Framing the Classroom: Pedagogy, Power, Oleanna

Oleanna and Cultural Conflict

I open this essay with an admission: I have never been a fan of Oleanna. When I first heard about the play in early 1992, I was apprehensive. Given the problematic attitudes toward women in plays such as Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, and Speed-the-Plow--and the strident masculine poses of both the playwright and his dramatic characters--David Mamet seemed an odd figure to address a topic as politically and ideologically complex as sexual harassment. Would Oleanna replicate the male vantage points of Mamet's work as a whole? There were warnings that it might. Longtime Mamet actor and close friend W. H. Macy, who originated the role of John, commented on the role in a Theater Week interview: "I think he's a fella who's gotten bollixed up in a world where the rules are changing and he doesn't know how to keep up. And boy, can I identify with that. I don't know what's going on with women." Macy, who had been reading Robert Bly's Iron John and other books from the men's movement, suggested: "Men are going to have to go through some sort of a revolution the way that women did in the 1960s and 1970s. We have got to define ourselves and we have got to stand up for ourselves" (Simpson 21).

Even given these apprehensions, I wasn't prepared for my reaction when I saw the New York production. As audience members cheered John's violence toward Carol in the play's closing sequence, I felt (and continue to feel, seven years later) that the play was harnessing outrage to a gender politics that it does little to question. That the audience of Oleanna is led to frame the play's earlier interactions in terms of Carol's manifestly outrageous behavior in acts 2 and 3 leaves her character and the positions she represents targeted in unfair and ultimately reactionary ways. As John refuses to sign his name to Carol's list of "objectionable" books, he rises to the heroic rhetoric of John Proctor in the final act of Arthur Miller's The Crucible: "I've got a book with my name on it. And my son will see that book someday" (Mamet 76). ¹ For her part, Carol becomes the play's Abigail, scapegoated and demonized for behavior that, in the end, speaks more to misogynistic cultural stereotypes than to psychological credibility. In his essay "'We're Just Human': Oleanna and Cultural Crisis," Marc Silverstein analyzes the play's concluding act of violence (John beats Carol while calling her a "vicious little bitch" and a "little cunt," Mamet 79):

That the beating answers an insistent desire the play generates in certain audiences is suggested by the ease with which some of its spectators forget the distinction between actress and character. Leaving the theatre after a performance, Mary McCann, the second actress to play the student in Mamet's own Off-Broadway production, encountered shouts of "bitch" of such intensity that she ran back into the theatre for safety. (103)

Others have raised these issues; indeed, the fury of the debate that Oleanna occasioned in the press and the academic community is in many ways as remarkable a phenomenon as the play itself. ² Alisa Solomon called Oleanna "Mamet's twisted little play . . . an act of name-calling meant to provoke--and especially to provoke feminists" (104). Branding it "one of the nastiest contraptions to sputter down the pike in some time," Jeremy Gerard accused Mamet of stacking the deck against Carol "with stunning ferocity" (76). Jan Stuart characterized it as "less a play than a registry of complaints . . . one man's reactionary protest" (356), and Daniel Mufson suggested that "Oleanna's working title could have been The Bitch Set Him Up" (11). On the other side, John Lahr called the play "powerful, exciting" and praised it for risking "the bracingly unfashionable...