[In the following essay, Ryan examines Mamet's intended messages about power relations, especially those found in academic settings as portrayed in Oleanna.]

Although playwright David Mamet has stated that he began working on Oleanna before Anita Hill's testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas made sexual harassment in the workplace a topic of conversation in the early 1990s, there is no doubt that the play's timeliness was used to boost ticket sales. The play's promotional mailout, for example, announced that ticket buyers could “be among the first to take a seat—and take a side—at Oleanna.” Even Playbill's cover helped polarize responses by featuring, for the first time in the magazine's history, two different covers for the production. One cover depicts a bespectacled man seated on a chair with a bullseye emblazoned on his chest, while the second cover pictures a female in exactly the same position.

Almost on cue, most critics and audience members did line up to “take sides” in the debate: had Mamet depicted the polarized positions of his antagonists fairly or had he chauvinistically “stacked the deck” in the male's favor? If Mamet's male character, a professor, is wrongfully accused by his student, why does he eventually resort to violence against her? Does the playwright's nightmarish depiction of the female student in the final scene set the women's liberation movement back twenty years? While such debates about sexual equality and harassment are logically engendered by Oleanna's context, the playwright perceives the play to be about an altogether different subject. Oleanna, Mamet stated at a question and answer session shortly after the drama's opening, “is a play about failed Utopia, in this case the failed Utopia of Academia.”¹

The work's title, a relic dredged from the playwright's memories of boyhood nights around summer campfires, supports this comment. “Oleanna” was one of many doomed European attempts to create a Utopian community in the American wilderness during the nineteenth century, but its memory lives today only in an old folk song: “‘Oh! to be in Oleanna, that's where I'd rather be / Than to be bound in Norway and drag the chains of slavery.’”²

While a play about the failure of academia to evolve into a Utopian paradise—or even a play centered around sexual harassment in higher education for that matter—may seem to be startlingly different soil for this playwright, Oleanna is developed around one of Mamet's most basic themes: human beings' never-ending battle to dominate one another. This need to obtain power, closely linked to our most basic survival instincts, is the sole force that drives such earlier predatory Mamet characters as Bernie Litko from Sexual Perversity in Chicago; Teach from American Buffalo; Roma, Moss, and Williamson from Glengarry Glen Ross; the gambler Mike in House of Games; and Charley Fox from Speed-the-Plow, all of whom rely, or try to rely, on manipulation and intimidation to accomplish self-serving goals. Mamet's depiction of the power struggle in Oleanna is unique, however, in that neither of the play's two characters, a college professor named John and his student Carol, appears to be talking about power throughout the entire first act of the play. It is only after intermission that the implications of the initial act's subtext clearly emerge, immersing both characters in a vicious struggle for control that climaxes in the play's final seconds.

While the subtleties of the first half of the play barely seem to prepare the audience for the blunt battles that dominate the second, Oleanna does, in fact, exemplify its creator's frequently articulated belief that unity is the cornerstone of dramatic structure. In numerous essays, most of which have been collected in either Writing in Restaurants or Some Freaks, as well as in interviews, Mamet has stated his conviction that a playwright needs to work relentlessly in order to excise superficial elements from a script: “Every time the author leaves in a piece of nonessential prose (beautiful through it may be), he weakens the structure of the play.”³

Mamet's strict adherence to this principle has engendered some of his most notable hallmarks: staccato, often elliptical dialogue; small casts; Spartan stage settings; and conclusions that leave the audience searching to find words capable of defining what the characters' behavior has implied. Even more importantly, however, the one constant that unites all of the works in Mamet's dramatic canon is the existence of a central concept—business, human relationships, eschatology, growing up—underneath the surface that holds every aspect of the play firmly in place. In a 1987 interview, Mamet succinctly defined the roots of this stagecrafting technique to interviewer David Savran while answering a question about the influence that Sanford Meisner has had upon his work: “‘the most important thing I learned at the Neighborhood Playhouse was the idea of a through-line, which was Aristotle filtered through Stanislavski and Boleslavsky.’”⁴ Clearly, the through-line that unifies Oleanna, from the play's first moment to its final curtain, is not provided by an intellectual debate about sexual equality but by Carol and John's struggle to overpower each other. ‘“The play's central interaction,” Oleanna's author told interviewer Leonard Lopate, “is not about sexual harassment. It's about power.”’⁵

To be a playwright, Mamet maintains, one must be “‘a total schizophrenic.’” The writer must believe, absolutely, every word that each character says. Accusations that he, as a man, is innately on the side of his male character fail to consider the playwright's bond with his female student: “‘I was always astonished as a student in higher education because I never had any idea of what everyone was talking about. … I think that's reflected in the student's point of view.’”⁶ Asserting kinship with both of his characters, the playwright maintains, “I agree with what she says as much as what he says. She may do some things that are dishonorable, but then so does he. For me, it's a play about the uses and abuses of power, and the corruption is on both sides.”⁷

