[In the following review, Resnikova writes that Mamet has merely presented “his theory of sexual anger” in Oleanna.]

David Mamet's latest play, Oleanna (the infelicitous title refers to a fool's paradise), now at the Orpheum Theater, has been touted in several quarters as a response to the issues raised in last year's Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. But the connection turns out to be spurious: not only did the real-life hearings make for more gripping theater than Mamet's gerrymandered play, but Oleanna is not even primarily about sexual harassment.

Nor is it about the inherent ambiguity of spoken and gestural language, which balloons alarmingly when the interlocutors are of opposite sexes (witness the phenomenal success of Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand) and could very well lead a woman to believe she has been sexually harassed when the man intended nothing of the sort. This scenario is one that Mamet, with his intense interest in language and its failures, might have explored with profit.

Instead, he has written a play that sets forth his theory of sexual anger. According to Mamet, women are angry at men because of the power they wield by virtue of their sex, but women refuse to acknowledge this unpleasant emotion, thus placing themselves on a higher moral ground. Men, in turn, are angry at women for this deception, but men must suppress their anger in order to function in civilized society. This mutual anger explodes when the delicate balance of deception and suppression is upset by the intrusion into these personal sexual politics of a nebulous radical—feminist “group.”

Mamet's play has elicited heated reactions not because of his subject matter, but because of the guile with which he sets up and manipulates the characters and the action. He purports to present an ambiguous situation in a balanced manner and then asks the audience to make up their own minds, based on the evidence. (To underscore this, there are even separate-but-equal versions of the Playbill, one with a man, the other a women on the cover, each with a target superimposed on his or her chest.)

But a play is not a trial, with a prosecutor and a defender each working to make his case. It is not even a hearing, with witnesses on each side presenting evidence. In a play, one person—the playwright—gets to create and select all the evidence. In Oleanna, Mamet has even eliminated any possibility of leavening through directorial or thespian intervention by taking on the role of director himself and casting compliant actors—his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Mamet veteran William H. Macy—who dutifully fulfill his dictum on the role of the actor: “to accomplish beat by beat, as simply as possible, the specific action set out for [him] by the script and the director”—in this case, the director being identical with the script. It is in this airless kangaroo court that the action unfolds, and the answer to the unspoken question “Who is the real victim?” is never seriously in doubt.

Perhaps Mamet thought he was presenting his characters as equals by making them both thoroughly unsympathetic. John is a fortyish college professor—mildly pedantic, mildly vain, conventionally insincere (his repetitions of “I love you, too” on the telephone to his wife elicited the biggest laugh of the evening)—on the brink of gaining tenure, and with it the upward mobility of homeownership and private school for his son. Carol is a dim, mousy student who shows up at his office to complain that she hasn't understood anything she has heard in the classroom or read in the assigned books all semester.

Though John assures Carol that she is “incredibly bright,” we are never given any indication of intelligence behind the vague, whiny complaints, either from her or from him. On the contrary, the only evidence of her scholarship is a line that John reads from an essay she has written: “I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author's feelings in a way that he intended, based on his results.” At the end of the evening, when one tots up the character flaws, John emerges as a well-meaning fool, while Carol is an emotional terrorist who has no qualms about destroying not only John but his innocent wife and child as well.

Sometime between the first and second scene, Carol undergoes a character change too radical to be explained away simply as the result of her having fallen into the clutches of her “group.” (This undermotivated volte-face is the greatest flaw in the play and remains a serious stumbling block to the suspension of disbelief.) Suddenly articulate, she is permitted to make a few valid points about John's unconscious sexism—though that a baby-boomer academic with a liberal bent would use the phrase “good men and true” to describe a tenure committee that includes a woman is a clumsy dramatic contrivance. However, these points are rendered trivial by the sheer looniness of her later charge of attempted rape. In this uneven contest, is it any wonder that, especially given the demographics of even the off-Broadway theater-going public, it is the middle-aged, middle-class family man John who engages the audience's sympathy?

Indeed, Mamet works up the audience into a state of such righteous indignation that John's final outburst of physical violence is made to seem, if not justifiable, well, then, somehow understandable. But his exhilaration is brief. By getting John to beat her up, Carol has won by losing (the ultimate in female passive-aggressiveness): she has gotten him to seal his own doom. “Yes, that's right,” are her—and the play's—final words.

On another theatrical occasion, in another time, another professor who offered to give special instruction to an ignorant young woman was driven to complain, “Why can't a woman be more like a man?” Mamet seems to share both Professor Higgins's frustration and his solution. What Mamet doesn't share with Higgins (the 1950s musicalized version, that is, not Shaw's) is his grumpy charm and self-deprecating humor. There is no room for charm or humor in the fool's paradise of Oleanna or the politically correct dystopia imagined by Carol. And therein lies the clear and present danger in the current war between the sexes.