Context
David Mamet's work epitomizes controversy. Born in Chicago in 1947, he is in many ways the American successor to British playwright Harold Pinter; his plays are sparse on action, with notoriously realistic dialogue—so realistic that he has often been accused of tape recording conversations and transcribing them. The rhythm and diction of the dialogue, which is often colloquial, are just as important to Mamet's point as its actual content, which is frequently and famously profane. His stories reflect the grittiness of urban life and are particularly male-dominated. Mamet began writing at Goddard College in Vermont and attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School in New York; early off-Broadway successes like Sexual Perversity in Chicago brought notoriety in the mid- 1970s and led up to a Pulitzer Prize for 1984's Glengarry Glen Ross. His first produced screenplay, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), was warmly received and preceded a string of originals and adaptations. House of Games marked Mamet's directorial debut in 1987; since then, he's directed eight films, most recently Heist and including, in 1994, Oleanna. Mamet taught at Goddard College, at Yale Drama School, and at New York University, and he founded the Atlantic Theater Company with William H. Macy. He has a big personal base for writing on the life of a professor.
Mamet wrote Oleanna soon after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, which were a huge factor in bringing the term "sexual harassment" into household usage. In 1991, Republican President George Bush nominated conservative African- American Clarence Thomas to succeed retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall on the United States Supreme Court. When confirmation hearings reached the floor of the Senate, University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill came forth with charges of sexual impropriety. While working under Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, Hill alleged, he harassed her with inappropriate discussion of sexual acts and pornographic films after she turned him down for a date. The case became "he said, she said" and highlighted the balance in gender politics in the early 1990s, particularly the inequalities of the primarily masculine workplace. Thomas was confirmed despite the accusations, but national awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace and in other institutional settings increased dramatically. Combined with its growing concern with political correctness, American culture was primed for the topics that Oleanna raises.
The play also holds a unique place within the rest of Mamet's body of work. He has often been accused of writing females as males, and Oleanna tests the bounds of this characterization: Carol is not particularly feminine, but Mamet signifies her sex by giving her several undesirable, weak traits that contrast John's, such as her depression and her consumption by self-doubt. The characters' inability to communicate is expressed in the play's rhetorical structure, its stops, its interruptions, and its false starts; this is Mamet's realistic dialogue in top form. The action is sparse, as usual, and the play doesn't deal with anything fantastic or extraordinary. Mamet instead emphasizes the subtext behind common exchanges—how that which seems mundane is seldom uninteresting. This is very much in the spirit of Pinter and is a common strain throughout Mamet's works. Unusually, Oleanna is almost entirely lacking in the profanity that characterizes Mamet's work." This absence may be due to the play's educational setting or simply the nature of the characters; in this sense, the play is an example of Mamet breaking stereotype and proving his range as a writer.
