Oleanna, David Mamet’s tense two-hander about student-professor gender politics and power dynamics, was arriving in theaters only three years after Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. And it was just two years after Oleanna’s successful stage-play debut Off Broadway. But in those heady early-Clinton years, as the post-p.c. era was dawning, the Reagan- and Bush-era campus culture wars seemed far away, at least to those then on campus. Another 15 years later, with the Broadway revival of Oleanna opening at the Golden Theatre Sunday night, its sexual-harassment standoff feels as historic an artifact as Justice Thomas’ can of Coke.

In Oleanna’s first scene, Carol, a student who doesn’t understand what’s been going on in class, comes to her professor’s office to ask for assistance; John, the professor—distracted, as-yet untenured and attempting to be compassionate—offers to help. In its second scene, Carol has filed a report with the tenure committee, accusing John of sexual harassment, and John is attempting to find out why. In its explosive final scene, he has been denied tenure, and Carol has accused him of rape.

That first scene is meant to be ambiguous—whose interpretation of the events is true, or at least more true?—but at the Golden it doesn’t play that way. This is partially because its culture-war language is today so unconvincing. (“I saw you, Professor. For two semesters sit there, stand there and exploit our, as you thought, ‘paternal prerogative,’ and what is that but rape,” Carol says at one point, sounding ridiculous to our 2009 ears but not, I think, meant to read as self-parody.)

But it is also because Julia Stiles, the lovely film actress, is so miscast as the student. She gives a good if inevitably mannered performance in her Broadway debut. (The always-mannered Rebecca Pidgeon, Mr. Mamet’s wife, originated the role.)

“You have no idea what it cost me to come to this school” is simply unbelievable coming from a poised, confident Wasp. She never seems harassed, only commanding. Bill Pullman, who plays John, is on the other hand shamblingly professorial from the first scene. Which means that the audience is automatically wondering only to what extent, and to what end, Carol has manipulated her professor.

During the two scene breaks, director Dough Hughes has automated Venetian blinds along the upstage wall of John’s office raise and lower themselves, with the hum of their motor amplified through the theater. That amplified hum grows obnoxiously louder, especially leading into the final scene, presumably to convey building frustration and anger. What’s left—and there is something—is an interesting portrait of interpersonal power dynamics, rendered in dexterously handled vintage Mamet dialogue.

OLEANNA IS A mere adolescent alongside The Royal Family, George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s satire of the Barrymore family, which debuted on Broadway in 1927 and returned last week to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in Manhattan Theatre Club’s latest revival of an aged script that was in no particular need of reviving.

Granted, if you must revive The Royal Family, this is the way to do it. The cast is near uniformly excellent: Jan Maxwell plays Julie Cavendish, the reigning star of a legendary family of stage actors, and Rosemary Harris, who was Julie in the 1975 revival, plays her mother, Fanny, the aging Cavendish matriarch. They share a sprawling East Side duplex with Julie’s daughter, a promising ingénue played by Kelli Barrett; an overburdened butler and housekeeper; and, finally, when he returns from Hollywood with press and perhaps police giving chase, Julie’s brother, the womanizing bon vivant Tony Cavendish.

Jon Lee Beaty’s set is decadent and commanding, a huge Edwardian living room filled with overstuffed furniture, a grand piano, tchotckes on tables, stagebills on walls, and plenty of doors and hallways to be run in and out of. And the period costumes by Catherine Zuber are—pun intended, but unavoidable—exuberantly handsome.

The basic question of the night is whether these to-the-stage-born actors can be happy as normal people, folks who, for a change, value their romances and real-world commitments over their devotion to their craft. And in the second act, when Ms. Harris and Ms. Maxwell sing the praises of their profession with ardor and enthusiasm, when director Doug Hughes moves his many actors on and off the stage with farcelike speed and precision, bringing them together at center stage in perfect tableaux, everything comes together, and the audience is delighted.

But, alas, you’ve got to sit through a lot to get to those moments of delight. The boring first act is heavily expository—though one suspects it would be funnier if today’s audiences had a finer appreciation for Barrymore jokes—and the third is dull and maudlin. And, of course, we all know the answer to that main question from the moment the curtain first rises:

There’s no business like show business; there’s no people like show people; and of course all the Cavendishes will remain onstage.

I just saved you—well, Irving Berlin and I just saved you—three hours.

WHILE NEW YORK’S major institutional theater companies are keen to gaze wistfully at the past—whether that early-20th-century acting dynasty at MTC; Elvismania and the putting on of a happy face, starting tomorrow night at Roundabout; or the eternal question of whether one can in fact spend an enchanted evening with a man who has two half-Polynesian children, for a solid year and a half at Lincoln Center Theater—the Second Stage Theatre has the odd habit of confronting with the present.

