and education, even though he's the most amazing teacher I've ever had. He's a fabulous teacher, just brilliant, entertaining, insightful, direct. He knows more about acting than anybody I've ever known. At the same time, he gets invited to teach every place, and the first thing he says is, well, the first thing you should do is drop out of school. Nobody can teach you how to act. You can't learn it. Just get some work and ply your trade that way. You'll get better the more you do, but it's probably tough for the people that hire him to hear him say drop out of school and to field all the comments from the students. Dave Mamet says we should drop out of school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that warehousing of the young, I mean, that's one of Dave's pet peeves that schools don't do their jobs. They've not even defined their jobs, so it's hard to judge them whether they're doing their jobs or not. You get out of college, and you have no marketable skills, and you're not much smarter than when you went in, and it cost a fortune, and I think he was making fun of himself with that phrase, warehousing of the young. I think Oleana's a tragedy in the purest form. I mean, the die was cast from the beginning of the play. The conclusion is inevitable given the circumstances, and if memory serves, what he was trying to heighten John's folly that he had allowed himself to get so emotional about this and to be, I think the professor would think, to be baited by this girl to such an extent that he did what he did, and he ruined his life. What he was trying to heighten is the devastation that John had brought upon himself. He's history. He's gone. That guy will never rear his head again. Here's the other thing about Dave that's really great. He writes these things, and when you quiz him, what were you thinking of? What did you mean? What do you want the audience to take away from it? He'll have none of that. He says, I told my story. You do with it as you will. I don't know. I can't tell you what it means. I told the story as clearly as I can. Now you decide, and he'll stick with that, and he's not being coy either. The more I've thought about that, the more I thought that's strength. That gives him great strength. A lot of times when I do publicity, they'll say, what do you want the audience to take away from this project, or what do you want trying to teach them, and that's the wrong question, man, and that's a bad reason to make a movie or write a play, to teach or to instruct or to change the public dialogue or something like that. That's a rotten reason to put pen to paper for a dramatist, I think. What you need to do is just tell your story and let the chips fall where they may, and he's a genius at that, and he's so brave. He don't care. Wish I could be more like him. I started acting as a child. I started reading Tennessee Williams when I was really young and Sam Shepard. My mother sent me to a performing arts kind of camp, and by the time I was 14, I started taking it very seriously, and I lived in Queens, but I would take the train and the bus to get to my acting class every weekend, and it was the highlight of my week, and I studied with this woman, Kate Harper, and then I ended up going into college and majoring in theater. Before Eliana was a movie, it was a play, and it started out in Boston with Rebecca Pidgeon and William H. Macy, and then they brought it to New York with Rebecca and Bill, and it was a big controversial play. There were fights in the lobby, and it had a really successful run, and it played at this theater downtown called the Orpheum Theater, and I'd heard about it. I lived nearby the theater, and I'd seen the marquee or whatever, and I was aware of it because it was sort of part of this downtown New York City that I was living in, but I hadn't seen it. I hadn't read the play or anything. I just was sort of in that environment that I was in at that time, and I was acting at the time and sort of off-off-Broadway, not getting paid, and then I looked it backstage, and they were looking for an understudy for the play. I went to the open call, as I would with a lot of different things. I hadn't read the play or seen the play. I just had the monologue, I think, or maybe I went in with a monologue. I can't remember exactly, and I got a callback, and then I don't know how many callbacks I had before they asked me to see the play, but eventually they said, you really should see the play, and I said, well, I really should read the play before I even see the play, so I read the play, and I loved it. After seeing his wife, it was Rebecca Pidgeon doing the role with Bill Macy, I was gonna go back, I think, for Bill. I had a callback with him, and then I had another callback with David, and there was a woman who was gonna be taking over for Rebecca Pidgeon named Mary McCann, so they were looking for Mary McCann's understudy, and I remember David, after I auditioned, just said to me, do you know what an understudy does? And I said, I think I do, and I remember being in my apartment and getting the call that I had gotten the role, which was a huge deal for me, as the understudy, so I started as the understudy. I had come up with a lot of ideas about who she was, but David doesn't talk about the character to you. He just gave three super objectives. It was all about his writing and saying the words and saying them clearly, which was the direction he would give. A term of art, because that's right. I think Rebecca was supposed to do the role in the film, and she got pregnant. I'd gone from understudy in the play to taking over the role, and again, I went on tour with Bill Macy. We went to the Kennedy Center. We went to a bunch of different locations and did the play. I