Theatre Essay: History is Written by the Winners - an analysis of OLEANNA

This was originally written in response to a British production of OLEANNA by David Mamet in the mid-2000s.

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Most critics seem to think that David Mamet has written an analysis of male-female miscommunications:

In Virtual-Lancaster, Paul Wilkenson wrote.:

What men say and what women hear (and visa versa) is one of those tricky areas of human nature that science steers clear of and only playwrights and comedians dare to tread.
or an indictment of political correctness, as Michael Billington of the Guardian believes:

Mamet is not just attacking the lunatic excesses of political correctness. His play is really a lament for the destruction of mutual trust and personal interaction that makes academic freedom possible.

Maybe it seems to be about miscommunications or political correctness on the stage, and the final message of the play depends a good deal on how it is directed. But on the page, OLEANNA is a folk tale about a hero fighting evil.

The title of the play is inspired by a folk song, which Mamet quotes in the introductory pages of the published play:

"Oh, to be in Oleanna ,
That's where I would rather be.
Than be bound in Norway
And drag the chains of slavery."
- folk song

In OLEANNA, John the professor fights evil in the form of the Group (Mamet's capitalization). Many reviewers entirely overlook the importance of the Group to the dramatic structure of the play and focus on Carol, the student who accuses John of harassment. The Group is mentioned only four times in the play, and probably in a stage presentation the physical reality of actors portraying John and Carol works to minimize audience awareness of the Group even further. But in the text it's easier to see the Group is responsible for the power dynamic that develops between Carol and John.

JOHN: Yes. Tell me frankly.
CAROL: ...my position...
JOHN: I want to hear it. In your own words. What you want. And what you feel.
CAROL: ...I...
JOHN: ...yes...
CAROL: My Group.

When asked what she wants, Carol refers to the Group. It's what the Group wants that matters now, and Carol is merely its spokeswoman.

In the Posner production some critics felt that John was portrayed as sexually exploitive.

Charles Spenser in The Telegraph comments:

One also feels a great deal less warm towards the professor in Aaron Eckhart's performance. He presents a man fatally in love with the sound of his own voice and far too preoccupied with his impending purchase of a new home to concentrate fully on his pupil's distress. When he puts his arm round Carol to comfort her, and later hugs her and offers to massage her grades, there is a distinct crackle of exploitative sexuality in the air.

To audiences the big question in the play is always whether or not John is actually making a sexual move on Carol. I think the text shows he is not. But although that issue is in dispute, what is absolutely indisputable is that the Group tries to blackmail John in its efforts to ban his book:

CAROL: We can and we will. Do you want our support? That is the only quest...
JOHN: .. to ban my book...?
CAROL: ...that is correct...

By the end of the play, the charge of sexual harassment has become attempted rape:

CAROL: My Group has told your lawyer that we may pursue criminal charges.
JOHN: ... no...
CAROL: Yes. And attempted rape. That's right. (Pause)

which makes the issue of whether or not John is guilty of sexual harassment completely irrelevant to the moral of the story - while there may be some doubt over whether John's actions are honorable, nobody in their right mind would say he tried to rape Carol.

So the play is not really about a man-woman misunderstanding, or a student reacting overzealously against what she truly believes is sexual harassment. This play is about a shadowy Group with an agenda to censor free thought by any means necessary. The Group creates a situation where John's life is ruined unless he capitulates to its demands. And he responds by transforming from a self-absorbed jerk or a subtle groper (depending on the production) into a fearless champion of the First Amendment:

JOHN: And, and, I owe you a debt, I see that now. (Pause) You're dangerous, you're wrong and it's my job... to say no to you. That's my job. You are absolutely right. You want to ban my book? Go to hell , and they can do whatever they want to me.

This is why audience members cheer at the end of some productions when John makes Carol cower before him: at great personal sacrifice the Hero slays the Dragon.

Mamet never uses the word "feminist" but since Carol accuses John of sexism, presumably the Group is composed of feminists. Anti-feminist Katie Roiphe believes that's what Mamet means:

Writers from David Mamet to Michael Crichton wrote works of art devoted to the excesses and absurdities of the feminist preoccupation with sexual harassment.