Let Me Down Easy, Anna Deavere Smith’s new one-woman show, which opened there last week, takes on current, pressing, real-world issues—life, death and the health care system—and it’s spectacular.

Ms. Smith is best known for her technique, performing monologues of real peoples’ words, mimicking each speaker, often with the aid of small props—glasses, a hat. The result is a series of impressive, uncannily realized performances. But it’s also something of a parlor trick, Rich Little in a legitimate theater.

Ms. Smith’s true genius lies in the editing. She is a wonderful actress, but she is an even better journalist. Let Me Down Easy uses the words of 20 different people, from whom Ms. Smith has elicited fascinating, moving, sad, funny and gut-wrenching stories. She knows how to ask questions, and she knows how to assemble the answers, well-crafted testimonials shaped into a well-crafted play.

Lance Armstrong talks about the body as a machine, one that must be kept in proper operating condition. Brent Williams, a rodeo rider, has a Westerner’s skepticism of big plans and big government but speaks admiringly of the care he received at a military hospital, where doctors are all government employees and work together, for a salary. Hazel Merritt, a poor woman in New Haven, Conn., tells of her daughter’s disastrous dialysis—the machine malfunctioned, blood spewed on Merritt, her daughter, and the room, but no medical staff was nearby to hear their cries for help. Finally, nurses shut down the machine, told Merritt to bring her daughter back another day and sent them home in a taxi, Merritt’s blood-soaked daughter wrapped in a sheet.

And Kirsta Kurtz-Burke, a doctor at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, talks of the dawning realization during Katrina that her poor patients were being ignored and forgotten.

“You just see the desperation of being poor in this country, and in some ways the distrust, I mean the deep down—this is not the first time this has happened to people,” she says. “I’m privileged, and this is the first time I’ve ever been totally abandoned by my government. But this wasn’t the first time for my patients or the nurses.”

The Kurtz-Burke monologue is devastating, but each one is profound and meaningful. (A few of the celebrities could have been excised; Eve Ensler and Lauren Hutton, for example, add little.) Together, they create a deeply thought-provoking look at life and death and a powerful and necessary reminder that the health care debate isn’t just about reimbursement rates and CBO scoring and Olympia Snowe but about real people, who sometimes get sick and who eventually die.

It’s the best theatrical experience I’ve had this season.

MEANWHILE, DOWN AT the Public Theater, artistic director Oskar Eustis is busy trying to convince the world that his current (and excellent) cash cow, the Broadway transfer of 1968’s “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” Hair, is actually about modern gay-rights protesters. (It’s not.) But on Monday night, as the Hair cast returned from Washington and a gig at the National Equality March, Lemon Andersen’s entirely up-to-date one-man memoir, County of Kings—a production not of the Public but of the Culture Project, plus high-profile backers including Spike Lee—opened in the Public’s Newman Theater.

County of Kings begins with Mr. Andersen onstage at the Tony Awards; Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam, in which he performed, has won for special theatrical event. (“When they say this is the Great White Way,” he says, “man they sure ain’t playing.”) It flashes back from there: He grew up in a Brooklyn housing project with a loving but heroin-addicted mother and a loving but heroin-addicted and car-stealing stepdad. Mom died of AIDS; Mr. Andersen dealt drugs and did two stints in prison. Behind bars a second time, he discovered books and words. And, when released, he stumbled upon an open-mike night at the El Puente community center in Williamsburg. Words—poetry—saved his life.

The play suffers from some of the standard pitfalls of biographical solo shows. (There’s a bit too much of “And then I remember my neighbor, Mrs. Judy,” followed by a stylized portrayal of crabby Mrs. Judy.) But that’s a small matter. The thrill Mr. Andersen gets from language, from massaging it, finessing it, delivering it, is palpable and delightful. His script is impressive, his delivery better. And Elise Thoron’s direction (she’s also listed as a “developer” of the show), combined with Jane Cox and Lily Fossner’s lighting and Robert Kaplowitz’s sound design, give impressive texture and dynamism to what could otherwise be one guy standing onstage talking.

Most important, County of Kings is unmistakably a piece for today. And it has brought an audience of actual New Yorkers—my fellow theatergoers were much younger, and far more diverse, than usual in New York, especially at a Sunday matinee—to the theater. Their exuberance at the show’s end was cathartic—and infectious.

editorial@observer.com