[In the following review, Showalter contends that Mamet fails to objectively address harassment in Oleanna.]

By all counts, this should be a championship season for the playwright David Mamet. The movie version of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross, opened to rave reviews and a prediction of an Oscar for Jack Lemmon; there's great anticipation of another movie, Hoffa, for which he wrote the screenplay, and which is expected to garner more Oscar nominations for its star, Jack Nicholson; his latest book of essays, The Cabin, is about to be published; and his new play, Oleanna, takes a controversial plunge into the raging rapids of the American debate over sexual harassment, political correctness and academic elitism.

A disciple of Stanislavsky and the Method, the master of a rough, spare, often very funny dialogue that draws on the American urban vernacular, Mamet has been associated with the rise of a number of distinctive actors, including Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver. With his last play, Speed-the-Plow, which cleverly cast Madonna in the role of a secretary to a cut-throat Hollywood producer, he had a Broadway commercial success satirizing Los Angeles players; and he has done some interesting, although flawed work as a film director, most notably in the offbeat Jewish cop film, Homicide, and the confidence sting, House of Games. Mamet currently enjoys a reputation as a serious intellectual, an American Pinter, a worthy successor to Miller, Williams and O'Neill. He has plans to direct Hamlet later this year, and he invokes Aristotle (and Mel Blanc) in discussions of Oleanna. In a deeply respectful chapter of his recent book, Modern American Drama, C. W. E. Bigsby calls Mamet an outsider who has “produced a series of plays which seem to add up to an excoriating assault on American values.”

Yet it has always been hard to determine where Mamet's excoriation of American macho, commercial, competitive American values begins and where his delight in their cultural forms leaves off. Not only in comparison to the epic range of passionate younger playwrights like Tony Kushner, Anna Deveare Smith and Howard Korder, but also in contrast to the surprising depth of old dogs like Clint Eastwood, whose new film, Unforgiven, relentlessly deconstructs the cherished frontier mythology of American gunslingers, Mamet's stylized minimalism seems repetitive, stale and unevolved. Trying out new roles has not taught him new tricks; his attitudes are beginning to look like prejudices, while his techniques are starting to sound like shticks.

Mamet has always been a testosterone Kafka, a locker-room Beckett who loves poker, the National Rifle Association, Soldier of Fortune magazine, hunting and fishing; and who writes about the dying subcultures of crooks, conmen, hustlers, cops, longshoremen—and Hollywood producers. Glengarry Glen Ross is his wryest hymn of praise to the American tradition of masculinity, appearing here in its upmarket rhetorical guise as “manhood.” In the words of the ace salesman Ricky Roma, “A man is his job,” and the job, however contemptible or unmuscular, must be made to seem worthy of a man. Thus the small-time real-estate salesmen at Premiere Properties, peddling their worthless Florida and Arizona properties through cold calls and purchased “leads,” have verbally transformed their bitching, schmoozing and noshing, their job of phoning, “sits,” lying and waiting, into manly conquest.

On one level, the film brilliantly sends up the self-deceiving fantasies of these pushers and hacks, but it also celebrates them. Their aggressive jargon has a great athletic rhythm, its breaks, dips and stresses perfectly timed by the all-male acting ensemble, who play it like a jazz combo—the Duke Ellington and Al Jarreau score reinforces the improvisional effects—or the Chicago Bulls. The haggardly sulphurous Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) makes a shrewdly-calculated existential pitch to a pussy-whipped mark, James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce, cast against type): “When you die you're going to regret the things you don't do. You think you're queer … ? I'm going to tell you something: we're all queer. You think that you're a thief? So what? You get befuddled by a middle-class morality … ? Get shut of it. Shut it out. You cheated on your wife … ? You did it, live with it.” As Blake, the hatchet man dispatched from “downtown” (a character invented by Mamet for the film version), Alec Baldwin, younger, sharper, crueller than Pacino, brandishes a pair of brass balls, and lays down the jungle law of the sales contest according to the offstage bosses, Mitch and Murray: first place, a Cadillac El Dorado; second place, a set of steak knives; third place, get fired.