While I'm sure that even feminist groups are capable of doing bad things, I have never heard of a feminist group using blackmail to ban a book. I'm not saying it's impossible - but I am saying that there's no evidence this has ever happened in the history of feminism. If there was, Katie Roiphe would have shouted it from the mountaintops by now.

This is a problem for Mamet, because political correctness as it is actually practiced would not serve his message. Silly speech codes and public demonstrations are not sinister enough and would probably make a better comedy than a tragedy. So Mamet invents the feminist version of the International Jew, a skulking, ruthless, extremely powerful cabal, able to arrange John's personal destruction through nothing more than hearsay from a mentally challenged undergraduate.

It's fascinating to compare Mamet's folk tale with reality. Recently Naomi Wolf has claimed she was groped by culture hotshot Harold Bloom when she was his student. She was excoriated by right-wingers for discussing it in public and  Kathleen Parker, writing for Townhall.com, even suggests that Wolf owed Bloom an apology for her reaction:

The fact that Bloom's boneless hand prompted Wolf to regurgitate her dinner inarguably put an immediate and explicit end to this would-be tale of sexual harassment, with no harm to any except perhaps to poor Bloom's withered self-esteem. Given Wolf's then-considerable gifts of youth, beauty and guile, I should think she owes the dear fellow an apology.

Incredibly Parker can't imagine that the incident could have a long-term impact on Wolf's relationship with Bloom, and therefore on Wolf's academic career. In general the conservative response to Wolf's claim is not disbelief that Bloom did what Wolf says he did, the response is that it's no big deal, it's strictly a personal issue between Wolf and Bloom, and Wolf should get over it.

And Wolf herself advises extreme caution when making accusations: unlike the world of OLEANNA, in Wolf's experience the accuser is far more likely to be punished than the accused:

For years now, Yale has been contacting me: Would I come speak at a celebration of women at Yale? Would I be in a film about Jewish graduates? Would I be interviewed for the alumni magazine?
I have usually declined, for a reason that I explain to my (mostly female) college audiences: The institution is not accountable when it comes to the equality of women. I explain that I was the object of an unwanted sexual advance from a professor at Yale - and that his advances seemed to be part of an open secret. I tell them that I had believed that many Yale decision-makers had known about his relations with students, and nothing I was aware of had happened to stop it. Where is the professor now? they ask. He is still there, I explain: famous, productive, revered. I describe what the transgression did to me - devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student, rather than as a pawn of powerful men. Then, heartbreakingly, a young woman will ask: "Did you tell?"
I answer her honestly: "No. I did nothing."
"Have you never named the guy, all these years on?"
"No," I answer. "Never."
"But," she will ask hesitantly, "don't you have an obligation to protect other women students who might be targets now?"
"Yes," I answer. "I do have that obligation. I have not lived up to it. I have not been brave enough." And then there is always, among those young, hopeful women, a long, sad silence.
After such speeches, a young woman will come up to me - in Texas, in Indiana, in Chicago - in tears: My music professor is harassing me , she'll say. I tried to tell the grievance board, but they told me it is my word against his, and that there is no point in pursuing it. I know I won't get a job if I do anything about it. My lit professor made a pass at me; he is grading my senior thesis. My female adviser basically told me to drop it if I want to graduate; to switch classes; to start all over with another subject. My lab instructor keeps putting his hands on my body, and his mentor is on the grievance committee. I can't sleep. What should I do?
I am ashamed of what I tell them: that they should indeed worry about making an accusation because what they fear is likely to come true. Not one of the women I have heard from had an outcome that was not worse for her than silence. One, I recall, was drummed out of the school by peer pressure. Many faced bureaucratic stonewalling. Some women said they lost their academic status as golden girls overnight; grants dried up, letters of recommendation were no longer forthcoming. No one was met with a coherent process that was not weighted against them. Usually, the key decision-makers in the college or university - especially if it was a private university - joined forces to, in effect, collude with the faculty member accused; to protect not him necessarily but the reputation of the university, and to keep information from surfacing in a way that could protect other women. The goal seemed to be not to provide a balanced forum, but damage control.