Allowing such a through-line to evolve without having it side-tracked by distractions demands, in Mamet's words, “the subjugation of all aspects of the production—not just the script, but the acting and the plastic elements—to the through-line of the play.”⁸ For example, the sparse setting employed in the New York production of Oleanna, the barest outline of a professor's office, supplied, like the minimalist settings employed in such earlier works as The Duck Variations and The Disappearance of the Jews, only “the scenic element essential to the dramatic thrust of the play.”⁹ The set's major function at the beginning of Oleanna, then, is to establish the professor's inherent power by eliminating the extraneous and, instead, focusing the audience's attention on how the characters' relationship to the few accoutrements that are depicted on stage—the desk, chairs, and even the telephone—helps define the characters' dealings with each other.

For example, in the play's New York production at the Orpheum Theatre, Mamet, as director, immediately established the relationship of his two characters at the play's onset. John stood behind his desk, absorbed in a personal telephone conversation with his wife, seemingly oblivious to Carol, seated by herself, across the desk from him, waiting for the professor to grant her attention. His unconscious dismissal of her presence during his opening monologue testifies to the importance the playwright attaches to subtext. “No one,” Mamet has explained, “really says what they mean, but they always mean what they mean.”¹⁰ While John's words to his wife do not illuminate his relationship with Carol, his attitude and the characters' respective placement on stage can.

Like the stage setting, character development is also subordinate to the demands of the through-line:

There's no such thing as “character.” “Character” doesn't exist. If you take a piece of writing, what you're going to see is twelve to twenty lines on a page for a hundred and twenty pages. If you turn it upside down, nothing's going to fall out. There isn't any “character” there. It's a bunch of words that people say, period. That's what Aristotle told us, and it's true today. There's no such thing as “character.” It's just little words that the writer made up.¹¹

Amplifying this theory, Mamet explains that when these “little words” are “sketched correctly and minimally, they will give the audience the illusion that these are ‘real people.’ …”¹² Clearly, the implication of these remarks is that, like every other aspect of the play, characterization must not detract from the through-line: in the case of Oleanna, how humanity's inherent need to wield power manifest itself in academia. This is a crucial point because many of the play's reviewers questioned the legitimacy of Carol's change of behavior between the play's two acts. Self-effacing and timid in the play's initial act, she evolves into a verbal tyro by the play's conclusion.

One suggested explanation for Carol's metamorphosis is that she or the people that she calls her group have “planted” her in John's class to exploit his vulnerability, in which case she is feigning imbecility in the first act in order to trick the professor into making statements that can subsequently be twisted into evidence against him. However, only one statement that she makes in the entire play even hints at any premeditation on Carol's part: “I saw you. I saw you, Professor. For two semesters sit there, stand there and exploit our, as you thought, ‘paternal prerogative,’ and what is that but rape. … You ask me why I came? I came here to instruct you.”¹³

Rather than establishing premeditation, however, these lines, which occur during the last scene of the play, reflect how new the concepts that her group has bestowed upon her are to Carol. Grammatically, the statement is nonsensical: surely, John never stood “there,” presumably in the front of the classroom, exploiting “our … ‘paternal prerogative.’” Carol's inarticulate linguistic groping here signals both her zealous but incomplete adoption of her “group's” cherished dogma as well as her, and their, inability to prove her charges against her professor analytically. Instead, Carol believes that simply hurling shibboleths like “paternal prerogative” and “rape” at John will shatter all of his rationalistic defenses. Such negative and simplistic labelling of John's methodology also erases the twin stigmas of shame and failure for Carol: how could she have possibly succeeded in such a hostile, chauvinistic environment with such a monstrous mentor? When she tells John that she came back to his office to instruct him, she is gloating over the apparent victory that these words, whose full import she hasn't yet digested, have given her.

Furthermore, any attempt to cast Carol as a scheming, veteran soldier in some noxious “political correctness” brigade, must fail because it places nearly impossible demands on Carol's characterization in the entire first act. The implication of perceiving Carol as a “plant” is that virtually everything she says in the first act is a lie, an almost impossible feat for even an experienced professional performer to sustain, given the rapidly-changing, impromptu nature of her conversation with the professor. More likely, Carol is, at the beginning of the first act, almost exactly as John initially sees her: a bright, but weak victim of a judgmental educational system. He believes that she needs only to redefine herself, as he himself once did, in order to gain the confidence to become someone just like him. John reaches out to her because her inabilities challenge his confidence in his power to work educational miracles. Blithely announcing, “I understand you,” (24), assured that he can define Carol correctly, John prepares to remold her into his own image.