Set in some anonymous edge of New York, the film has a haunting urban vagueness. Exterior night shots of coffee shops and restaurants resemble the paintings of Edward Hopper or Reginald Marsh, and hint at the literary habits Mamet described in his book, Writing in Restaurants—one of a number of subtle parallels between the salesmen and the playwright. There are warring generations in the theatre as well as the office, and a fight to get on the scoreboard. Ricky Roma's lament for the “dying breed” of real salesmen (“It's not a world of men … it's not a world of men, Machine … it's a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders … what it is, it's a fucked-up world … there's no adventure to it”) is also a lament for a kind of art, most admired by Mamet in what he calls the “virile certainty of risk and danger” of the Moscow Art Theatre. The sales motto, “Always Be Closing”—in other words, get the customer to sign, make the sale—also applies to Mamet's grab-the-audience technique. The stage play was dedicated to Pinter, and while Mamet's desperate Shelly Levene (a bravura performance by Jack Lemmon) has neither the depth nor the comic pathos of Pinter's tramp in The Caretaker, he has riffs that stand comparison to Pinter's great set speeches about the Islington buses and the papers in Sidcup.

Seeing Glengarry Glen Ross blown up on the big screen, however, one also sees its affinities to buddy films like Lethal Weapon, and its addiction to what Norman Mailer called “the language of men.” Thematically, but also stylistically, Mamet struggles with the problem that has frequently plagued American male writers, an imagined conflict between writing and masculinity. Mamet gives us the trappings and rituals of masculine combat—the scoreboard, the cars, the salaries—and the predictable hierarchy of emasculating insult which accompanies it, starting with “asshole” and “shithead,” moving to “faggot” and “cocksucker,” and culminating with his most abusive term: “You stupid fucking cunt. … Whoever told you you could work with men?” There is a woman on the movie's cast list (the hat check girl in the Chinese restaurant), but no female characters, only allusions to trouble-making wives, sick daughters, or memorable fucks. The closest thing to a seduction is Roma's pick-up of James Lingk in the bar.

But these are traditional genres of Hollywood film, and Glengarry Glen Ross is an effective and entertaining movie. It's in Oleanna (subtitled “A Power Play”), where the Mamet techniques are stretched to cover larger and more complex social issues, that the limitations of his talent become clear. There are two programme graphics for Oleanna; one shows a seated man with a target on his chest, the other a targeted woman. He is John (William H. Macy), a middle-aged professor who has just been recommended for tenure, and is in the process of buying a house, a premise which allows Mamet to make more real-estate gags and to interject some amusing one-sided phone conversations. She is Carol (Rebecca Pidgeon), a failing student who comes to his office, ostensibly to argue about her grade on a paper. Sexless and childlike in a baggy dress worn over two pairs of long underwear, Carol anxiously protests that she has not understood anything of John's lectures, and not a word of his book. At first preoccupied, self-centred and harsh, John gradually is moved by (and identifies with) her desperation, her hopeless incomprehension, her slavish note-taking, her sense of being stupid and out-of-place; he offers to wipe her failing grades from the slate, and to tutor her in his office. Recklessly, he promises her an A in the course, and in answer to her persistent, wide-eyed questions, confides that he too had difficulties in school, that he too has problems—with his wife, with his job—and that he does not feel contempt for her ignorance, but likes her. When she seems to break down in despair, he attempts to comfort her with a hug, from which she springs away with a start. Carol's attempts to express herself and, at one point, to confide in John, are interrupted, either by the telephone, or by his educational theorizing. At another point, he uses a tasteless sexual metaphor: “The rich copulate less than the poor but they take off more of their clothes.”

But by Act II, it appears that the scene we have witnessed, in which the professor is vain and foolish, but basically well-intentioned, and the student is more worried about grades than about learning, but basically grateful for the professor's effort to help, was not at all what we had supposed. Carol has made charges to John's tenure committee that she has been the victim of sexual harassment. She has rewritten the narrative of Act I in the most sinister terms—a man having problems with his wife has made sexual overtures, and promised her an A in his course if she will meet privately with him in his office. She now reappears alone, at his extremely unwise and unrealistic request, to listen with unshakable self-righteousness to his efforts to sort things out.

While in Act I she could barely understand words like “paradigm” and “transpire,” Carol is now given to solemn polysyllabic oratory on questions of legal propriety, class exploitation and academic morality. Boyishly dressed in a little vest and trousers, she sits primly in a straight-backed chair, writing John's remarks in a blue ledger like a recording angel. And where before she seemed isolated and waif-like, in contrast to John, who has a wife and son, now she is the representative of an unidentified “group,” in whose name she makes her accusations. When she insists on leaving, John, who seems not to have figured out what he is up against, attempts to hold her back.