So why is it that although many students have been sexually harassed by professors right up to the present, and even Naomi Wolf advises them to worry about making true accusations, the most famous play on the subject of professor-student harassment is about a feminist group using false accusations and blackmail to ban a book?

Village Voice theatre critic Alexis Solomon notes:

...since 1975 the percentage of plays by women has stayed virtually the same on Broadway (16 percent) and increased only marginally Off-Broadway (from 13 to 21 percent). Never mind that the study found that nearly two-thirds of ticket buyers are women. Often they're trying to drag their reluctant husbands or boyfriends along to the theater, and winning them over means insisting that the play in question will appeal to their male sensibility. (No wonder the misogynist OLEANNA was one of the most-produced plays in the history of regional theaters.)

Solomon wrote that in 1999, but nothing has changed. This year (2004) the Atlantic Theater Company is doing a season with exactly zero female writers (0%). Their direct mailing piece includes Tina Howe's name on the cover, but they aren't doing a Howe play - it's Howe's interpretation of Ionesco. Since the Atlantic is co-founded by Mamet (they're doing a Mamet play in the new season) you might expect that kind of thing from them, but the Roundabout is also doing a zero female writer season (0%). While last year's season had one female author out of 3 (33%) the previous Roundabout season had no women (0%). Meanwhile, the Manhattan Theatre Club managed to do plays by 2 female writers out of 7 total productions (28%).

Mamet includes some lyrics from the folk song "Oleanna" in the published version of the play. The song was written by Ditmar Meidel in 1853. Pete Seeger provided the English lyrics in 1953. Oleanna is not only a place to escape the chains of Norway - it is a magical land, where chores are done for you - the cows milk themselves and the hens lay eggs ten times a day. And if the women get out of line, you don't even have to beat them yourself:

In Oleanna the women do all the work.
If she doesn't work hard enough
She takes a stick
And gives herself a beating!

You can read the entire song here:
http://spikesmusic.spike-jamie.com/folk/ps3/OLEANNA.pdf

Maybe one day when women's plays are produced 50% of the time, or students have true recourse against professors who misbehave, Mamet will have cause to be paranoid about female power. But OLEANNA is an example of the way history - and folk tales - are written by the winners.

c. 2012 Nancy McClernan

David Mamet is a teabagger

*** This post contains spoilers about RACE by David Mamet ***

I can't believe that nobody except me and a right-winger picked up on the similarity between the straw-woman character Susan in RACE with her crazed college thesis, and the vicious, out-of-context misrepresentation of Michelle Obama's college thesis that was trumpeted by the right-wing smear machine.

To quote one of the emails that went around during the 2008 election and reprinted on the web sites of many teabaggers:

Michele Obama clearly has a chip on her shoulder.

Not only does she see separate black and white societies in America, but also she elevates black over white in her world.
...

Michelle Obama does not look into a crowd of Obama supporters and see Americans. She sees black people and white people eternally conflicted with one another.

The last sentence is an EXACT description of Susan's thesis.

Fox News' Sean Hannity also promoted the smear.

The urban legend web site snopes.org explains:

Much scrutiny and discussion has been focused on a single phrase contained within the thesis, the statement that "blacks must join in solidarity to combat a white oppressor." This phrase has repeatedly been quoted out of context and presented as if it reflected Michelle Obama's own philosophy, but in its full context it is clearly her speculation about what she thought some of the respondents she surveyed for her thesis (i.e., students who had attended Princeton in earlier years) might have been feeling:

As discussed earlier, most respondents were attending Princeton during the 70's, at a time when the Black Power Movement was still influencing the attitudes of many Blacks.

It is possible that Black individuals either chose to or felt pressure to come together with other Blacks on campus because of the belief that Blacks must join in solidarity to combat a White oppressor. As the few blacks in a white environment it is understandable that respondents might have felt a need to look out for one another.

The Tea Party as such was not around during the 2008 election, but this incident is strikingly similar to the recent Shirley Sherrod case - a black woman smeared as a racist when her words were taken out of context - and this time they did some real damage.

Here is a piece of "satire" recently written by Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams:

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the 'tea party movement'.

