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 sociopolitical, sexual, and economic power motivates the very worst of human behavior.
Over the course of the play’s three acts, John and Carol’s mutual desire for power—over the other person, over their own circumstances, and over the university community they’re both a part of—becomes painfully clear. In the first act of the play, Carol has come to John’s office to seek help in regard to his class. The subject or nature of the class is never revealed—but it becomes clear, as John and Carol discuss the source material (John’s own book, an indictment of the state of contemporary higher education in America), that her inability to wrap her head around the issues John discusses each week makes her feel powerless. John is on and off the phone with his wife Grace and his lawyer Jerry discussing the impending purchase of a grand new home for himself and his family—he discusses his candidacy for tenure, which is all but a done deal, and pontificates with swagger about education, privilege, and pedagogy. John has all the power, while Carol grows increasingly agitated about her smallness and powerlessness within a system that privileges those who have a head-start in life. John attempts to comfort Carol by putting a hand on her shoulder and even offering her the chance to start the class over in private weekly sessions in his office, but Carol rejects these gestures, instead collapsing into tears as she talks about how “bad” she is.
In Act Two, as the lights come up and John begins speaking, it becomes immediately clear that a power shift has taken place. He is on the defensive now, trying to explain himself, his teaching methods, and attempting to justify why he wants tenure so badly—even in the face of his disdain for the modern university system. It soon becomes evident that Carol has filed a harassment claim against John, citing his deployment of a lewd anecdote, his attempt to touch her, and his offer to give her an A should she come visit him in his office for private sessions. As John attempts to ask Carol to retract her claim, he treads lightly and carefully—she is angry, and as a student leveraging a harassment claim against her teacher, she is ironically the one with all the power. John knows this, and is terrified of it. When Carol attempts to leave the office, he physically restrains her, desperately trying to salvage an ounce of power—but he doesn’t realize that in seeking to regain power over Carol, he is giving her allegations real weight.
By Act Three, the scales have tipped completely. John has lost his chance at tenure and his new house, and he is preparing for the idea that his job, too, will soon be taken away from him. Carol, on the other hand, exudes a newfound grace and power as she berates John for his callous denouncement of higher education and his casual flaunting of his societal and economic privilege. She knows that she has John beat—and, conscious of the fact that she has the upper hand, tries to use her power, however ill-begotten it is, to satiate her own desires. She presents John with a list of books her “group” wants banned from campus, and among them is John’s own text. John refuses Carol’s demands, deciding that his morals are more important than regaining a weakened version of his former power. However, when Carol makes a passing comment that sends John off the deep end, he savagely beats her—and it seems as if the power is back in John’s hands as he holds a chair over the cowering Carol’s head. As John calms himself and sets the chair down, though, he realizes that he has been playing right into Carol’s hands. “Yes. That’s right,” Carol says as John slinks away from her—confirming that she has total power over him, and is able to both predict his actions and goad him on as a means towards her own desired end: the destruction of John’s power.
John and Carol are both power-hungry people with little regard for the feelings or needs of others. John talks blithely about what a joke and a scam education is, ignoring the meek, put-upon student in front of him even when she expresses how offended she is by his comments, given how hard she’s worked just to gain admission to the university. Carol, angered by John’s boastful displays of power and wealth, decides to turn the tables on him—and casts his banal, thoughtless anecdotes and infantilizing offers of help and guidance in a predatory light as she brings her allegations of harassment before the tenure committee. Both characters want power, and will do whatever it takes to regain the power they feel the other has stolen from them. As Mamet pits John and Carol against one another, he uses their power-grabs to suggest that power—and the desire for it—corrupts people and motivates them to carry out terrible acts of physical and emotional violence in pursuit of influence and authority.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Desire for Power ThemeTracker
The Desire for Power Quotes in Oleanna
JOHN: What is a “term of art”? It seems to mean a term, which has come, through its use, to mean something more specific than the words would, to someone not acquainted with them … indicate. That, I believe, is what a “term of art,” would mean. (Pause)
CAROL: You don’t know what it means…?
JOHN: I’m not sure that I know what it means. It’s one of those things, perhaps you’ve had them, that, you look them up, or have someone explain them to you, and you say “aha,” and you immediately forget what…
CARO: You don’t do that.
CAROL: I did what you told me. I did, I did everything that, I read your book, you told me to buy your book and read it. Everything you say I … (She gestures to her notebook.) (The phone rings.) I do…. Ev…
JOHN:… look:
CAROL: …everything I’m told…
JOHN: Look. Look. I’m not your father. (Pause.)
CAROL: What?
JOHN: I’m.
CAROL: Did I say you were my father?
JOHN: If I fail all the time, it must be that I think of myself as a failure. If I do not want to think of myself as a failure, perhaps I should begin by succeeding now and again. Look. The tests you see, which you encounter, in school, in college, in life, were designed, in the most part, for idiots. By idiots. There is no need to fail at them. They are not a test of your worth. They are a test of your ability to retain and spout back misinformation. Of course you fail them. They’re nonsense.
