Oleanna Themes

David Mamet’s Oleanna is a two-person play which unfolds over three acts. As the play progresses, the power dynamics between the about-to-be-tenured university professor John and his meek, struggling student Carol slowly reverse themselves. Both characters want more power than they have, and will do terrible things to get it—and through the subversions of power that his two characters enact upon one another, Mamet uses them as analogues for the argument that the desire for…

Written largely in response to the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas—and the allegations of sexual harassment leveraged against him by his former coworker Anita Hill during said hearings—Oleanna takes a cynical view of contemporary gender relations. When John’s student Carol brings harassment allegations against him just as he is about to be reviewed for tenure at the university, his life comes crumbling down—and Carol, backed by a “group”…

Hypocrisy, manipulation, and deliberate misinformation are at the heart of Oleanna, in which two characters work to hide parts of themselves from one another even as the twisted intimacy between them deepens. As John and Carol deceive, destabilize, and extort one another, Mamet argues that there can often be an element of manipulation in even the best-intended actions—and that hypocrisy and duplicity often define human relationships.

Both John and Carol are guilty of hypocrisy…