The tea party position to "end the bailouts" for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn't that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

And the ridiculous idea of "reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government." What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

The racist tea parties also demand that the government "stop the out of control spending." Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government "stop raising our taxes." That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom's Nephew
NAACP Head Colored Person

As blogger Lindsay Beyerstein notes:

Last week, the NAACP passed a resolution at its annual convention asking Tea Party leaders to condemn the racists in their ranks. The NAACP was right on the money. Regardless of whether you think the average Tea Party supporter is racist, overt racists regularly show up and make headlines at their events. Tea Party leaders would have you believe that they're a fringe element that is absolutely not representative of the core values of the Tea Party. So, the leaders should be only too eager to publicly distance themselves from the ugly fringe, right?

Wrong. Instead, one major Tea Party group doubled down, accusing the NAACP of racism.

The large and influential Tea Party Express withdrew from the National Tea Party Federation rather than rebuke TPE executive director Mark Williams for a satirical blog post in the voice of "Precious Benjamin Jealous", "Tom’s Nephew National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Head Colored Person"[sic]. (The current president of the NAACP is named Benjamin Todd Jealous.)

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Williams later tried to defend himself by saying that the piece was satirical, that he was using the absurd to illustrate the absurd. Satire to underscore an offensive point is still offensive. The point Williams was trying to drive home with all the juicy stereotypes about "coloreds" and their "wide screen TVs" is that anyone who thinks the Tea Party is racist is the real racist for wanting to perpetuate slavery.

This is the kind of bizarro hall-of-mirrors logic that typifies the Tea Party rhetoric around race. Their favorite language game is "Who's the Real Racist"? Whenever anyone accuses the Tea Party of racism, they accuse the accuser of racism.

This game of Who's the Real Racist is a game that David Mamet likes to play too. In an essay he wrote for the NYTimes right before RACE opened he quotes Chris Rock:

Chris Rock, in his last tour, addressed the subject of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and asked, rhetorically and on behalf of the whites in the audience: Is it possible that a 70-year-old black man hates the whites? Let me enlighten you. You cannot find a 70-year-old black man who does not hate the whites.

This made sense to me. (I apologize to the esteemed Mr. Rock for what I am sure is a clunky paraphrase.)

Presumably because Chris Rock is black and therefore in Mamet's mind an authority on the racial views of 70-year-old black men, it's OK for Mamet to agree with this incredibly racist statement. Imagine for a moment if Michelle Obama said: "you cannot find a 70-year-old white man who does not hate the blacks."

Mamet then goes on to his very favorite tactic, false equivalence:

There has always been, at the very least, a little bit of hate between blacks and whites in this country, with each side, in its turn, taking advantage of its political strength (as who does not?). But that relationship is also perhaps like a marriage. Both sides at different times are bitching, and both at different times are bailing, but we’re all in the same boat.

You see it's a level playing field. Blacks taking advantage of political strength is the equivalent of hundreds of years during which whites held blacks in slavery, plus another hundred years of terrorism, bigotry, vote supression etc. etc.

RACE is full of the constant drumbeat of blacks hate whites, whites hate blacks over and over again, in between the incessant lawyer jokes. Mamet's message is clearly along the lines of, hey, let's not argue about who is the victim - we ALL are because we are ALL racists and liars.

The rightwing loves false equivalence as Media Matters for America documents.

And as in OLEANNA, Mamet completely stacks the deck. Even though it seems like he's saying we are all equal in our racial hatred, the villain of the piece is Susan (all the other characters get last names) who is basically inhuman and possesses a Terminator-like obsession to get whitey.

I am quite serious. The character has nothing to say about anything except race. She doesn't appear to have any friends, or relatives, or hobbies, or even very much to do in the law office where the entire play is set. She is presented as a bright woman with an Ivy-league law degree, she has talent the white lawyer guy says. But she throws it all away in order to set up her law firm, make them take a case and then make sure they lose the case. She destroys her own career, which presumably she worked very hard for. So that she can hurt a colleague who is fond of her.

And the final proof given for her insane obsessive hatred for whitey is when a portion of her thesis is read aloud during the play. (I will get down the the Dramatists Book Store soon and copy it down and post it here.)