CAROL: There are rules.
JOHN: Well. We’ll break them.
CAROL: How can we?
JOHN: We won’t tell anybody.
CAROL: Is that all right?
JOHN: I say that’s fine.
CAROL: Why would you do this for me?
JOHN: I like you.
CAROL: I was saying … I was saying … (She checks her notes.) How can you say in a class. Say in a college class, that college education is prejudice?
[…]
JOHN: … that’s my job, don’t you know.
CAROL: What is?
JOHN: To provoke you.
CAROL: But how do they feel? Being told they are wasting their time?
JOHN: I don’t think I’m telling them that.
CAROL: You said that education was “prolonged and systematic hazing.”
JOHN: Yes. It can be so.
CAROL: …if education is so bad, why do you do it?
JOHN: I do it because I love it.
JOHN: You see, (pause) I love to teach. And flatter myself I am skilled at it. And I love the, the aspect of performance. I think I must confess that. When I found I loved to teach I swore that I would not become that cold, rigid automaton of an instructor which I had encountered as a child. Now, I was not unconscious that it was given me to err upon the other side. And, so, I asked and ask myself if I engaged in heterodoxy, I will not say “gratuitously” for I do not care to posit orthodoxy as a given good—but, “to the detriment of, of my students.”
JOHN: Well, all right. (Pause) Let’s see. (He reads.) I find that I am sexist. That I am elitist. I’m not sure I know what that means, other than it’s a derogatory word, meaning “bad.” That I… That I insist on wasting time, in nonprescribed, in self-aggrandizing and theatrical diversions from the prescribed text … that these have taken both sexist and pornographic forms … here we find listed […] instances “…closeted with a student” … “Told a rambling, sexually explicit story […] moved to embrace said student and … all part of a pattern …”
CAROL: I don’t care what you feel. Do you see? DO YOU SEE? You can’t do that anymore. You. Do. Not. Have. The. Power. Did you misuse it? Someone did. Are you part of that group? Yes. Yes. You Are. You’ve done these things.
CAROL: How can you deny it. You did it to me. Here. You did… You confess. You love the Power. To deviate. To invent, to transgress […] whatever norms have been established for us. […] And you pick those things which you feel advance you: publication, tenure, and the steps to get them you call “harmless rituals.” And you perform those steps. Although you say it is hypocrisy. […] You call education “hazing,” and from your so-protected, so-elitist seat you hold our confusion as a joke, and our hopes and efforts with it. Then you sit there and say “what have I done?”
JOHN: They’re going to discharge me.
CAROL: As full well they should. You don’t understand? You’re angry? What has led you to this place? Not your sex. Not your race. Not your class. YOUR OWN ACTIONS. And you’re angry. You ask me here. What do you want? You want to “charm” me. You want to “convince” me. You want me to recant. I will not recant.
CAROL: Even if I were inclined, to what, forgive? Forget? What? Overlook your…
JOHN: …my behavior?
CAROL: …it would be wrong.
JOHN: Even if you were inclined to “forgive” me.
CAROL: It would be wrong.
JOHN: And what would transpire.
CAROL: Transpire?
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: “Happen?”
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: Then say it. For Christ’s sake. Who the hell do you think that you are? You want a post. You want unlimited power. To do and to say what you want. As it pleases you—Testing, Questioning, Flirting…
CAROL: Do you hate me now? (Pause)
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: Why do you hate me? Because you think me wrong? No. Because I have, you think, power over you. Listen to me. Listen to me, Professor. (Pause) It is the power that you hate. So deeply that, that any atmosphere of free discussion is impossible. It’s not “unlikely.” It’s impossible. Isn’t it?
JOHN: Yes.
CAROL: Do you want our support? That is the only quest…
JOHN: …to ban my book…?
CAROL: …that is correct…
JOHN: …this…this is a university… we… […] No, no. It’s out of the question. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking of. I want to tell you something I’m a teacher. […] It’s my name on the door, and I teach the class, and that’s what I do. I’ve got a book with my name on it. And my son will see that book someday. And I have a respon… No, I’m sorry I have a responsibility… to myself, to my son, to my profession…
CAROL (exiting):…and don’t call your wife “baby.”
JOHN: What?
CAROL: Don’t call your wife baby. You heard what I said.
(CAROL starts to leave the room. JOHN grabs her and begins to beat her.)
JOHN: You vicious little bitch. You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life? (He knocks her to the floor.) After how I treated you …? You should be… Rape you…? Are you kidding me? (He picks up a chair, raises it above his head, and advances on her.) I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole. You little cunt…
(She cowers on the floor below him. Pause. He looks down at her. He lowers the chair.)
CAROL: Yes. That’s right. (She looks away from [JOHN,] and lowers her head. To herself:) …yes. That’s right.
