Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles to Headline Oleanna in Los Angeles

Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles are set to star in David Mamet’s Oleanna at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The show replaces the previously announced Uncle Vanya as the third production in the Taper’s 2009 season at the Los Angeles Music Center, due to casting complications. Previews for Oleanna start May 28, with opening night set for June 5. The production, directed by Tony winner Doug Hughes, will play through July 12.

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 and the recent Bottle Shock and Noble Son. He has appeared on Broadway opposite Mercedes Ruehl in Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination. In 2007, he earned a second Drama Desk nomination for his appearance in Albee’s Peter and Jerry in 2007 at Second Stage. Pullman was also nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for the 2006 Kennedy Center production of The Subject Was Roses.

Stiles starred in Oleanna in London’s West End in 2004. Her additional stage credits include the 2002 Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, James Lapine’s Fran’s Bed at Playwrights Horizons and The Vagina Monologues off-Broadway. Her film credits include I Love You, I Love You Not, 10 Things I Hate About You, Save the Last Dance, Mona Lisa Smiles, two David Mamet films State and Main, Edmond, as well as The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Oleanna is a gripping account of a power struggle between a male university professor and one of his female students. Premiering in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1992, it has since been produced in London and New York and was made into a movie in 1994, starring William H. Macy and Debra Eisenstadt.