Framing the Classroom:
Pedagogy, Power, Oleanna

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Figures

Oleanna and Cultural Conflict

I open this essay with an admission: I have never been a fan of Oleanna. When I first heard about the play in early 1992, I was apprehensive. Given the problematic attitudes toward women in plays such as Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, and Speed-the-Plow--and the strident masculine poses of both the playwright and his dramatic characters--David Mamet seemed an odd figure to address a topic as politically and ideologically complex as sexual harassment. Would Oleanna replicate the male vantage points of Mamet's work as a whole? There were warnings that it might. Longtime Mamet actor and close friend W. H. Macy, who originated the role of John, commented on the role in a Theater Week interview: "I think he's a fella who's gotten bollixed up in a world where the rules are changing and he doesn't know how to keep up. And boy, can I identify with that. I don't know what's going on with women." Macy, who had been reading Robert Bly's Iron John and other books from the men's movement, suggested: "Men are going to have to go through some sort of a revolution the way that women did in the 1960s and 1970s. We have got to define ourselves and we have got to stand up for ourselves" (Simpson 21).

Even given these apprehensions, I wasn't prepared for my reaction when I saw the New York production. As audience members cheered John's violence toward Carol in the play's closing sequence, I felt (and continue to feel, seven years later) that the play was harnessing outrage to a gender politics that it does little to question. That the audience of Oleanna is led to frame the play's earlier interactions in terms of Carol's manifestly outrageous behavior in acts 2 and 3 leaves her character and the positions she represents targeted in unfair and ultimately reactionary ways. As John refuses to sign his name to Carol's list of "objectionable" books, he rises to the heroic rhetoric of John Proctor in the final act of Arthur Miller's The Crucible: "I've got a book with my name on it. And my son will see that book someday" (Mamet 76). ¹ For her part, Carol becomes the play's Abigail, scapegoated and demonized for behavior that, in the end, speaks more to misogynistic cultural stereotypes than to psychological credibility. In his essay "'We're Just Human': Oleanna and Cultural Crisis," Marc Silverstein analyzes the play's concluding act of violence (John beats Carol while calling her a "vicious little bitch" and a "little cunt," Mamet 79): [End Page 39]

That the beating answers an insistent desire the play generates in certain audiences is suggested by the ease with which some of its spectators forget the distinction between actress and character. Leaving the theatre after a performance, Mary McCann, the second actress to play the student in Mamet's own Off-Broadway production, encountered shouts of "bitch" of such intensity that she ran back into the theatre for safety. (103)

Others have raised these issues; indeed, the fury of the debate that Oleanna occasioned in the press and the academic community is in many ways as remarkable a phenomenon as the play itself. ² Alisa Solomon called Oleanna "Mamet's twisted little play . . . an act of name-calling meant to provoke--and especially to provoke feminists" (104). Branding it "one of the nastiest contraptions to sputter down the pike in some time," Jeremy Gerard accused Mamet of stacking the deck against Carol "with stunning ferocity" (76). Jan Stuart characterized it as "less a play than a registry of complaints . . . one man's reactionary protest" (356), and Daniel Mufson suggested that "Oleanna's working title could have been The Bitch Set Him Up" (11). On the other side, John Lahr called the play "powerful, exciting" and praised it for risking "the bracingly unfashionable notion of a woman harassing a man" (125, 121), while Jack Kroll considered it "a riveting report from the war zone between genders and classes" (65). William A. Henry, III's response suggests both the play's power and the manipulation of emotion that has made it so controversial. Henry lauded the play's "power to incense"; so powerful was his antipathy to Carol's actions in the final act that he "virtually leap[ed] out of his chair in fury at the injustice and unreason," thereby directing at the stage (and its female inhabitant) an aggression born of the play's gendered interaction (70).