Susan is a straw-woman like Carol from OLEANNA, but she is an even more fearsome invention than Carol. Carol is clearly a pawn of The Group, as I wrote about in my essay about OLEANNA History is Written by the Winners, and can only work her dastardly will on John through the amazing influence and reach of The Group, with its daring scheme to censor heroic John's work through a trumped up rape charge.

But Susan - wow, she is amazing! She seems to have no need for the corrupting influences of a Group, she soaked up the evil all on her own, from the very reverse-racist atmosphere of Academia itself. And she executes her scheme to destroy poor white lawyer guy - making sure that they take the case, making witnesses change their testimony all by her lonesome. But maybe she doesn't care that she completely destroyed her legal career - with those powers she could get a gig as a Super Villain in any comic book universe.

I mentioned one right-winger got it, Harry Stein writing in the City Journal:

Late in David Mamet’s recently premiered Race, something happens that, for those accustomed to the pro forma left-liberalism of typical Broadway fare, is little short of stunning. The play deals with a black-white legal team defending a prominent white client accused of raping a powerless, young black woman. They’ve just learned that the centerpiece of their ingenious strategy to prove his innocence was leaked to the prosecution—the culprit being their stylish, newly minted female black associate, the protégé of the white, liberal attorney (James Spader). The black attorney (David Allen Grier) is irate. He’d warned his partner not to hire her, knowing from the start that she’d be trouble, that she’d put race loyalty above the firm’s interests and even the truth. How could he have known all that, wonders his chastened colleague? Grier stalks over to a file, pulls out the young woman’s college thesis, and begins reading aloud. It's full of the inchoate, anti-white rage characteristic of such efforts - indeed, it recalls Michelle Obama's at Princeton. You think you know this woman, Greer tells Spader; you think she likes you, but she's an affirmative-action babe, a perpetual victim. That's how she sees herself, and this is her revenge.

Talk about an electric theatrical moment! The play may be otherwise seriously flawed, but here is vintage Mamet — in fact, a new, even more daring Mamet. It's the Mamet conservative theater fans have been waiting for since he took on the issue of sexual harassment in Oleanna back in 1992; and even more so since he came out as a quasi-conservative early last year in a Village Voice essay entitled, "Why I Am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal"

Note he thinks the rest of the play may be flawed, but that moment there was just right. Because Harry Stein actually believes this creature exists, this "affirmative-action babe, a perpetual victim." And in fact, he thinks she is Michelle Obama.

Nobody has clued Harry Stein into the fact that the smear against Michelle Obama has been debunked - but unfortunately not only conservatives like Harry Stein are slow on the uptake - there are still liberals who let David Mamet slide because he's a Great Man of the Arts. Sarah Seltzer writes:

The nightmare that "Oleanna" predicted never happened. I hope that if Mamet took on the issue today, the results would be a bit different.

Mamet did not predict the nightmare that is OLEANNA - he believes the nightmare exists. Every bit as much as he believes that Susan exists - maybe he, like fellow conservative Harry Stein, even believes Michelle Obama is just like Susan.

Is he a card-carrying (or teabag carrying) member of the Tea Party? Probably not. But he would be perfectly comfortable hanging out with Tea Partiers, most of whom are, like Mamet a White, Republican, Older Male with Money

Now I admit I am a little surprised by the non-reaction to RACE. Whereas misogyny is perfectly acceptable from a Great Man of the Arts, and will not hurt a man's career in the least, as David Mamet demonstrates, I would have thought that more people would have called him out on RACE - but then again a good number of liberal arts-types defended admitted child-rapist Roman Polanski on the grounds that he's a Great Man of the Arts and shouldn't be held to the standards of mortals, so I guess they have no problem at all giving Mamet a pass for his paranoid reverse-racism obsession.

I'll leave the final word to a member of the demographic Mamet hates and fears the most - a female college student in the clutches of the corrupting liberal forces of Academia:

Last year, Mamet came to UT to conduct a writing seminar for several graduate and undergraduate playwrights and screenwriters. During the seminar, Mamet called Muslims terrorists and Arabs pedophiles. He also, unsurprisingly, spewed misogynist rhetoric in addition to his racist diatribe. Several students were shocked and appalled and took Mamet to task for his bigoted remarks. He countered with, "Why shouldn't we pick on Arabs? They blew up New York City."