By Act III, she has called this gesture an act of attempted rape; his tenure has been revoked; and he is about to lose his job. Their roles are reversed; he is dishevelled, in his shirtsleeves, and distraught; she is calm and neatly garbed in a man's suit. His pleas for human sympathy are met first with her sermons about his cynicism and elitism, and then with a proposal: if he will accept her group's list of books to be removed from the reading list, including his own, she will withdraw her charges. On a realistic level, it's an absurd situation; even in the dire terms of the play, such a demand could immediately backfire on the accuser, while the withdrawal of criminal charges would not bring instant reinstatement. But instead of handing the blacklist to his lawyer, his supporters, the press and the union, John makes an impassioned speech in favour of freedom of thought, and, after a final taunt from Carol, the play ends with a long-anticipated act of violence (the programme credits a Fight Director), which, though not calculated to help John's legal position, certainly provides a much-desired catharsis for the audience. As the man sitting next to me commented, “I nearly climbed up on the stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself,” and while various New York reviewers remarked on the unusual phenomenon of audience members shouting one-liners back to the actors, “Right on, sister!” was not among them.

It may safely be said that Oleanna is an involving theatrical experience, although the nature of that involvement is highly questionable. Frank Rich in the New York Times described Oleanna as Mamet's “impassioned response to the Thomas hearings,” and told his readers to “imagine eavesdropping on a hypothetical, private Anita Hill—Clarence Thomas confrontation in an empty room,” to get an idea of “what the playwright is aiming for and sometimes achieves.” This is nonsense: the Hill—Thomas hearings, which continue to have unforeseen repercussions in American political life, constituted a social drama, played out before an audience of millions, in which the original conversations, a decade past, played a minor role. What the hearings displayed were the massive inequalities of gender and race within American democracy, not the communication problems of two conservative, upwardly-mobile African-American lawyers. And, of course, Thomas was confirmed and took his seat, for life, on the Supreme Court.

Mamet himself has explained that he drafted the play eight months before the Hill—Thomas hearings, drawing on the experience of a college teacher friend who had been “the target of a sexual harassment charge,” but pulled it out of the drawer while they were going on. Asked by the New York Times what had drawn him to the subject to begin with, Mamet replied, “That's like asking Capa why he took pictures of war.”

These combative metaphors make clear why Oleanna does indeed exploit the audience's reservoir of emotion from the Hill—Thomas hearings, or from other widely publicized cases of sexual harassment. Like Strindberg's dramas of sexual combat, or Patrick Buchanan's anti-feminist rantings (“a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”), hyped-up charges of female vengeance and sexual warfare will readily tap a latent male rage, especially in fin-de-siècle periods of political confusion and economic decline. On the whole, critics have been too soft on Mamet's failure to distance himself from his characters' violence. An exception is David Van Leer, who noted in a prophetic essay in the New Republic in 1990 that “the racism, the sexism and the homophobia of his characters is not effectively defused by their author, and Mamet may seriously misjudge the psychological effect of so regularly venting those emotions in his work … The venom of Mamet's plays permits audiences to credit their own worst biases under the cover of moral distance.”

Mamet expresses his own biases at some length in his essays as well as his plays; he believes, for example, that “women do not, on the whole, get along with women”; that “the true nature of the world, as between men and women, is sex, and any other relationship between us is either an elaboration, or an avoidance”; and that “the joy of male companionship is a quest for and can be an experience of true grace, and transcendent of the rational, and so, more approximate to the real nature of the world.”

In the all-male plays, like Glengarry Glen Ross, even a feminist spectator can take pleasure in the dramatic conventions Mamet has developed to express this grace. But Oleanna gives Mamet little scope for his usual gifts. There's very little humour, and little of the staccato, aphasic obscenity which gives his dialogue its driving rhythms. Only in the ultimate confrontation (“Rape you? I wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole, you little cunt”), does he get to use the magic words. Moreover, his usual stylistic tricks—rhetorical questions, unfinished sentences, italics, pauses—fall flat because these characters do not speak the same language; they simply declaim to each other. Bill Macy, a long term associate of Mamet's who was in the original Chicago cast of American Buffalo, seems more at ease with the dialogue than Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet's wife, although her failure to elicit any sympathy is more the playwright's problem than her own.

In making his female protagonist a dishonest, androgynous zealot, and his male protagonist a devoted husband and father who defends freedom of thought, Mamet does not exactly wrestle with the moral complexities of sexual harassment. What he has written is a polarizing play about a false accusation of sexual harassment, and that would be fair enough—false accusations of harassment, rape and child abuse indeed occur—if he were not claiming to present a balanced, Rashomon-like case. The disturbing questions about power, gender and paranoia raised in Oleanna cannot be resolved with an irrational act of violence. Mamet's haste to end the play recalls his harried salesmen: “I got to close the fucker or I don't eat lunch.”