City of Smoke

In the autumn of 1992, when the original off-Broadway production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” was about to open in New York, my wife, Mimi Kramer, then a drama critic for The New Yorker, was asked by the magazine’s new editor, Tina Brown, to write a puff piece about the play for Brown’s first issue. Mimi had been working for a couple of years on a book about the school of acting that Mamet and the actor W.H. Macy had founded in Vermont in the 1980s. She spent the next several months turning some of the material from her book into an article about the relationship between “Oleanna” and Mamet’s approach to acting training. Brown apparently never read the piece, and Mimi was fired several months later. The current revival of “Oleanna,” with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles, seemed like an opportune moment to revive the essay, which appears in a slightly updated version on City of Smoke’s companion web site, Smoke & Mirrors.

The Conversational Reality