Oleanna: Act 1 Summary & Analysis

In an office on an unnamed university campus, John, a professor, takes a phone call at his desk while his student Carol sits opposite him, waiting for him to finish. On the obviously-frustrating phone call, John talks with his wife Grace, who is touring a house they’re hoping to buy. He talks about “the land,” “the “easement,” and mentions “a term of art.” His wife is clearly frustrated with whatever’s happening at the house, and John tells her to “call Jerry,” their lawyer, before promising he’ll come to meet her in fifteen or twenty minutes. He promises his wife that they will not lose the house, and tells her he loves her before hanging up the phone.

John scribbles some notes and apologizes to Carol for being distracted. She asks him what a “term of art” is. John asks her if she would rather talk about what a “term of art” is, or what she came to his office to discuss. He reminds her that he is “somewhat rushed.” Seeing Carol’s disappointment, however, he apologizes and explains that a “term of art” refers to “a term, which has come, through its use, to mean something more specific than the words would, to someone not acquainted with them… indicate.” After a brief pause, Carol implies that John himself doesn’t know what a “term of art” is. John says he once looked it up and forgot what it meant, the way many people do—Carol retorts that people “don’t do that.” John insists that if something doesn’t interest someone, of course they might forget about it.

John apologizes again for being distracted, but Carol insists he doesn’t need to apologize to her. John suggests they “get on” with their discussion, and tells Carol that he has no desire but to help her succeed in class. Carol is clearly upset and insists that though she does what she’s “told” to do, takes notes, and has even purchased and read a book written by John, she’s still finding the “language” of the course difficult.

John says he has a hard time believing that Carol is struggling so profoundly, and remarks that she’s “an incredibly bright girl.” He says the reason he believes she’s struggling in class is that she’s angry. Carol again insists that she has done everything John has told her to do. The phone rings again. John says he’s not Carol’s father. Carol, stunned, says she didn’t say or imply that John was her father, and asks why he’d say such a thing, but John picks up the ringing phone.

John tells the person on the other end—Jerry—that he can’t talk, and will call him back. He hangs up the phone, turns to Carol, and asks what she wants him to do. He says that both of them are just “two people” who have “subscribed to […] certain institutional” protocol. Carol, her speech scattered and nervous, expresses anxiety about showing her parents the grades she’s earned so far, and begs John to just “teach” her. She tells him she can’t understand his book. John asks her what she doesn’t understand, and she replies “any of it.”

John asks Carol for an example of something she doesn’t understand. She opens her notebook from class and tells him she can’t get her head around the phrase “virtual warehousing of the young” and “The Curse of Modern Education.” John begins explaining the terms before backpedaling, insisting that his book is “just a book.” Carol, however, retorts that everyone around her has come to university to learn, “to be helped,” to do things, and to know things. Carol is afraid that she’ll fail—increasingly often, she says, she’s feeling stupid. John tells Carol she’s not stupid—she’s angry.

John tells Carol that he wishes he could help her with her anger, but has a phone call to make and an appointment to attend. Because Carol dropped into his office and didn’t schedule her meeting, he can’t help her now. Carol self-pityingly tells John that he must think she’s stupid. He replies that he does not. She accuses him of calling her stupid, but he again says that he didn’t, and asks her when she thinks he said such a thing.

Carol insists that she’s stupid, and will “never learn.” She wonders aloud what she’s doing at school—in her classes she’s unable to keep up with the discourse. She doesn’t understand what anyone around her is talking about. She explains that she signed up for John’s course because she was intrigued by the class’s promise to discuss “responsibility to the young,” but now she can’t keep up, and is failing. She begs John to just fail her already, and condemns herself as “stupid” and “pathetic.”

John asks Carol, who has stood up during her tirade, to calm down and sit. She does so. He tells Carol that he knows what she’s talking about, and begins telling her a story about himself. He says he was “raised to think [him]self stupid.” His earliest memories, he says, are of being told that he was behaving stupidly and failing to understand simple concepts. “How people learn,” he says, was a mystery to him. He spent his whole life, he says, comparing himself to other people—“capable people.” The class Carol is in, he explains, is investigating how and why young people, when told they cannot understand things correctly, take that as a “description” of themselves. John says that if Carol doesn’t understand what he’s teaching, it’s his own fault—he admits he’s been busy and distracted with buying a house.