If the ability to spark such debate (and such passion) is one of the signs of a work's power, then Oleanna must be acknowledged as one of the landmark cultural texts of the early to mid-1990s. The play tapped into collective sensitivities about issues of conduct, culture, and representation with the incendiary directness of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ. What is remarkable about the responses to Oleanna, from writers and audience members alike, is how pervasively they reflect the conflicts that characterize the contemporary political and cultural landscapes: battles over sexual harassment, so-called "political correctness" in higher education, and the wider status of feminism and multiculturalism. Before and after the premiere of Oleanna, the passions surrounding these issues were particularly acute. The 24 December 1990 issue of Newsweek featured a cover story by Jerry Adler entitled, "Taking Offense: Is This the New Enlightenment on Campus or the New McCarthyism?" which helped fuel media attention on "pc." The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings in the fall of 1991 absorbed public attention with their drama of gender, race, and power. ³ Other events such as the Los Angeles riots, battles on the abortion front, the furor over gays in the military, attacks on the NEA, and the O. J. Simpson trial further illustrated the powerfully contested nature of political, legal, and social reality.

Feminism and the contemporary university continue to play leading roles in such conflicts. Susan Faludi's Backlash, which was published the year before Oleanna's [End Page 40] premiere, documents the indictment of both feminism and the women's movement in conservative political and academic circles as well as in the press, popular culture, psychology, and the work of "postfeminist" writers. Silverstein's article places Mamet's play in the context of antifeminism and contemporary debates about the university and its cultural function. Exploring the New Right's attack on universities as a displacement of the broader crisis of capitalist legitimation onto the field of culture, Silverstein argues that Oleanna roots itself in a conservative view of the university and its mode of community. Feminism, in the figure of Carol, masks a desire for power, linguistic and otherwise, and its view of social relationships refuses the rhetoric of the "human." Drawing upon the energies of backlash politics, the beating at the play's end offers itself "less as an act of aggression than as a form of defense . . . of the institutions (the family and the university) that, as the guardians of traditional values, find themselves under attack from those who flock to the rallying cry of 'difference'" (Silverstein 113). Understood against the backdrop of cultural and social conflict that Silverstein outlines, the anger generated by Mamet's play occupies the same cultural status as the rage generated by the film Fatal Attraction (1987)--here, too, audience members shouted, "Kill the Bitch" (Faludi 112)--and the hostility occasioned by debates over bilingual instruction. ⁴

Meta-pedagogy

My own contribution to this debate will address a slightly different set of issues. Since Oleanna's initial production in 1992 and its publication that same year, the most visible debate that has raged over its institutional, sexual, and ideological politics has been carried out in newspapers, scholarly journals, academic conferences, and theatre venues. What is less evident, though no less public, is the considerable discussion that has taken place in the intervening years in university classrooms. Indeed, given the play's availability--Oleanna was quickly anthologized, and it is widely taught in introductory and advanced drama and theatre courses--and the fact that it immediately became a staple of university theatre companies, the play's extratheatrical discussion life is now firmly lodged in the academic institution it takes as its subject. I would like to focus on an immediate and personal dimension of this institutional embeddedness. Drawing on my own experience of teaching the play in both text and performance to a sophomore-level Introduction to Drama course in fall 1996, I would like to consider what I suspect others who have taught the play have found: that Oleanna in the classroom becomes a powerfully reflexive text, framing the student-teacher relationship and the larger institutional structures within which this relationship is articulated. Simultaneously, the play forces meta-pedagogical awareness of several overlapping concerns: the ambiguous status of the personal and the public in institutional settings, the relationship between speech and power, the politics of interpretation and advocacy, academic constructions of authority, and the uncomfortable erotics of interactions in and out of the classroom. If Oleanna has demonstrated its ability to touch social and cultural nerves, then surely one of its most confrontational (and fascinating) edges lies in the ways it foregrounds the structures and dynamics underlying academic discussions of it. As [End Page 41] a corollary to this, Oleanna throws into relief the challenges of talking to students about gender, sexuality, and power in the 1990s (and, no doubt, in the early 2000s). In the classroom, Mamet's play exposes the fault lines of cultural and gender anxiety as ruthlessly as it has in the broader public arena.

Our course's week-and-a-half-long unit on Oleanna was coordinated with a production of the play by the Clarence Brown Theatre Company at the University of Tennessee. (This production, which ran in early November 1996, was directed by Paul Draper and featured J. Michael Flynn and Liz Jahren). Because of the particular strategies and emphases of this production, the experience of teaching Mamet's play was unusually rich in institutional awareness. During rehearsals, members of the company presented scenes to university staff members who worked in the office that handles accusations of sexual harassment. One of the review performances was followed by a panel that included one of these staff members, a local lawyer, and me. I have never thought of Mamet as in any way a Brechtian playwright, but for two weeks the university became--for those of us involved with the play and, through publicity, for others in the community--a laboratory where the politics of academic relationships were brought into the open and the juncture of power and knowledge in the classroom became its own subject.

