Just saw David Mamet’s Oleanna–it’s on Broadway in New York now. Has anyone else seen it? Either this, another production, or the film? I really enjoyed it–my intro to it was from this book by Katie Roiphe, The Morning After, so going in I already knew what it was about.
I was also wondering if it was going to be more ambiguous than I had read…like maybe there was some ambiguity about the sexual harassment. But there really wasn’t any that I could see. Not in the first scene anyway. In the second scene where he grabs her because she’s leaving and he wants her to stay and explain what he did wrong, he was dumb to touch a student, but it was understandable considering he did nothing and she was on the brink of ruining his career. And of course by the end he does beat her, but his life has been destroyed and it’s pretty much what we all want to do.
Any idea on why she did it? My first thought was, oh, just for a bad grade. I think it was a lot more complex than that, though…she talks about how she’s worked so hard to get here, and she doesn’t understand anything. And I think she feels really ignored by the university–he’s on the phone the whole time in the first scene and she’s probably worked really hard her whole life coming from such a working class background, and now maybe she’s not as smart as she thought she was or college is just really different. And this is kind of her way of getting back at what she sees as “the establishment,” or perhaps trying to seize back power the only way she knows how, through this pseudo feminist discourse and her feminist “group.”
Sort of an interesting topic especially in light of current events on and off college campuses as they pertain to rape…
Mamet’s comments on this play indicate that it’s not about sexual harassment at all. It’s really about the professor-student relationship, and Mamet, IMHO, uses sexual harassment as a metaphor for the way professors abuse and betray students. Mamet had bad experiences, apparently, with teachers who belittle and confuse students to soothe their own inadequacies and hide their shortcomings.
There is true ambiguity in the play – when properly staged, it’s impossible to be certain whether the student is punishing the professor for an actual act of sexual harassment that we haven’t seen, or a metaphorical act that stands in for his real crime, which can’t be punished.
Really? I didn’t get that in the production I saw–it seemed like all she did was take stuff he actually did and just twist it around (saying he told weird pornographic anecdotes, or putting his arm around her when she started crying).
It definitely seemed like she was angry at him because he just didn’t care enough. Like how she’s confiding in him and he goes to answer the phone. And I think a lot of it was class resentment–she talks about she’s been so poor and so forth and he’s buying this house and almost has tenure and has this great family…it seemed like she just wanted to take all this from him.
I think to get out of what Mamet intends, it’s important not to think of *Oleanna *as a whodunit; the single point is not “what really happened when we weren’t looking?” I think he meant it more as an illustration of the ways that power can be used destructively: the teacher uses his power blindly, blithely, almost unconsciously–he’s oblivious to the ways his unequal power is destructive to his students, and he’s too fucking arrogant to give a shit. He enjoys his power, but I don’t think he’s ever really given it much thought. The student’s power is more consciously created–if not by her, by her group, who have the pleasure of wielding the Student as a weapon they’ve created against an abstract institutional power, without the messiness of actually having to engage with the Teacher themselves. For the Group, this is a simple exercise in power; for the individuals involved, it’s devastating.
I had a sister who was in one of those scary relationships where her girlfriend tried to cut her off from her family. I’d have a conversation or an encounter or whatever with my sister, a few days would go by, and the next time we talked, she’d explain to me what REALLY happened between us: her girlfriend would reinterpret everything in such a way that I was a bad person trying to destroy my sister’s life, or something. This kept happening until my sister and I severed our relationship. Which was of course her girlfriend’s goal. This was very, very bewildering: it was like I was involved in a life-or-death struggle with someone who wasn’t there, and I was like blindfolded or something. A round would be fought without me present, and I would find out later that I had lost a fight I didn’t even know I was engaged in. Very, very weird, but very, very Oleanna. That look of stunned *WTF? *on Macy’s face when he’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on was immediately, viscerally familiar to me.
I ran lights for a community theater production of Oleanna, and I didn’t like it very much. I know a lot of it had to do with the production and the old-fashioned director, but I wasn’t so happy with the script either. I felt like, in a lot of ways, Mamet just didn’t really get it. It felt like a shallow interpretation of both arrogant academics and student activists.
Having said that, I do think it contained that spark of creative energy that can make a play a worthwhile project to take on, it just didn’t do a lot for me in the production I was involved with.
See, I didn’t see the professor as all that arrogant. He had a high opinion of himself, but I think he also wrestled with insecurity as he pointed out. He seemed like a nice guy, someone who’d be cool to have as a professor. I found myself liking him.
I think that arrogance was the very core of his being: if I can fault Mamet for anything in this script, it’s for making the professor too two-dimensional a cardboard cutout meant to represent ARROGANCE. It’s his reason for existing in the story; if this were a medieval morality play, his character’s name would have been Arrogancio or Hubristis or something like that.