How David Mamet portrays sexual harassment claims in OLEANNA

I updated my essay about OLEANNA from thirteen years ago for the NYCPlaywrights weekly email, with 2017 info.

In OLEANNA David Mamet portrays charges of sexual harassment as a plot by feminists to destroy men. And it should be noted that OLEANNA was first produced long before Mamet came out of the closet as an extreme conservative happily joining his buddy Rush Limbaugh on his radio show.
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/06/10/the_david_mamet_interview/ 

Many people, including critics, seem to think that David Mamet wrote about male-female miscommunications. In Virtual-Lancaster, Paul Wilkenson wrote:

“What men say and what women hear (and visa versa) is one of those tricky areas of human nature that science steers clear of and only playwrights and comedians dare to tread.” 

Some people think OLEANNA is an indictment of political correctness, as Michael Billington of the Guardian believed:

“Mamet is not just attacking the lunatic excesses of political correctness. His play is really a lament for the destruction of mutual trust and personal interaction that makes academic freedom possible.”

Maybe it seems to be about miscommunications or political correctness on the stage, and the final message of the play depends a good deal on how it is directed. But on the page, OLEANNA is a folk tale about a hero fighting evil. 

The title of the play is inspired by a folk song, which Mamet quotes in the introductory pages of the published play:

"Oh, to be in Oleanna, 

That's where I would rather be. 

Than be bound in Norway 

And drag the chains of slavery. 

- folk song”

In OLEANNA, John the professor fights evil in the form of the Group (Mamet's capitalization). Many reviewers entirely overlook the importance of the Group to the dramatic structure of the play. This review of a currently running production does not mention The Group at all.
http://brookline.wickedlocal.com/entertainment/20171017/theater--new-reps-oleanna-takes-on-renewed-urgency 

The Group is mentioned only four times in the play, and probably in a stage presentation the physical reality of actors portraying John and Carol works to minimize audience awareness of the Group even further. But in the text it's easier to see the Group is responsible for the power dynamic that develops between Carol and John.

JOHN: Yes. Tell me frankly.
CAROL: ...my position...
JOHN: I want to hear it. In your own words. What you want. And what you feel.
CAROL: ...I...
JOHN: ...yes...
CAROL: My Group.

When asked what she wants, Carol refers to the Group. It's what the Group wants that matters now, and Carol is merely its spokeswoman. 

In the Lindsay Posner production (London, 2004) some critics felt that John was portrayed as sexually exploitive.  

Charles Spenser in The Telegraph comments:

“One also feels a great deal less warm towards the professor in Aaron Eckhart's performance. He presents a man fatally in love with the sound of his own voice and far too preoccupied with his impending purchase of a new home to concentrate fully on his pupil's distress. When he puts his arm round Carol to comfort her, and later hugs her and offers to massage her grades, there is a distinct crackle of exploitative sexuality in the air.”

To audiences the big question in the play is always whether or not John is actually making a sexual move on Carol. I think the text shows he is not. But although that issue is in dispute, what is absolutely indisputable is that the Group tries to blackmail John in its efforts to ban his book:

CAROL: We can and we will. Do you want our support? That is the only quest... 

JOHN: .. to ban my book...? 

CAROL: ...that is correct... 

By the end of the play, the charge of sexual harassment has become attempted rape:

CAROL: My Group has told your lawyer that we may pursue criminal charges. 

JOHN: ... no... 

CAROL: Yes. And attempted rape. That's right. (Pause)

This completely changes the ethical issue at the heart of the play. The play does not portray at any point an attempted rape. The charge is clearly a vicious lie by an evil shadow organization that has immense but unexplained power. We never learn anything about the Group except its criminal machinations and its control over Carol's mind. 