English 252, a survey of dramatic literature and an introduction to the genre, is one of a number of sophomore survey courses designed to fulfill general humanities and elective requirements; the students are as close to a cross-section of the student community as one will find outside introductory composition courses. As with the department's other sophomore survey courses, the course can also serve as a prerequisite for students planning to major in English, though such students comprise a very small percentage of most classes. There are generally several theatre majors or students with theatre backgrounds in the class, and I always organize the syllabus to take advantage of play productions on campus and in the Knoxville area. This particular class had thirty-two students in it, eleven of them male and twenty-two female. The gender ratio is fairly typical, and it reflects (I suspect) the persistence of a social gendering of arts and humanities education. With the exception of an African American woman, the class was white; given the racial demographics at the University of Tennessee, such class composition is also not unusual. Class participation is often lively in this particular course, and I conduct the class through a mixture of lecture and discussion, with an emphasis on the latter.

From the start of our week-and-a-half unit on the play, Oleanna stood apart from the other plays on our syllabus. Mamet's play framed the classroom in a number of ways, perhaps most overtly in a wary, sometimes awkward self-consciousness as the terms of our relationship were brought out into the open. I include myself in this self-consciousness: as bell hooks notes, even progressive professors are more comfortable addressing such issues as class bias through the material studied than they are with questioning how these factors shape classroom behavior and dynamics (187). Oleanna defamiliarized our relationship and its institutional parameters, disclosing the contradictions and ambiguities underlying the classroom and its modes [End Page 42] of interaction and performance. As we talked about the play, these ambiguities and contradictions became more evident, and I worked whenever I could to allow this reflexive reference to be articulated. We spent some time on the question of space and the often unclear boundaries that characterize settings within the university as an institutional context: the fact that university offices, for instance, are at once ambiguously offstage and onstage, public and personal. We suggested how this particular boundary is negotiated and the risks it presents. We talked about the ways that student-teacher relationships are marked by dissymmetries of power, and I raised the question of what this means for a term like "relationship," with its typical associations of mutuality and reciprocity. This issue, it turned out, was hard for them to grasp--surprisingly so, given the conventions of authority and deference that Southern students bring to classroom interactions. (Many address their professors as "Sir" or "Ma'am.") I suspect that the structures of power governing this interaction are hard for students to talk about, in part, because the fantasy of transgressing such boundaries is culturally such a taboo. Of course, broader attitudes are also at work here. As Dale Bauer and Katherine Rhoades observe in their analysis of student attitudes toward pedagogical feminism, students have tremendous resistance to seeing the classroom as ideologically charged and to negotiating the public-private split that structures the traditional classroom (99-100). ⁵

At the same time, I discovered, the act of framing these relationships and taboos led to a certain level of transgression in practice. Given the skill with which Mamet portrays the dynamics of conversation in the play's opening act, the students and I were forced into an awareness of the relationships of power governing our own classroom discussions. Who can speak? Who can interrupt? Who adjudicates? That John can and does interrupt Carol as frequently as he does underscores the politics of conversation and the unequal privileging of voice. Connected to this, of course, is the issue of interpretive authority. Whose view is legitimized? What are the rewards and penalties attendant upon this recognition? Discussions in English 252, as I have noted, are often spirited, and students are usually not shy about advancing their own interpretations. But in the course of discussing Oleanna, what took place was something far more transgressive. In their anger at Carol, the students violated the protocol they usually observe and openly defied my attempts to redress the play's imbalances. I was taken off guard by the force with which they attacked their surrogate in the play and their unwillingness to entertain the possibility that the responsibility for the play's climactic violence was shared. (I argued valiantly against John in the first scene; as the university sexual harassment officer had said in the postperformance discussion, the number of professional missteps he makes is appalling. None of my students attended this panel, unfortunately.) The trajectories of their responses were complex. On the one hand, the anger of the students was directed at an outsider who challenged this representative of institutional authority; specifically, I think, they were defending what they saw as John's paternalism. On the other hand, their reaction was the assertion of a group voice against mine, and it acquired an almost carnivalesque quality. Was this reveling in their reactions a response to the play's fantasy of Carol's triumph? Was it the celebration of a rupture in classroom decorum, "a temporary suspension of the entire official system with [End Page 43] all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers," to borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin's characterization of the carnivalesque (89)? Oleanna, in this sense, constituted a kind of license, made safe by the fact that it was I who was defending Carol and they who were, in a sense, defending me. Nobody will ever confuse me with W. H. Macy, but the similarities between my beard, hair color, glasses, and style of dress and those of John on the cover of the paperback text of Oleanna made the process of cross-identification, in which I felt simultaneously targeted and defended, even more charged.

