Producer Jeffrey Finn announced today that OLEANNA, the provocative drama by Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet, will have its first-ever Broadway production as part of the 2009-2010 Broadway Season. Starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles and directed by Tony Award winner Doug Hughes, the play is a gripping account of a power struggle between a male university professor and one of his female students.
The Broadway production will begin previews on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at The Golden Theatre (252 West 45th Street) with an Opening Night set for Sunday, October 11, 2009. Tickets will go on sale beginning Sunday, July 19, 2009 and will be available for purchase through visiting Telecharge.com or calling (212) 239-6200.
An instant hit with critics and audiences alike, this new production of OLEANNA recently premiered in Los Angeles to rave reviews at the Mark Taper Forum on June 5, 2009. The L.A. engagement is presented by Center Theatre Group by special arrangement with Jeffrey Finn, and is currently playing through Sunday, July 12, 2009.
Written in the heyday of political correctness and the culture wars of the early 1990s, OLEANNA made an instantly incendiary debut - dividing audiences at every performance into two camps, compelled to attack or defend either character. Critics weighing in on this new production confirm that the play hasn't lost any of its bite, power or relevance, noting the intense post-show conversations that continue to erupt nightly. Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times called it "A PRIZE FIGHT! You can't argue with a play that retains the power to get theatergoers arguing with each other as they head home. OLEANNA hasn't lost its power to rile an audience." Jay Reiner of The Hollywood Reporter proclaimed it, "DYNAMITE THEATER! Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles are RIVETING together under Doug Hughes' taut direction. Mamet's dialogue flies between the two characters like a shattered pane of glass, each fragment finding its mark and leaving a speck of blood." And Bob Verini of Variety cheered, "BRILLIANT ACTING and Doug Hughes' canny helming fully animate David Mamet's GALVANIC play. Stiles is SUPERB, achieving increasing majesty with each uppercut. Pullman is a REVELATION. His horrified stagger is ONE OF THE SPELLBINDING EMOTIONAL EXHIBITIONS OF THIS THEATRICAL YEAR."
Bill Pullman will return to the Broadway stage for the first time since he received a 2002 Drama Desk Award nomination starring opposite Mercedes Ruehl in Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?. Other recent stage work includes a second Drama Desk nomination for his appearance in Albee's Peter and Jerry in 2007 at Second Stage and the 2006 Kennedy Center production of The Subject Was Roses (Helen Hayes Award nomination). With a major career in stage, film and television, Pullman is perhaps best known for his roles in the films Independence Day, Lost Highway, Sleepless in Seattle, Ruthless People, While You Were Sleeping, The Grudge, Spaceballs, Scary Movie 4, the recent Bottle Shock and Noble Son and the recently-released Surveillance.
Julia Stiles earned great acclaim for her performance in a previous production of OLEANNA in London's West End in 2004. Having begun her career in the Theater at a young age in New York City, her additional stage credits include the 2002 Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night as Viola, James Lapine's Fran's Bed at Playwrights Horizons and The Vagina Monologues. OLEANNA will mark her Broadway debut. She made her cinematic debut at age 15 in I Love You, I Love You Not with Claire Danes. She followed this with many films, most notably, 10 Things I Hate About You, Save the Last Dance, Mona Lisa Smiles, two David Mamet films State and Main and Edmond and the three Bourne movies - The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.
