Oleanna, David Mamet | Robert Skloot (essay date 2001)
Robert Skloot (essay date 2001)
SOURCE: Skloot, Robert. “Oleanna, or, The Play of Pedagogy.” In Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet, edited by Christopher C. Hudgins and Leslie Kane, pp. 95-107. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
[In the following essay, Skloot assesses Oleanna as a play about the educational system's custom of pitting the power and inflexibility of the teacher against the insecurity and marginalization of the student and one possible outcome if these roles are reversed.]
“Teaching is a performative act.”
—bell hooks
“That is how they educate us. By osmosis!”
—Augusto Boal
When David Mamet's Oleanna premiered in 1992 in Boston and New York, under the direction of its author, critics were quick to point out that the two-character play presented a devastating vision of the tense relationships between...
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