Carol cannot believe that people once told John he was stupid, and asks him who told him such things. He says that people told him he was stupid in his childhood—even if “they’ve stopped,” he says, he can still hear them “continue.” John compares himself to a pilot flying a plane who, when he finds his mind wandering, begins berating himself for being terrible at his job and unworthy of the “precious cargo of Life,” and ends up crashing the plane. Carol retorts that the pilot could have just collected himself and his thoughts and kept going. John says that this is what he's trying to explain to Carol—she must not begin believing herself “incapable” just because she finds herself “frightened” or overwhelmed.

John tells Carol that he’s talking to her the way he’d talk to his own son—in a “personal” way, attempting to communicate the things that he wishes someone had once told him. Carol asks why John would want to be personal with her. John tells Carol that “we can only interpret the behavior of others through the screen we […] create.” As he’s talking, the phone begins ringing again, and again he picks it up, apologizing to Carol. His wife Grace is on the other end, and he explains that he’s with a student and will be there as soon as he can—everything, he promises her, will work out.

John hangs up the phone and explains that there are some problems with the final agreements on the new house he and his wife are buying. Carol asks him if he’s buying a new house “because of [his] promotion,” and he tells her she’s right. Carol asks why John is staying to talk to her rather than going to attend to the issues with the house—John replies that he’s chosen to stay because he likes Carol. Carol asks why, and John says it’s because they’re “similar.”

Carol asks John if he has problems, too, and he says he does. Carol asks him what his problems are. He says he has problems with his wife and his work, and that his problems are similar to Carol’s. She asks him how they’re similar, and he explains, after a brief pause, that because he came late to teaching—because of the “need to fail” he felt as a result of being told he was stupid in childhood—he has always seen “an exploitation in the education process.”

Carol asks John how he stopped feeling the “need to fail,” and John replies that he had to examine his actions. He didn’t want to think of himself as a failure anymore—and decided he needed to start “succeeding now and again.” John tells Carol that the tests she is going to come up against “in school, in college, in life” are designed “for idiots […] by idiots.” Failing tests is normal—tests, he says, are not a test of “worth,” but simply of one’s ability to retain and regurgitate information. John says that he himself is, right now, being tested by the university’s tenure committee. Though they’ve announced that he’s being granted tenure, they haven’t yet signed his contract. The same kind of thing, he says, is happening with the house he’s trying to buy.

John begins to elaborate, but Carol interrupts him, saying that she wants to know about her grade. John caustically replies, “Of course you do.” Carol asks if it’s “bad” of her to want to know about her grade. John apologizes for the way he spoke to Carol and says, more empathetically, “of course you want to know about your grade.” The phone rings again, and Carol gathers her things, saying she should go. John tells Carol he’ll make her a deal. Carol tells him to answer the phone, but he says that what he has to say to her is more important.

John tells Carol, again, that he wants to make a deal with her. He says that if she stays, they can “start the whole course over” together—and he’ll give her an A. The phone stops ringing. Carol, stunned, points out that the semester is only halfway over, but John again reiterates that he will give her an A for the entire semester if she comes back to meet with him a few more times—he wants to answer her questions and help her truly understand the material, and isn’t interested in how she does on tests or essays.

Carol says they can’t start over, but John says they can. Carol points out that there are rules. John says the two of them can break them, and simply not tell anyone about their arrangement. Carol asks why John would do such a thing for her, and he reiterates that he likes her. After a moment’s pause, Carol takes out her notes and begins going over her questions with John.

Carol tells John that she was confused, in class, when he referred to “hazing.” She looks through her notes to try to find the exact phrase he used—John encourages her to stop referring so much to her notes and instead try and put things in her own words, but Carol continues flipping through her notes until she finds the lecture on hazing. John expounds upon his theory that academia is hazing, or “ritualized annoyance”—students are fed books, “grill[ed]” on what they’ve learned, and made to participate in the “sick game” that is higher education. John posits that higher education is now nothing more than a ritual that everyone is “subjected to.”

