WATERFORD, Mich.– When David Mamet’s play Oleanna opened in 1992, it was assumed that he had been inspired by the Clarence Thomas – Anita Hill hearings, which had gripped the country for months. The play (which Mamet had in fact started before the sexual harassment charges against the Supreme Court nominee) seemed so timely that it garnered huge attention. Twenty-four years on, the theme of sexual harassment is still all too relevant and timely, more than keeping the blood running through the play.

Monster Box Theatre has mounted the two-person play in its “small space,” which is more intimate than its main theater. Oleanna is just the sort of play this rising company should mount there; as the whole play takes place in the drab university office of John, a professor who has a complicated relationship with his students.

John (David Galido) is a pedantic, self-important professor who has landed academia’s endgame for many – tenure. It means more money for him and his family, and he is already in process of buying a bigger, nicer home when the play opens, even before the papers are signed. Hannah Taubitz is Carol, a student from a modest background who doesn’t seem quite sure, at the start, why she is even in college except for an unshaped plan to do better, or that it’s what her parents thought she ought to do. She stumbles over high-school vocabulary words and claims not to “get it” in class.

John is plainly pretty insufferable – a tool. He doesn’t so much talk to people, as he seems to be making a constant run of commentary about learning, his observations, his thinking…about, seemingly, nothing. It’s no wonder that Hannah in Act 1 keeps checking her smartphone seemingly for anything more interesting than the sound of John’s vapid conversation all designed to Lord his “position” over her. John’s phone conversations with his wife in which he refers to her as “baby” are wince-worthy and foretells his problems to come.

The play is about power, how it can change and shift beneath the feet of people whose end-game is power, rather than using what power they have for anything remotely positive. There is more in common, it seems, between university professors and members of Congress than we may have thought.

There is more to Hannah, a lot more, than we are led to believe in the fist act. And by the second act, and the finale, she has re-engineered the soil beneath John’s feet.

Galido and Taubitz do a fine job of packing the tension of the play into the professor’s simple office set, designed, I’ll assume, by director Stacy Grutza and assistant director Karyl Crites. The challenge in doing any Mamet play is that the dialogue can be brutally tough for actors to get right, with an avalanche of clipped sentences, one sided phone conversations and speaking over one another’s lines. Indeed, sometimes I think Mamet goes too far with his signature writing style. His attempt at real conversational rhythm seems over-engineered at times. The two actors have their lines, the intent and their characters down. But it’s the sort of play that can take two weeks or more for the dialogue and cadences to settle in. That’s not a luxury many small theaters have.

Nevertheless, the two actors do a very solid job of delivering on crackling material. I just found myself wondering how the energy between them might be even deeper after twenty or so performances.

The play skates by pretty in three short acts with one ten-minute intermission, with a total time of just about 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Bottom Line: Monster Box delivers solidly on  a theme that sadly never goes out of style or relevance.

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