Mamet Mamet

I'm just about coming to the end of a long affair with Mamet. I've been teaching his 1992 play Oleanna for the whole academic year and have my last class tomorrow. My ideas regarding this work as well as my interpretation of the themes and issues presented by Mamet have changed dramatically over the course of the year and I'll explain why...

First of all, for those who are perhaps unfamiliar with Oleanna, here is a brief synopsis: written during the late eighties/early nineteen nineties and amidst the emerging media hype surrounding cases concerning sexual harassment, Oleanna relates the story of a university professor and a student. At the play's start, we feel as though we are witnessing a simple tale teacher-student relations: John, the professor is going to help Carol, the student who does not 'understand' his lectures and who is, as a consequence, failing the course. Somehow, during the course of the play and as a consequence of both characters' actions, John is accused and will be charged with attempted rape, will lose his job, his house and all promises of securing tenure at his place of work.

Power struggles

Without wishing to spoil the plot for those who have not yet read or seen Oleanna, I wont go into anymore detail except to say that Mamet's evocation of these characters considering the play's context is very astute. Criticism of the play tends to lean in favour of one or the other character as being 'in the right' and justified in their actions but I feel that such arguments miss a fundamental point. The play is about the uses and interpretation of language and of the characters' actions between the two characters and in a way that cleverly mimics the contemporary accusations of sexual harassment and what is deemed to be politically correct or not, Mamet illustrates the difficulties of such interpretation. In other words, and perhaps rather obviously, if everything boils down to subjective interpretation, no-one can ever be right and no-one can ever be wrong. The publicity surrounding the play regarding extreme audience reaction cleverly taps in to the media induced hype of the early nineties' obsession with political correctness and sexual harassment and replicates this mania through a very cleverly structured play that seems to highlight the futility of taking the moral high-ground in any scenario.

David Mamet Society