In fairness to my students, they were also responding to behavior in the play's final two acts that is genuinely outrageous; in this sense, their anger has a valid cause. They, like John, recoiled at the heartlessness of Carol's offhand demand: "Don't call your wife baby" (79). Despite Mamet's insistence that abuses of power occur on both sides in the play and that the audience is left to draw its own conclusions (Ryan 401)--a view reflected in the programs for the New York production, which were variously printed with male and female figures at the center of a bull's-eye--the play clearly stacks the emotional and ideological deck against Carol. It is part of my argument with Oleanna that Mamet evokes a violence both onstage and offstage that he fails to accurately name and that he directs it at the play's easiest target. And it was my aim in raising this within our own segment of an institutional environment to insist that students make this response an object of examination in its own right. It was an attempt, I suppose, to somehow contain the fears, values, and demonizations that the play released and to uncover the textual operations by which these responses were generated and channeled. In this, on the whole, I had limited success. Most of the students found it hard to consider Carol as a characterization, not a "real" character, and their own responses as the product of specific textual choices on Mamet's part. Chief among these, I feel, is the structural discrepancy between Carol's linguistic and intellectual naïveté in the first act and her later discursive sophistication, which (given the investment in realism and psychological consistency on the part of most students) encourages a retroactive view of Carol's motives as conspiratorial in the first act.

Critiquing Oleanna entailed a decidedly self-conscious pedagogical stance on my part; by arguing against the play, I was forced to be even more explicit than I usually am about my own ideological stances and predispositions. This is a good thing: without such forthrightness, genuinely dialogic classroom interactions are impossible. At the same time, to the extent that Oleanna caricatures political critique as "political correctness" (that label by which the Right has turned the discursive tables on a range of political counter-discourses), my position in taking such a stance was undercut by the play itself. Students seemed bemused by my defense of Carol against Mamet's characterization of her, and though the term "pc" wasn't directed toward me, it was clearly in the air. At such moments, I experienced a milder version of the aggression directed at Carol. In a real sense, then, Mamet's play not only highlights the environment of its academic reception, it intervenes in this environment, "framing" the positions that one can adopt toward it, in both senses of the word. Oleanna, its production history makes clear, exposes the fiction of the [End Page 44] unitary audience and, in my case at least, manipulates a gulf between student and teacher attitudes.

Production and Response

The Clarence Brown production reinforced the students' attitudes toward Oleanna's central conflict, and this, too, was surprising to me, given the company's attempt to challenge the play's demonizing of Carol. While Carol flirted with John in the opening part of the first act, the director added a number of physical overtures on John's part. The stage itself, located in the university's theatre-in-the-round, was rotated between acts to emphasize the importance of multiple angles of vision. Nothing with Oleanna is ever simple, and even this production was "framed" in multiple and contradictory ways. The Clarence Brown publicity department put together a program with a cover that featured a mosaic of headlines dealing with sexual harassment; the most prominent of these raised the specter of political excess and victimization: "Fear in Academia: Concern over Unmerited Accusations of Sexual Harassment" and (the fragment of a headline) "Sexual Correctness: Has it Gone too Far?"

The students, for the most part, left this production even more confirmed in their anger toward Carol. Several of them found their sympathies troubled and conflicted. "By the end of the play I was completely divided on which character I wanted to support," wrote one student. Another observed, "It really showed the power struggles that we as a gender, race, even as a human race face everyday." The production tended to work against any sense of balance we had managed to construct in our classroom discussion. The students' written production critiques, turned in after the end of the play's run, acted out the violence underlying the play's dynamics of identification with clarity and force: "In the end you want to be right up there w/ John when he hits her"; "Many times in the performance, I just wanted to reach out and scream and pull out Carol's hair myself"; "I went into the play hating Carol & came out ready to kill her."