However, John lacks the power to force Carol into a comfortable pigeon-hole that will allow an easy recasting of her personality. Carol's socio-economic background, her sex, and her educational experiences are, in truth, incomprehensible to the professor. For Carol, John's class, and probably most of academia as well, is a Tower of Babel, where each professor hawks his—or her—own peculiar, contradictory doctrine. John is the proverbial last straw in her academic life, the catalyst who drives her into the arms of the “group,” who minister to her bewilderment by providing a comforting illusion of certainty that renders her confusion about the academic world completely comprehensible. And so, John is redefined as a cancer, an exploitive, chauvinistic enemy whose presence must be eradicated from the battlefield of academia so that a more perfect world can be created.

The subtext of John and Carol's initial conversation in the play immediately defines Carol's need to cast the professor as an infallible authority and thus foreshadows the conflict that erupts in the second half of the play. Under Carol's questioning of his use of the words “term of art” after he hangs up the phone, John inadvertently reveals his human fallibility to her: “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 …” Surprised that John could be unsure of a term that he has just used, Carol cuts him off with an astonished, “You don't do that,” and then follows his later remark “… forget things? Everybody does that” with an assertive “No, they don't” (3-4).

Carol finds John's admission of uncertainty so upsetting because, as she states repeatedly throughout the first act, she craves certainty and desires John to mold his theories into a concrete body of information that she can copy down in her notebooks, memorize, and recite at will. Instead, Carol finds John's ruminations pointless and begs him to alleviate her frustration. She desires fodder for her notebook, not incoherent academic jargon about the “‘virtual warehousing of the young’” and other—to her—meaningless “‘concepts’” and “‘precepts’” that say nothing tangible or useful: “WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” she screams out in bewilderment, “I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS AND I'M FAILING” (11, 14).

Her impassioned plea “Teach me. Teach me” underscores the linguistic gap that surrounds both characters. While John believes that he is doing his best (“I'm trying to teach you”) to introduce Carol to educational marvels that she can later accept or reject, he fails to recognize either his own instructional prejudices or the source of Carol's frustration. Desperate not to fail, Carol frantically searches for the objective information that will assure her of that most concrete of realities, a passing grade. When John proves unable to provide the requisite responses to her needs, she will eventually, with the aid of her group, shift the blame for her failures onto him. Her cry that “I did what you told me. I did everything that, I read your book, you told me to buy your book and read it” (9) anticipates the transference of guilt from herself to her professor, which will make all of her accusations in the second half of the play unassailably valid to her and safe from John's attempts to refute them logically.

Never simplifying his ideas into more easily digestible data, John, perhaps better as a theorist than as an instructor, chooses instead to reminisce with his student. Responding to her lament that she is “stupid,” John tells Carol about his own youthful experiences with education: “… my earliest and most persistent memories are of being told that I was stupid. … The simplest problem. Was beyond me. It was a mystery” (16). Even though John understands that he and Carol are, perhaps, “similar” in having been labelled as “stupid” by educational authorities, he fails to perceive their different responses to this labelling. Generationally a “child of the 60's,” John rebelled against “the Artificial Stricture, of ‘Teacher,’ and ‘Student’;” against tests “designed, in the most part, for idiots. By idiots;” and, even now as a professor, against “the Great Tenure Committee,” where “they had people voting on me I wouldn't employ to wax my car” (21, 23).

Unfortunately, as John gained credentials through his attacks on an educational system riddled with inconsistencies, he never considered the inconsistencies within his own belief system and his own temperament. For example, as a professor, it is John's job to grade students' work, but he fails to see a connection between his actions and those of the teachers who graded his own work because he unconsciously adopts the position that his rebelliousness against the system has made him, de facto, impervious to charges of academic, to use his own word, “hazing.” In a similar vein, he condemns Carol's statement on her paper, “‘I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author's feelings in a way that he intended, based on his results,’” as being worthless because it says nothing analytically insightful about the subject. However, Carol's evaluation is more than vapid; it offends his understanding of his purpose as an educator. The subtext behind his critique of Carol's paper is that she has not followed his own methodology and dissected the author's position, an attack that students should make on any thinker other than himself.

Projecting a belief that the Tenure Committee's preliminary report has provided him with a mantle of invulnerability, John sets about redefining the course so that it will become a worthwhile experience for Carol. She will no longer be judged as the other students in class are; she is guaranteed an ‘A’ for the course even though it is the middle of the semester and she is currently failing. He will forget about her poor performance on her paper if she will just meet with him a few times in his office. After all, as John says, “What's important is that I awake your interest, if I can, and that I answer your questions. Let's start over” (26). How can such a seemingly generous offer fail?

