NPX Weekly Round-Up: John Deserves to Die by Rachel Greene
My hatred of Mamet, justified! Plus, 3 other play recommendations for your week.
If you’re in theatre, or have a theatre degree, you know who David Mamet is. Heck, he was on Broadway not that long ago with a revival of his 1975 play, American Buffalo.
Also if you’re in theatre, you probably have an opinion on David Mamet. Mine is that he sucks! If yours aligns, I have DEFINITELY got a play for you.
John Deserves to Die by Rachel Greene is not only a great play calling out misogyny and fat-phobia in collegiate theater, but it’s also a great example of how to comment on specific art pieces, artists, or movements within a play. But more on that later. First, let’s just take a look at the play.
The summary of John Deserves to Die on NPX is as follows:
All is calm until theater department favorite Professor Daniel Holmes casts unassuming freshman Laura Vogel as Carol in his Spring production of David Mamet’s Oleanna. No one is less pleased than ambitious, fat sophomore Jen Barnett, who threatens to expose a secret that could turn lives and careers upside down. When passionate student reporter Andy Stark starts to follow leads for an explosive exposé, it is only a matter of time before dangerous truths come out. Art begins to imitate life as secrets unravel, masks come off, and classic texts are challenged. In this decidedly murderous exploration into the devilish intricacies of sex, power, consent, and gender politics in academia, three students take control in asking: If Carol was telling the story, wouldn’t John deserve to die?
Scintillating, no?
Greene uses relatable, funny, and scathing characters to highlight issues a lot of femmes in collegiate theater experience or have experienced: fatphobia, favoritism, and creepy male professors. The character of Leah has an affair with Professor Daniel Holmes, and it all begins to go downhill from there. Leah, a fat woman, is never cast in the lead role despite promises from Daniel (and her obvious talent), and when she’s overlooked for the title role in Oleanna, she decides enough is enough. This, along with the professor’s creepy treatment of freshman Laura and the gross nature of the Mamet play in question come together to show an unapologetic critique of how a lot of men in power (especially in theater) act.
Speaking of Mamet: when I first read Oleanna for a playwriting course in undergrad, I remember feeling…icky about it. I didn’t really know why— just that something about it felt wrong. After a few more years of life and theater study, I realized why.
As Rachel Greene states in the opening scene of John Deserves to Die: Oleanna is an antifeminist play.
Now, Greene doesn’t just SAY this and leave it there, no no. The whole play, while being an insightful look into the experiences of femmes in theater, is also a dressing down of Oleanna in every possible way. And there is where I learned the most from this play as a fellow playwright.
We’ve all heard of adaptations and “inspired by”s, films, plays, and books that derive from a work that came before it. But to have a work that does its own thing while so thoroughly analyzing another work that came before it is a little more rare from what I’ve seen. Greene uses her characters and their current predicaments to further show the audience how the story of Oleanna is read by women, especially women of other marginalized identities. When these characters, most of whom are fat, queer, and/or BIPOC, are forced to confront Oleanna in class, we see what they see— that Mamet’s depiction invalidates SA victims and people who have had inappropriate experiences with people in power. This makes sense if you do a little research into Mamet. He’s an old white guy who has said and done a lot of gross stuff, most recently being his support of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in which he implied that male teachers are probably p*dos. Yeah.
Anyways, read this play. I learned a lot about how the influence of other art upon ours can appear in a myriad of ways.
My official recommendation on NPX:
“John Deserves to Die says everything I've always wanted to say about how I've felt regarding a LOT of men in education and rehearsal rooms. It also says everything I've always thought about the misogynistic nature of Mamet's work. No spoilers, but the ending will have you standing on your chair shouting "HELL YES GIRL GET HIM!" A very validating piece for anybody who identifies as a femme in the theatre world.”
Along with John Deserves to Die, here are three other plays on NPX that I recommend for your weekly reading!
Rain Follows the Plow by Rachel Nelson
The Interrobangers by M Sloth Levine
Ripe Frenzy by Jennifer Barclay
Happy reading, and see you next week!
~Brynn