If the classroom responses were in some sense communal, these written responses were individual, yet in their convergence they help us understand what might be thought of as a field, or horizon, of response that the play itself generated among students in the audience. The responses, in other words, are useful in identifying the dynamics of student response to a play that is in a real way about them, and they clarify both the difficulties of class discussion and the attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and power with which students tend to frame dramatic and theatrical representation. Unlike the published discussions of the play in journalistic and academic circles, which were directed toward the issues of campus politics and political correctness, the focus of student response was overwhelmingly on sexual dynamics and the issue of sexual harassment. This emphasis is understandable: the issue of sexuality was foregrounded in the Clarence Brown production, and a sensitivity to the boundaries and rules of interaction between the sexes is one of the [End Page 45] ways in which the questions surrounding university conduct codes manifest themselves in the lives of young adults. I suspect, in fact, that feelings occasioned by the play's engagement with ideological policing were deflected onto its sexual dynamic, a displacement that certainly owes something to Mamet's own conflation of these issues.

Not surprisingly, the students tended to focus on Carol in their critiques, and their responses to her reveal much about their attitudes toward sexual harassment and the role of women within relationships of power and sexuality. There was a shared belief that Carol was the cause of whatever harassment took place in John's office--that she asked for it. She was blamed for "flirty behavior," for the clothes that she wore in the first act (cutoffs, skimpy shirt), and even for coming to John's office for help in the first place. A male student wrote, "When she flipped at John's tie, that was a blatant 'come on' move and I feel validates any behavior on his part. Any time a woman makes an uninvited touch such as she did, that gives the man the go ahead to do it right back which he did tactfully." In the words of a female student, "After I saw Oleanna performed, I sided with John because I felt like she had provoked John to 'sexually harass' her. I thought to myself, she doesn't have to go to his office every day, but she does, continuously. And she doesn't seem to mind him touching her knee or shoulder." Liz Jahren was actually praised for her skill in making one student "ready to beat her up at the end of the play." [End Page 46]

Even though the production added inappropriate physical contact to the role, John was almost universally absolved of any responsibility in the sexual dynamic. Almost none of the students paid any attention to the boundaries and protocols governing a teacher's interaction with his or her students. "He placed his hand pretty high up on her thigh, put his hand inside the hole in her jeans, and caressed her a lot more than in the book," one male student wrote. "I felt that John was actually hitting on her throughout the first scene, but not sexual harassment." The trope, to be sure, is a familiar one: the woman is credited with the sexualization of situations and blamed for evoking sexual feelings in the man. To the extent that John participated in sexualized contact, he did so (to several students) as a passive victim of Carol's predatory advances. Listing the various ways in which Carol "comes on" to John, one male student noted, "at one point Carol leans on a chair arches her back and sticks her ass out. They know that drives us nuts!" Rendering explicit the misogynistic undertones of such criticism, this student characterized her elsewhere as an "evil temptress"; another student, also male, called her "an evil, devil woman." ⁶

As this description demonstrates, the students focused repeatedly on the presence of Carol's body onstage--its appearance, its volatile assertiveness. To the extent that an antifeminist attitude toward Carol makes itself felt in these responses, it does so largely in terms of bodily presentation. Carol was criticized for wearing a "stupid suit" in the play's final act; such a remark clearly reflects an uneasiness with her appropriation of the visual and corporeal codes of male authority. The actress' physical presence onstage factored into the students' responses in another way, as well. Several students felt that the actress was not attractive enough to justify any sexual approach on John's part toward Carol; as one female student wrote, "If they picked a 'knockout' actress, the interpretation of John flirting with a student might have been more believable, I think." Besides neglecting the extent to which sexual harassment is about power rather than sexual attraction, such observations demonstrate a wider cultural tendency to read character in terms of the performer's body when female roles are concerned. Jill Dolan discusses this uneven reading in [End Page 47] an overview of critical responses to Kathy Bates's performance of Jessie in Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother. Noting comments made by male reviewers about Bates's weight and dress, Dolan writes, "In a clear example of reception filtered through gender biases, the male critics' responses to Jessie were based almost uniformly on her physical appearance onstage, which substantially altered their reception of the play" (30). In keeping with such a bias, John's appearance was never mentioned. Male actors tend not to be "embodied" in the same way onstage, and the characters they play are subsumed to a far less extent by the actuality and particularities of the performing body. In Oleanna, the different readings of male and female bodies reinforced a broader dissymmetry: any sexual overtures on John's part were understood (and generally defended) as the result of sexual arousal, while Carol's flirting was seen (and broadly condemned) as an act of power and manipulation.