John asks what Carol thinks about what he’s just said. She says she doesn’t know what she thinks. He asks her to think back to the example he used in class. Carol looks down at her notebook, but John again urges her not to lean so heavily on her notes. Carol looks up and begins repeating the example John used in class to talk about higher education, by comparing it to the right to a fair trial. Justice, he says, is a “right”—but a person’s life is not “incomplete without a trial in it.” John explains that he believes there is “confusion between equity and utility” when it comes to education.

Carol asks if John believes that higher education is “prejudice,” and he says he does. Carol, shocked, asks how he can say such a thing—John encourages her to always “speak up” and ask such questions. He elaborates on his statement, explaining that a prejudice is any “unreasoned belief” that people are subjected to. Education, he reasons, is in this way like prejudice.

Carol tries to interject, but John keeps talking. Eventually she becomes frustrated and shouts that she is trying to speak. John apologizes profusely, and then lets Carol have the floor. She asks how John could possibly say, in a college class, that “college education is prejudice.” John replies that it is his job to provoke his students and make them mad—in order to force them to question what they know.

John talks about a joke his friend told him when he was younger: “The rich copulate less often than the poor. But when they do, they take more of their clothes off.” The joke confused John, but he spent years obsessed with it. When he finally realized it meant nothing and was just “some jerk thing,” he felt free. He compares this feeling to the feeling of realizing that higher education is not necessarily “an unassailable good.” Carol and her fellow students, he says, have been trained to hold education “so dear” that when John questions its utility, they become angry. Fired up by his own ideas, John stops to make a note.

John continues ranting, talking to Carol about his own desire to buy a nice house “to go with the tenure” and allow his children proximity to private school. He begins talking about how public school is designed to use children to “improve the City Schools at the expense of [their parents’] own interest,” but stops himself, and asks Carol if he’s boring her. She looks up from her notebook and explains she’s just trying to make sure she’ll remember what John is telling her. John says he’s not lecturing her, he’s just trying to talk with her.

John and Carol continue debating the use of a college education. John states that young people now believe college is their “right,” but Carol retorts that being told they’re simply wasting their time will upset young people. She points out that John, in his book, asserts that education is “prolonged and systematic hazing,” and asks why he is in academia if he hates it so much. John replies that he doesn’t hate education—he loves it.

John suggests Carol take a look at some statistics about the demographics of college students from the mid-1800s up through 1980, but Carol replies that she can never understand charts. John tries to tell her how charts can be useful, but Carol explodes, shouting that she doesn’t “understand […] any of it.” She says she often sits in class, smiling and nodding and taking notes, all the while feeling out of place, uncertain of who to listen to, and unsure of what anything she’s learning means. John approaches Carol and puts his arm around her shoulder, but she shouts “NO!” and walks away from him.

John continues trying to calm Carol from a distance. He shushes her and tells her to “let it go,” reassuring her that everything is “all right.” Carol calms down, and begins saying something, but stops herself mid-sentence. John asks her to finish her thought and tell him what she’s thinking—she says she can’t. John asks her to tell him once more. Carol replies only that she’s “bad” and “can’t talk about this.”

John continues encouraging Carol to share her thoughts with him. Carol begins speaking, and starts saying that in all her life, she’s “never told anyone this.” John encourages her to go on—but the phone rings. He goes over to it and picks it up. He tells Grace, who is on the other end, that he can’t talk right now, but becomes absorbed in the conversation when he gets some bad news about the house. He becomes irate, and tells his wife to “put Jerry on.” He begins talking to Jerry about the real estate agent, who has voided some sort of agreement. He tells Jerry to tell the real estate agent they will “see her […] in court,” and repeats “screw her.”

As John gets more and more irate and heated, he suddenly pauses, reacting to what’s happening on the other end. He says he doesn’t understand—and then asks if there is or isn’t a problem with the house. After determining there’s no problem, he says he’ll head out “right away” and hangs up the phone, confused. Carol asks John what’s going on—he tells her that all this time, his wife and friends have been waiting at the new house. They are throwing him a surprise party in celebration of the tenure announcement. Carol tells John he should go, and he agrees that he should. Carol tells John his family is proud of him. John replies that “there are those who would say [a surprise is] a form of aggression.”