Insecurity is at the heart of much professorial arrogance; I have heard of a study wherein some astonishing proportion of successful academics felt that they didn’t deserve their positions, and only kept them by perpetrating a sort of fraud. This insecurity, I suspect, is what lies at the heart of Mamet’s professor’s infuriating behavior.
I have no doubt at all that if you scratch an arrogant person nine times out of ten you’ll find a self-conscious, even self-loathing, neurotic covering his weakness with bluff.
However, even though I think you can armchair-pyschoanalyze the Teacher to then Nth degree, I don’t think Mamet’s particularly concerned with the root cause of his arrogance. That he’s arrogant, and thus cavalierly destructive of the hearts and minds he’s supposed to be helping, is his main point.
He is not arrogant in the current Broadway play. Lissener, it sounds like you saw the original with William S. Macy, which I’ve read was done very differently than the current show. Some of the reviews of the show (which opened last week) mention how those who have read the play beforehand, or have seen another production, have a completely different view of the characters than those who have only seen the Broadway version. Bill Pullman plays the role with no arrogance, he sounds weak and put-upon. Julia Stiles, on the other hand, comes across as either a malicious bitch who set him up from the beginning or someone being controlled by a “feminist” group. The current show is so one-sided that I found it extremely dull.
One of my very favourite plays. I’ve seen two stage productions and the movie (which I didn’t really like).
I love the fact that Mamet manages to spin a complex drama from two people, two chairs and a desk. I love the rhythms and beats of the inimitable Mamet dialogue, and the way the balance of power seems to shift and sway as the play unfolds.
I’d say the play acts as a sort of dramatic Rorschach test. Ten different people can watch it and come to ten different conclusions about what’s going on and who is right. Men tend to see it one way, women another. There’s plenty of controversy, but no resolution because there is no single, definitive or correct reading. It’s like two people seeing the famous ambiguous figure that is either an ornate vase or two faces in profile looking at each other, and arguing over which is the ‘correct’ interpretation. There isn’t one. Mamet provides material that can be interpreted either way, stands back, and let’s the controversy ensue. Even the actors in the play aren’t sure what happened or which of them is in the right. This of course adds to the challenge for the actors, as if trying to learn the dizzying switchbacks of Mamet’s dialogue were not difficulty enough.
I enjoyed that, too, ianzin. It’s strange how you can see a play with a cast of six or seven characters and lots of people talking, and set changes, and such, and yet this play in three scenes, with two characters, and one set is so compelling.
Interesting…I think, as Eyebrows put it, that this version going on right now is a lot more one sided. Even though I did enjoy it I rather wish I could see another more ambiguous production. I went with my grandmother who had seen it years earlier and she didn’t remember it as well but seemed surprised to realize it was so clear cut. Based on what I saw I have a hard time viewing it as anything more than “Mean jealous bitch goes after sweet innocent prof.”
Then again a lot of people have seen it that way. My first intro to it was in this book the Morning After that’s very critical of feminism. It described it pretty much as a play about the evils of feminism which seems a bit oversimplified. But in a lot of message board threads, I’ve heard people say things like how they hated the character Carol, etc.
I’ve also heard the play described as misogynist and how sad it is that the most well known play about sexual harassment is a play in which we’re meant to think that no sexual harassment took place. (I think it was a Village Voice article.)
I keep hearing people say this, and the ad campaign for the Broadway version uses the slogans “Take a side” and “Who do you believe?” but I don’t see how there is any ambiguity at all. In other productions of the play, are you made to think it’s possible that the professor really did sexually harass the student? Because in this version it’s clear cut that she is making stuff up and has an agenda. As for men & women seeing it differently, there was an audience talkback after the show (they do one every night) and I would say that everyone there felt bad for the professor and thought that what the student did was wrong. I suppose the only divergence of opinion that came up was whether or not she planned it from the beginning, or if it started as a misunderstanding on her part which was then exacerbated and latched onto by some feminist group to advance their own agenda (re: banning the books.)
Is this the type of reaction you mean as well, or do you mean some women actually *agree *with what she did? That would really be almost unthinkable with how this production is performed.
Ambiguity doesn’t mean “you get to pick who was right and who was wrong.” It means that there are less likely to be clearly identifiable “good” or “bad” guys. In a more ambiguous production, both characters come off as someone who has no clue that what they’re doing is wrong, but they are still causing great damage to another person. Neither one is unambiguously evil or unambiguously good.
I think it’s easier to portray the girl as being the bad guy, but I think that’s from an outside perspective. It’s possible for that part to be portrayed in such a way that the girl clearly trusts the wisdom of those who are advising her, and she thinks she is doing the right thing. She cannot see it from the professor’s point of view, he cannot see things from her point of view. Likewise, it seems to me, an unambiguous staging would represent a failure to understand the perspective of one or both of the characters.
The way this was done, I have no idea how anyone could see it as anything other than the girl just lied. It looked like she knew what she was doing and was setting out deliberately to hurt the professor.