got to do the play in New York a few times before the tour, and we toured with that play for a long time, so I had done the play for a while, and this wasn't that long after I had done it, and I think it was really nice of him to cast me because I was a nobody. He could have gotten a name, probably, for that role, but I think it was a small, independent film, and I knew the role, and we just sort of did it like we had done the play. As far as David Mamet's concerned, I don't feel like I know him at all. I know him just in this one weird way where we had this, where I did Oleana. He was very kind to me. He was very mysterious to me, and I feel like any time I had any kind of conversation with him outside of what I was doing in the play or in the film, I think I was really intimidated talking to him, so I don't know that he got to know me any more than I got to know him, but I felt like I knew him through his words, through the script, and I think that that was appropriate. What I learned from him now that I'm a director was how well he sort of captained his ship, and he was very kind, and there was a kind of an equanimity between everybody on the set, so he treated everybody with a lot of respect, and he got a lot of respect in return, and I think everybody enjoyed being there. I had a relationship with Bill because we were working together, and he's a really friendly guy, and we became kind of like brother and sister during this period. I really loved hanging out with him, and I think we just forged a really strong friendship. Put Jerry on. The interesting thing was is that the production was in what was a mental institution, and I felt like the character that I was playing was kind of borderline personality or something like I had been reading. The book that was sort of my Bible for that was Girl Interrupted before they'd made a movie of it with Susanna Kaysen, and I think where we shot was really close to where Susanna Kaysen had been hospitalized, so that I felt was like a weird coincidence because I didn't know I was doing the film when I did the play, but when I did the play, that was a book that I remember reading over and over. He told me he had problems with his wife and that he wanted to take off the artificial stricture of teacher and student. He put his arms around. Do you deny it? Can you deny it? You know, I think I had my own personal experiences, and it was good for me to have a place to sort of put that anger in this character. Now is a really interesting time. I know people were really angry. I mean, like, I think when I remember, what I remember is my character being so hateful to people and going into auditions after that movie, getting auditions, and people being actually mad at me, and there being some sort of weird, or going to, I remember going to some conferences for David Mamet, and they would sort of talk to me as if I were that character. And I'd have to remind them that that's not me. What? Is this so bizarre? I can't believe you. It's not necessary you believe it. Academic freedom. Feminists were angry by the one-sidedness of it, or the seemingly one-sidedness of it. I mean, everyone interprets it differently. In the play, when she got beat up, the audience would cheer. I know it impacted Rebecca. I mean, it was really awful. And the audience would cheer, and that's what I was sort of talking about, that people wanted to see her hurt. Ah! No, ah! What's so interesting about this play or this film is that it's this conversation, and it's this sort of stab at higher education, and having tenure, and these ivory towers, and somebody, the character that I was playing, I was imagining, didn't come from much, and is trying to just get by and pass her class, and goes into this man's office, and he sort of keeps her there. And he's just talking, and talking, and talking. I mean, so I think it's easier to sort of take his side, but I think if you're really listening, you might take her side. And I know that in the theater, they had like a blackboard up, and the audience would vote for whose side they were on, and they tried to do this kind of gimmicky thing where you got to vote and take sides. But ultimately, I would think that just from what I gather, that they mostly were taking his side, not her side. I went back to being on tour with the Wendy Wasserstein play, and I went on to do some television, and I just wasn't having that great of an experience. I was kind of depressed as an actress. It wasn't really, this wasn't really what I wanted to be doing, I realized. Especially when I was on tour, and I was like, you know, my early 20s, and I kind of would think about, well, where do I want to be in 10 years? And I would see, I felt like I could have a career as an actress of some sort. But I has always been more interested in the writing, and in what, and having my own interpretation of what I was reading, and I was always feeling somewhat disappointed. I started doing classes down the block at this film school, and I ended up making, started making films, and started writing plays, and I was much happier doing that. And then I got a scholarship to this film school, and I said, I want to do that. And I don't really, and as soon as I did make that choice, and I did start making films and writing my own things, and I was so much happier as a person, my life changed completely. Because I got that job at such a young age, I kind of got something out of my system. It allowed me to have that experience of being a professional actress at a young age, and realizing that's not what I want to be doing. I'm very grateful that I had that opportunity, and that David gave me that opportunity. And I have great memories of my friendship with Bill, and you know, it was all good.