So the play is not actually about a man-woman misunderstanding or political correctness gone wild. This play is about a Group with an agenda to censor free thought by any means necessary. The Group creates a situation where John's life is ruined unless he capitulates to blackmail. And he responds by transforming from a self-absorbed jerk or a subtle groper (depending on the production) into a fearless champion of free speech:

JOHN: And, and, I owe you a debt, I see that now. (Pause) You're dangerous, you're wrong and it's my job... to say no to you. That's my job. You are absolutely right. You want to ban my book? Go to hell , and they can do whatever they want to me.

This is why audience members cheer at the end of some productions when John makes Carol cower before him: at great personal sacrifice the Hero slays the Dragon. 

It's fascinating to compare Mamet's folk tale with reality. And Hollywood isn’t the only problem. Naomi Wolf claimed she was groped by literary celebrity Harold Bloom when she was his student.
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9932/ 

She was attacked for discussing it in public and  Kathleen Parker, writing for Townhall.com, even suggested that Wolf owed Bloom an apology for her reaction:

The fact that Bloom's boneless hand prompted Wolf to regurgitate her dinner inarguably put an immediate and explicit end to this would-be tale of sexual harassment, with no harm to any except perhaps to poor Bloom's withered self-esteem. Given Wolf's then-considerable gifts of youth, beauty and guile, I should think she owes the dear fellow an apology.

Incredibly Parker can't imagine that the incident could have a long-term impact on Wolf's relationship with Bloom, and therefore on Wolf's academic career. In general the conservative response to Wolf's claim is not disbelief that Bloom did what Wolf says he did, the response is that it's no big deal, it's strictly a personal issue between Wolf and Bloom, and Wolf should get over it. 

And Wolf herself advises extreme caution when making accusations: unlike the world of OLEANNA, in Wolf's experience the accuser is far more likely to be punished than the accused:

“For years now, Yale has been contacting me: Would I come speak at a celebration of women at Yale? Would I be in a film about Jewish graduates? Would I be interviewed for the alumni magazine?  

I have usually declined, for a reason that I explain to my (mostly female) college audiences: The institution is not accountable when it comes to the equality of women. I explain that I was the object of an unwanted sexual advance from a professor at Yale - and that his advances seemed to be part of an open secret. I tell them that I had believed that many Yale decision-makers had known about his relations with students, and nothing I was aware of had happened to stop it. Where is the professor now? they ask. He is still there, I explain: famous, productive, revered. I describe what the transgression did to me - devastated my sense of being valuable to Yale as a student, rather than as a pawn of powerful men. 

Then, heartbreakingly, a young woman will ask: "Did you tell?"  

I answer her honestly: "No. I did nothing. "

"Have you never named the guy, all these years on?"  

"No," I answer. "Never."  

"But," she will ask hesitantly, "don't you have an obligation to protect other women students who might be targets now?"  

"Yes," I answer. "I do have that obligation. I have not lived up to it. I have not been brave enough." 

And then there is always, among those young, hopeful women, a long, sad silence.  

After such speeches, a young woman will come up to me - in Texas, in Indiana, in Chicago - in tears: My music professor is harassing me , she'll say. I tried to tell the grievance board, but they told me it is my word against his, and that there is no point in pursuing it. I know I won't get a job if I do anything about it. My lit professor made a pass at me; he is grading my senior thesis. My female adviser basically told me to drop it if I want to graduate; to switch classes; to start all over with another subject. My lab instructor keeps putting his hands on my body, and his mentor is on the grievance committee. I can't sleep. What should I do?  

I am ashamed of what I tell them: that they should indeed worry about making an accusation because what they fear is likely to come true. Not one of the women I have heard from had an outcome that was not worse for her than silence. One, I recall, was drummed out of the school by peer pressure. Many faced bureaucratic stonewalling. Some women said they lost their academic status as golden girls overnight; grants dried up, letters of recommendation were no longer forthcoming. No one was met with a coherent process that was not weighted against them. Usually, the key decision-makers in the college or university - especially if it was a private university - joined forces to, in effect, collude with the faculty member accused; to protect not him necessarily but the reputation of the university, and to keep information from surfacing in a way that could protect other women. The goal seemed to be not to provide a balanced forum, but damage control.

