Framing the Classroom: Pedagogy, Power, Oleanna

Abstract

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).

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