Three Tutorial Plays: The Lesson, The Prince of Naples and Oleanna

Three Tutorial Plays: The Lesson, The Prince ofNaples and Oleanna CRAIG STEWART WALKER If the discovery that the tutorial relationship provides a rich field for dramatic conflict must be ascribed, the credit probably belongs to Jakob Lenz, whose play, Der Hofmeister or The Tutor (1774), was a sort of grotesque contemporary reworking of the Abelard and Heloise story. Yet despite that early start, the idea seems to belong more typically to the late twentieth century, when the explosion of information had made the lUtorial relation more central to cultural continuity. The question of how to think about one's relation to society had then become more complex, interwoven as it was with the question of one's capacity for absorbing the modem diffusion of human projects, and consequently the intermediary tutor had become as seemingly indispensable to the age of information as the priest had been to an earlier age. This paper examines the degree to which the parallel structures of three late twentiethcentury plays featuring students and teachers, Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson, George F. Walker's The Prince ofNaples, and David Mame!'s Oleanna, are used to dramatize three distinct moments of cultural tension. Were there any doubt that a play centred on the tutorial relation could provide one of the most intense glimpses of contending social interests, that doubt should certainly have been dispelled by the furor raised by David Mame!'s Oleanna over the past few years. Yet I would like to argue that much of this furor was actually beside the point. Most of the commentary on the various productions of the play, whether positive or negative, treated it as another salvo in what has unfortunately been labelled "the gender wars." To be sure, given the climate of opinion into which the play first entered, it was perhaps inevitable that the reaction was so starkly polarized. The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings had just taken place in the fall of the previous year, 1991. So there could hardly have been a more incendiary issue than sexual harassment for the time, and the play seemed to weigh right into the national debate. Indeed, so strong was this connection in the Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 149 150 CRAIG STEWART WALKER minds of many commentators that they assumed, on nothing more than circumstantial evidence, that the play was Marnet's direct response to the hearings.' According to Mamet himself, however, the timing of the Thomas hearings was mere coincidence. He claimed he did not follow the hearings at all and that he had actually written the play some time before the hearings but had put it aside because he was having trouble with the last act. Moreover, he explained: I never really saw it as a play about sexual harassment. ] think the issue was, to a large extent, a flag of convenience for a play that's structured as a tragedy. Just like the issues of race relations and xenophobia are flags of convenience for Othello. ... This play ... is a tragedy about power. These are two people with a lot to say to each other, with legitimate affection for each other. But protecting their positions becomes more importanllhan pursuing their own best interests. And that leads them down the slippery slope to a point where. at the end of the play, they tear each other's throat out. My plays are not political. They're dramatic.1 Assuming Mamet's opinion on his own play to be worth something - by no means the definitive judgement, of course, but at least an informed one - the possibility emerges that the discussion of what is essential to Oleanna may well have been as occluded by the preoccupation with "gender wars," as the grave and well-documented questions raised by Oarence Thomas's moral character, political convictions, and judicial competence were occluded by the muddier issues of sexual harassment and racism.3 At any rate, it is my contention that certain aspects of Mame!'s play are best illuminated by regarding it within a specific dramatic tradition, exemplified by the other two plays under discussion. Of course, there is little chance that Mamet was acquainted with Walker's The Prince of Naples when...