Oleanna (play)

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Contextual Information

Plot Synopsis

Plot Analysis

About the Author

      David Alan Mamet is an American playwright and screenwriter. He was born near Chicago in the small town of Flossmoor, Illinois on November 30, 1947. As a child, Mamet developed an affinity for words under the tutelage of his lawyer father. The senior Mr. Mamet instilled in David and his sister a love of the English language and encouraged them to perpetually question the world around them. Unfortunately, the seemingly happy Mamet family would be torn apart by divorce, lending the remainder of David’s childhood a gloomy hue.  

Mamet rediscovered his love of words as a young teenager when he began working at a local theatre. Correct in his assumption that he’d found his calling, Mamet went on to study theater at Goddard College in Vermont and The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York. He returned to teach theater at Goddard College in 1971, when he also took his pen to his first dramatic works. Even Mamet’s earliest plays showed off his distinct style. The Duck Variations (1972) was his first critically acclaimed play, a success that was rapidly followed by Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), American Buffalo (1975) and The Water Engine: An American Fable (1977). All of these pieces involve a concrete, unchanging setting and small casts. The most unique aspect of Mamet’s plays, however, was his amazing ability to express the nuances of daily speech in his characters’ dialogues. This lent a considerable amount of realism to the plays – the characters often talked as real human beings, not as an author delicately crafting each word of their lines. Mamet’s birthplace would be central in several of his pieces, most notably in Glengarry Glen Ross (1982), which is set in Chicago and concerns the real estate business, a field in which Mamet had personal experience in the 1960s. For this play, Mamet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

      Also at this time in his career, Mamet turned much of his attention to screenwriting. He wrote such scripts as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), The Verdict (1982) and House of Games (1987). Some of his later works include the plays Speed-the-Plow (1988) and Oleanna (1992), which he adapted into a film in 1994, and the direction of movies such as Wage the Dog (1997) State and Main (2000). 

David Mamet has been married twice. In 1977, he wed actress Lindsay Crouse, which who he has two children. In 1990, he divorced Crouse and the following year married singer and actress Rebecca Pidgeon, for whom the role of “Carol” in Oleanna was specifically written. Mamet and Pidgeon also have two children.

Character Guide

John – John is a college professor, around 40 years old, married and in process of buying a new house and applying for tenure. Throughout the course of the play, he offers to help Carol out a great deal by changing her grade to an “A” and spending extra time meeting wither her. His interactions with her are always interrupted by calls from his realtor and his wife.

Carol – Carol is college student, around 20 years old and struggling in John’s class. She is constantly protesting to him that she does not understand what he is teaching her, even when he explains it in the simplest of terms. She files a sexual harassment report against him, which jeopardizes his chance of being granted tenure.

Character Analysis

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Production History

Oleanna is a two-character play by David Mamet about the power struggle between a university professor and one of his female students who accuses him of sexual harassment and, by doing so, spoils his chances of being accorded tenure. The play's title, taken from a folk song, refers to a 19th-century escapist vision of utopia.

The play premiered in May 1992 in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the first production of Mamet's new Back Bay Theater Company. The premiere featured William H. Macy as John, a "smug, pompous, insufferable man whose power over academic lives he unconsciously abuses". Rebecca Pidgeon played the female lead, Carol, "Mamet's most fully realized female character, ...a mousy, confused cipher" whose failure to comprehend concepts and precepts presented in John's class motivated her appeal for personal instruction. The part of Carol is said to have been written for Pidgeon.

In October, a year after the Anita Hill - Clarence Thomas hearings which "crystallized and concretized" Mamet's dramatization, it appeared off-Broadway at New York City's Orpheum Theatre, with Macy and Pidgeon reprising their roles. The production included a rewritten third scene. Critic Frank Rich provides a summary of the play in his review of the off-Broadway production:

Oleanna ... is an impassioned response to the Thomas hearings. As if ripped right from the typewriter, it could not be more direct in its technique or more incendiary in its ambitions. In Act I, Mr. Mamet locks one man and one woman in an office where, depending on one's point of view, an act of sexual harassment does or does not occur. In Act II, the antagonists, a middle-aged university professor and an undergraduate student, return to the scene of the alleged crime to try to settle their case without benefit of counsel, surrogates or, at times, common sense.

The result? During the pause for breath that separates the two scenes of Mr. Mamet's no-holds-barred second act, the audience seemed to be squirming and hyperventilating en masse, so nervous was the laughter and the low rumble of chatter that wafted through the house. The ensuing denouement, which raised the drama's stakes still higher, does nothing to alter the impression that "Oleanna" is likely to provoke more arguments than any play this year.

It had its London premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in 1993, directed by Harold Pinter. David Suchet played John (in a Variety Club Award-winning performance), and Lia Williams played Carol, in a version that used Mamet's original ending from the Cambridge production. As Pinter notes in personal correspondence to Mamet that Pinter also published on his website:

There can be no tougher or more unflinching play than Oleanna. The original ending is, brilliantly, "the last twist of the knife". She gets up from the floor ("Don't worry about me. I'm alright") and goes straight for the throat. The last line seems to me the perfect summation of the play. It's dramatic ice.

Michael Billington, in a review published in The Guardian, endorsed Pinter's choice of ending, saying "by restoring Mamet's original ending, in which the professor is forced to confess his failings, Pinter also brings out the pain and tragedy of the situation".

Oleanna was turned into a movie directed by Mamet, starring Macy and Debra Eisenstadt. Roger Ebert, whose review of the film is primarily about the off-Broadway production he saw over a year earlier, was "astonished" to report that Oleanna was not a very good film, characterizing it as awkward and lacking in "fire and passion"; this is in contrast to what Ebert wrote about the performance of the play he saw at the Orpheum:

Experiencing David Mamet's play "Oleanna" on the stage was one of the most stimulating experiences I've had in a theater. In two acts, he succeeded in enraging all of the audience - the women with the first act, the men with the second. I recall loud arguments breaking out during the intermission and after the play, as the audience spilled out of an off-Broadway theater all worked up over its portrait of . . . sexual harassment? Or was it self-righteous Political Correctness?

More recently, a 2004 production at the Garrick Theatre in London, featured Aaron Eckhart and Julia Stiles and was directed by Lindsay Posner.

See also

• Sexual harassment in education
• Pretty Persuasion
• Oleanna (song)

External links

• Study Guide for Oleanna from SparkNotes
• History is Written by the Winners, a critical analysis of Oleanna by playwright N.G. McClernan