One of the production critiques contained this observation: "By seeing this play performed I have finally understood that, sad as it may seem, some women do make up rape to punish others." Like many responses that contained particularly harsh judgments, this one was written by a woman. Indeed, it was often the female students who responded to Carol with the greatest outrage. There are regional dimensions to this: the investment in traditional roles in the South continues to add a certain stigma to female academic success. It is not unusual to hear stories of female students in the Tennessee public schools feeling the pressure to underperform in class or risk social ostracism. But the nature and force of these women's responses reflect the broader dilemma that female students face when addressing gender issues in the antifeminist and "postfeminist" 1990s. To the extent that feminism raises issues not only of equal opportunity but of gender roles and their institutional codification, it threatens the model of femininity on which the social identity of many young women continues to hinge. Stigmatized as the ideology of man-hating, masculinized fanatics, the "feminism" constructed by contemporary antifeminism offers an unacceptable point of identification for many college women. Addressing gender issues in today's classroom means encountering the ritual disavowal with which female students regularly preface observations that risk being seen as radical: "I don't want to sound like a feminist, but . . ." By embodying the negative stereotypes of feminist assertiveness so starkly, Mamet's Carol triggers these anxieties with particular force. Angered by the cold-bloodedness of her power play, many of my female students were clearly eager to dissociate from her.

Concluding Reflections

In text and performance, then, Oleanna highlighted both the politics of classroom interaction and the field of social and cultural attitudes against which these politics assume their contemporary shape. Could I have introduced the play's issues more effectively? In the intervening years, I have mulled over different strategies for engaging the play and what I perceive as its ideological and representational imbalances. ⁷ As a way of underscoring John's culpability in the misuse of power [End Page 48] within the play, a colleague in another department suggested viewing the opening act of the film version of Oleanna with the sound turned off, thereby reading the often problematic interaction at a gestural level. In order to explore the ways in which character is the product of specific choices of language, characterization, and staging, one might also invite students to devise different versions of Carol or John in this encounter, modify the exchanges in slight ways, script other outcomes. How would the encounter change if the gender roles were reversed? What happens to the closing sequence if the line, "Don't call your wife baby," is cut or changed? Such sketches of alternative texts would not be designed to supplant or correct Mamet's play; rather, they might denaturalize Mamet's representation, situate it within a field of possible "takes" on the problems it addresses. That Mamet himself explored different endings further justifies such an approach.

As an additional pedagogical strategy, one might distribute reviews of the New York production (conveniently collected in the New York Theatre Critics Reviews) in order to trace the rhetoric characterizing the play's reception. Finally, Oleanna's extensive production history can also illuminate the "parameters" and "tolerances" (to borrow Roger Gross's terms) of the play's ideological dynamic. ⁸ The 1993 London production, directed by Harold Pinter at the Royal Court Theatre, had some success (according to many of its reviewers) in redressing the play's imbalances. Other productions come to mind: the 1994 West Hollywood production, which featured a black actor (Lionel Mark Smith) as John, or the 1995 English-language production in Hamburg, which shifted over the play's three acts from realistic staging to Caligari-like expressionism, thereby transporting Mamet's action from the familiar to the interiorized and the nightmarish. ⁹ Despite the Clarence Brown Theatre's limited success, production can decenter and reframe texts in powerful ways. As the material of my students' responses suggests, the very resistance of texts to performative counter-readings can be useful to trace.