So why is it that although many women have been sexually harassed at school and on the job and even Naomi Wolf advises them to worry about making TRUE accusations, the most famous play on the subject of sexual harassment is about an evil Group using lies and blackmail to ban a book? 

Village Voice theatre critic Alexis Solomon noted in 1999:

“…since 1975 the percentage of plays by women has stayed virtually the same on Broadway (16 percent) and increased only marginally off-Broadway (from 13 to 21 percent). Never mind that the study found that nearly two-thirds of ticket buyers are women. Often they're trying to drag their reluctant husbands or boyfriends along to the theater, and winning them over means insisting that the play in question will appeal to their male sensibility. (No wonder the misogynist OLEANNA was one of the most-produced plays in the history of regional theaters.)”

In 2015 the Women Count study by the League of Professional Theatre Women indicated the situation had improved somewhat: 21% of off-Broadway plays were by women in 1999, sixteen years later the number was 29% (down from a high of 36% in 2013).
http://theatrewomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Women-Count-2015-Report.pdf 

Things are slowly getting better, but men are still telling a greater share of human stories although humanity is 50% female.  

Under such conditions, it’s not surprising that the focus in theater has not been on the impact of sexual abuse on women’s lives but rather on men as victims of false charges. 

Mamet includes some lyrics from the folk song "Oleanna" in the published version of the play. Oleanna is not only a place to escape the chains of Norway, it is a magical land, where chores are done for you. The cows milk themselves and the hens lay eggs ten times a day. And if the women get out of line, you don't even have to beat them yourself:

In Oleanna the women do all the work.  

If she doesn't work hard enough 

She takes a stick 

And gives herself a beating!

You can read the entire song here:
http://spikesmusic.spike-jamie.com/folk/ps3/OLEANNA.pdf 

(please note - the above link to the OLEANNA pdf is no longer available. Here is a different version of the lyrics - the translation is different, but the idea is the same:

The women there do all the work 

As round the fields they quickly go 

Each one has a hickory stick 

And beats herself if she works too slow

Maybe one day when women's plays are produced 50% of the time, or when sexual harassment is no longer so common, Mamet will have cause to be paranoid about female power. But OLEANNA is an example of the way history - and folk tales - are written by the winners.

OLEANNA is a right-wing play - glad the NYTimes agrees

A few years ago I wrote an essay about OLEANNA called History is Written by the Winners in which I suggest that there was a deeply conservative, even misogynist subtext to the play. Although some feminists were also saying it, for most people it was just some sort of he-said/she-said both-sides-are-wrong kind of thing.

FINALLY the NYTimes - the "paper of record" lays it on the line. In its caption of the photo on the left it says: "David Mamet's OLEANNA addresses sexual harassment through a conservative lens."

Thank you for noticing. Of course it probably helps that Mamet recently came out of the closet as a conservative.

The rest of the article frets about the lack of conservative views in the theatre. But that's wrong - the author, Patricia Heffernan, is just not thinking fourth -dimensionally, as Doc Brown says. The theatre is FULL of conservative views - anything written 50 years ago represents conservative views, or at the very least respresents a world that is pallatable to conservatives. Except most stuff by G. B. Shaw.

Oleanna Essay

For years it annoyed me that critics and audiences were missing what David Mamet was saying with his play Oleanna, so I wrote an essay about it. One of the few people who read it, Laurence Cantor an actor in my playwrights group, told his sister about it. She teaches a course at SUNY and had her students read it. I'm so proud.

Here's an excerpt from "History is Written by the Winners"

While I'm sure that even feminist groups are capable of doing bad things, I have never heard of a feminist group using blackmail to ban a book. I'm not saying it's impossible - but I am saying that there's no evidence this has ever happened in the history of feminism. If there was, Katie Roiphe would have shouted it from the mountaintops by now.

This is a problem for Mamet, because political correctness as it is actually practiced would not serve his message. Silly speech codes and public demonstrations are not sinister enough and would probably make a better comedy than a tragedy. So Mamet invents the feminist version of the International Jew, a skulking, ruthless, extremely powerful cabal, able to arrange John's personal destruction through nothing more than hearsay from a mentally challenged undergraduate.

The entire essay is here.