From Hollywood to Broadway, Julia Stiles searches for Depth
In David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” Carol, a young college student failing an English class won’t be talked down to, even if she doesn’t know the meaning of the word “paradigm.” In the space of three intimate office visits, she plays the feminine, feminist, and femme fatale cards one after the other, provoking her mentor’s ardent interest, accusing him of attempted rape, and ultimately bringing the wrath of the politically correct establishment crashing down on his career.
Julia Stiles, who considers Carol one of David Mamet’s best developed female characters so far, received critical acclaim for her compelling performance as the troubled young student, in the play’s Fall run at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. She recently returned to her native New York for the production’s turn on Broadway, which wrapped in December.
In his L.A. Times review, Charles McNulty points out that although Carol’s destructive actions— much more incriminating than the professor’s— might define her as the villain in the story, Stiles’s strong performance keeps her from becoming “just a bugaboo of a belligerent male imagination,” and that she “deftly exposes one of the sources of Carol’s vindictive anger — her lack of access to language and knowledge.”
Stiles may be something of an authority on the role at this point, having played Carol in London five years ago when she herself was an English major at Columbia. Doug Hughes, the director of the recent production, asked her to participate because of her familiarity with the play, and when she reread it she was surprised at how rich the material still felt.
“I still had questions that were unanswered and aspects of the play that I still wanted to explore.” She recalls. “I find that it just gets deeper and deeper. Some nights more of the anger will come out. A lot of that has to do with what’s going on that night, and the audience reactions.”
When it was first performed in 1992, in the wake of the Anita Hill testimony, the play enflamed debate about political correctness and sexual harassment. For Stiles this time around, it has taken on a different meaning. “It doesn’t actually hinge on the moment when the professor embraces Carol. The complaints are much bigger than that. So it’s really not a harassment play. I feel like it’s really about human attraction. I’m OK with not focusing on the politics so much. Letting that be the audience’s job. For me it’s become much more of a personal play. Almost like a Greek tragedy about miscommunication and misunderstanding.”
Stiles’s commercial films, from “10 Things I Hate About You” to “The Bourne Supremacy,” have been successful at the box office, but she has approached her career as an artist more than as a business person. She’s tackled Shakespeare in the Park, directed the short film “Raving” starring Zoey Deschanel, and is now a fledgling producer developing an independent film based on Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” She has chosen roles not just for their sweetness and charm, but for their deep and resonant complexities. “Oleanna” is the latest example of how Stiles has challenged the perception that a young woman’s role is to be endearing above all else.
Stiles willingly steps outside of her comfort zone. “One of the reasons why I’m drawn to Carol is that it’s very liberating to get up on a stage and confront that fear of not being liked by people, because I know that by the end of the play the audience is probably going to dislike me or the character. I’m confronting that uncomfortable feeling and that’s very liberating.”
“The most interesting characters are humanly flawed. And there are grey areas of good behavior and ‘bad behavior.’” In picking her roles, “It really comes down to depth… Yeah. That is the draw. And certainly I’ve tried to find that in certain film roles that I’ve played, but that medium is so full of conventions that those kinds of roles are hard to find, and I’m not the first actress that’s said that.”
Maybe that’s why her first love is the stage.
“Yeah. It’s exhilarating. I’m some sort of frustrated rock star. I love being on stage.” For Stiles, the “Oleanna” material allows for new discoveries every night. She adds, “I’ve had the opposite experience too. At times, with film, and all those stage productions I’ve done with Shakespeare in the park, it’s hard to get over feeling like there’s a right and wrong way to do it. There’s an expectation that the audience has, having heard these monologues or soliloquies before.” Stiles says she has never experienced the feeling of artistic spontaneity as frequently consistently as she has through “Oleanna.” “Even on the last night that we closed in LA. I got really upset and I didn’t know why and as the lines came out I was sobbing and I couldn’t stop myself. I wasn’t trying to cry in the play, I was fighting through that to get to one of my longer speeches, and that’s a testament to how deep [Mamet’s] writing is.
Stiles went to Columbia, where she completed a play, kept a journal, and wrote short stories. She also recently started a blog. “I was very reluctant to do it at first because I felt like ‘ah who cares,’ but I took a class in Final Cut Pro, so I learned to edit and would make these little short films. Digital is the nicest outlet.” At one point, serendipitously, a musician friend brought her some video footage of a band tour and asked if Stiles would cut it together, to a song. She used it to practice her editing, and then posted the results on her blog, www.juliastilesblog.com.
The blogging and editing projects give Stiles the opportunity to practice filmmaking skills independent of the customary big-budget cast and crew. “I was always frustrated that my friends who are musicians, when they are between jobs or between touring or writing music, can always be practicing and getting better at what they do, and I never really felt I could do that as an actor because it’s such a collaborative profession. You need a director, you need a script, you need an audience. I could never really practice on my own. So writing and cutting little movies together is kind of an extension of that.”
Stiles has a larger independent project in the works as well. She obtained the rights to “The Bell Jar” and has been working on it for a few years now, inspired by the text and its strong visual potential. “It struck me that the book is so vivid and vibrant and colorful and almost hallucinatory and it’s so different from preconceived notions about Sylvia Plath’s life. The imagery that she writes is so [much more] colorful than the sadness and the angst that people associate her with.”
“I don’t really know what’s going to happen to it because it is just really hard with independent film. Even with low budget film, the industry is changing so much.” While financing is still in the works, there is a script written by Tristine Skyler and a stellar cast that includes Virginia Madsen, Topher Grace, and Rose McGowan.
With “Oleanna” wrapped, Stiles will make a stop at her alma mater, Columbia College, to accept a John Jay Award for her distinguished professional achievement. She is also preparing to perform in a show about the myth of Persephone with Ridge, the theater where she began her acting career, at the BAM Next Wave Festival in the fall. Other than that, she’s free to pursue other projects. Stiles’ confidence turns uncertainty about the future into anticipation. “One of the things I love about my job as a free-lancer is that while it’s anxiety-inducing to be wondering where you next job is, it’s also really exciting to know that you have no idea what you’ll be doing a year from now. I enjoy that.”
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