Whatever strategies I might have tried to teach against Mamet's play, I would have had to admit both the limits of classroom framing and the powerful cultural pressures conditioning student response. One of my students wrote about the production:

When I first read the play I did not see any real sexual harassment. Then in our class discussion I saw people's point of view that John messed up a bit. After seeing the play I have gone back to my original thought, I think Carol is crazy and John is a teacher that was just trying to be supportive and helpful. It seems to me that he was just a friendly and maybe a little bit touchy person.

For a progressive professor who feels strongly about the issues raised by the play, this can be a discouraging response: a dialectic of sympathy and responsibility is abandoned in favor of Oleanna's cathartic demonization. But a play, like anything else, works in the psyche over time, and despite its conclusive final sentences, this student's response reveals textual engagement as something more open-ended. [End Page 49]

Would I teach Oleanna again? With a certain trepidation, I would say yes. Safe works may be more superficially enjoyable, but Mamet's play blew the cover off our institutional interactions in a way that made our week and a half one of the most interesting classroom experiences I have ever had. Oleanna confronted us with the relationships of power and interpretation, and it gave us a visceral experience of what's at stake in both.

Stanton B. Garner, Jr. is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where he teaches courses in modern drama and dramatic theory.

Notes

1. John Proctor refuses to sign a confession in act 4 of The Crucible: "I have three children--how may I teach them to walk like men in the world, and I sold my friends?" When Danforth asks him why his signature is so important, he offers the ringing words: "Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies!" (143).

2. Broadening the field of critical discussion beyond those who generally conduct it, the New York Times published a collection of responses from Susan Brownmiller, Deborah Tannen, and others from nontheatrical backgrounds. See Brownmiller et al.

3. For a discussion of the political and cultural issues engaged by the Thomas-Hill hearings, see Morrison. Sandra Tomc reads Oleanna in the context of "the performative body of sexual harassment" foregrounded in the hearings (165).

4. In addition to Faludi's work, Ferguson, Katrak, and Miner provide a useful background to contemporary antifeminism. For a collection of essays on political correctness that appeared in the years and months preceding the premiere of Oleanna, see Berman.

5. Oleanna is also a fascinating text to think about in conjunction with Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation--a collection, edited by Jane Gallop, that considers the relationship of the personal and the performative in teaching--and with Gallop's more recent book, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.

6. In a continuation of our discussion of these issues, we later read and discussed Vinegar Tom, Caryl Churchill's revisionist dramatization of the seventeenth-century witch persecutions. As part of our discussion of the psychological and cultural demonization of women's sexuality, I gave them the lyrics of Chris Isaak's song, "Wicked Game": "What a wicked game you play / To make me feel this way / What a wicked thing to do / To make me dream of you."

7. The introduction to the play in the third edition of the Bedford Introduction to Drama describes the conflict in terms sympathetic to John. According to this introduction, John "reassures" Carol, "good-naturedly criticizes" the institution of education, and "innocently embraces her in a show of confidence." Carol, on the other hand, "goes on the attack" (Jacobus 1615). This edition had not been published when I taught my Introduction to Drama course in 1996; we used a different anthology and supplemented it with several individual playtexts, including the Grove edition of Oleanna.

8. See Gross 134-36.

9. For an insightful review of the Royal Court production of Oleanna, see Zeifman. The West Hollywood production, which played at the Tiffany Theater, was directed by Macy; Stephanie Tucker discusses the controversies leading up to and surrounding the production in her review of the play. The University Players production of the play in Hamburg was directed by Stefan Grund. I am indebted to Allen Dunn for information on this production.

Works Cited

Adler, Jerry. "Taking Offense: Is This the New Enlightenment on Campus or the New McCarthyism?" Newsweek 24 Dec. 1990: 48-54.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Bauer, Dale and Katherine Rhoades. "The Meanings and Metaphors of Student Resistance." Antifeminism in the Academy. Ed. VèVè Clark, Shirley Nelson Garner, Margaret Higonnet, and Ketu H. Katrak. New York: Routledge, 1996. 95-113.

Berman, Paul, ed. Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses. New York: Dell, 1992.

Brownmiller, Susan, et al. "He Said . . . She Said . . . Who Did What?" New York Times 15 Nov. 1992: 2:6.

Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1988.

Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.

Ferguson, Moira, Ketu H. Katrak, and Valerie Miner. "Feminism and Antifeminism: From Civil Rights to Culture Wars." Antifeminism in the Academy. 35-66.

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