For Carol, John's words have implications that escape the professor completely. On a personal level, such snippets of conversation as “Because I like you,” “I like you. Is that so difficult for you to …,” and “There's no one here but you and me” (21, 27) both place Carol on her guard and go directly into her notebook, where they can later be stripped of context and evolve new meanings. To her, John's critique of higher education, loosely modeled on the thoughts of Thorstein Veblen, is bewildering. She misunderstands John's statement that Americans have “a prejudice toward” higher education to mean that “higher education is prejudice.” She is baffled by his remark that his job is “[t]o provoke you,” and wonders why “… to make me mad is your job?” Most importantly, she believes that she is being forced to endure both his anecdotal use of a childhood story about the amount of clothing that the rich and poor wear when they copulate and his noxious, self-serving characterization of the public school system as “The White Man's Burden.”

Once again, she explodes:

NO, NO—I DON'T UNDERSTAND. DO YOU SEE??? I DON'T UNDERSTAND. … What are you talking about? What is everyone talking about? I don't understand. I don't know what it means. … you tell me I'm intelligent, and then you tell me I should not be here, what do you want with me?

(36)

Appearing to be deeply touched by Carol's pain, John, acting more like a therapist than a professor, reaches out to her as the first act comes to an end, and Carol responds to his concern:

CAROL:
I always …
JOHN:
… good …
CAROL:
I always … all my life … I have never told anyone this …
JOHN:
Yes. Go on. (Pause) Go on.
CAROL:
All of my life …

(38)

Apparently, Carol is prepared to trust John with her most personal secrets, but the telephone, ever-present symbol of the external pressures that hound human existence, suddenly rings again. At this crucial moment in the play, John turns away from Carol's pain, picks up the phone, and insensitively commences arguing about the house he is planning to buy, only to discover that all the phone calls he has been receiving are a ruse to trick him into attending a surprise party in honor of his tenure announcement. Ironically, John's attempts to secure his new house—in conversations that actually have nothing to do with that house—will cost him his career.

John and Carol's final attempt at communication at the end of the first act is a microcosmic presentation of their inability to interact. After John extracts himself from his phone conversation, Carol reaches the conclusion that the party is being held because “They're proud of you.” As usual, unfortunately, John denies her the satisfaction of an acceptable conclusion; “there are,” he smugly announces, “those who would say” that “a surprise” is “a form of aggression” (41) as the first act concludes. When Carol leaves her professor's office, she is even more confused than when she entered. Is it any wonder that she accepts the answers that the group provides her? They, at least, give her the illusion that their understanding of education can provide answers to life's confusion.

In the two short scenes that comprise the second act, the implications of the first act's subtext emerge, and the characters' physical positions at the onset of act two help define each's status. Now, the telephone is unused, and the two characters sit facing each other, separated only by John's desk. The professor's opening monologue makes it clear that his position is under siege. He first attempts to intimidate his student with his vocabulary: “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 my students’” (43). He expects that Carol, confronted by such verbiage, will wither. Further, he claims that he is trying to protect Carol and not his own vested interests when he attempts to bully her into withdrawing her accusations against him. Ironically, this sixties rebel, or “maverick” as Carol later sarcastically labels him, has evolved into an advocate of individual security and the status quo because it is now personally advantageous for him to do so. His hypocrisy is most clear when he redefines the previously despised tenure committee as “Good Men and True.” Carol's reminder that a female sits on the committee bluntly drives the professor's shortsightedness home.

“Basically,” Mamet told an interviewer, Robert Feldberg, in 1984, “in any profession—doctors, lawyers, even social workers—when you get past the rhetoric, people are out to make a living. What people do is different than what they say they're doing.”¹⁴ While these remarks were formulated to demonstrate that the actions of the real estate salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross were akin to economic procedures engaged in by all of humanity, Oleanna exemplifies the consistency of Mamet's perceptions about human motivation. Even scholars have vested interests, and John's vulnerability is grounded in his dishonesty about his own.

Dismissing John's attempt to use language as an intimidation tactic, Carol challenges John with elemental terms against which he is defenseless: “You can't do that anymore. You. Do. Not. Have. The. Power” (50), “You love the Power” (52), “Do you know what you've worked for? Power. For power” (64), “You want unlimited power” (66), “Why do you hate me? … Because I have, you think, power over you” (68), and “Now you know, do you see? What it is to be subject to that power” (70).

Unfortunately, Carol's (and her group's) own hunger for power is as ravenous and self-serving as John's. Incapable of embracing such concepts as “dialogue,” “compromise,” and “agreement,” Carol, sudden spokeswoman for her group, reveals in her newly found power, flatly stating: “You have an agenda, we have an agenda,” once she perceives that the balance of power has changed. She relentlessly presses her attack with such McCarthyesque tactics as a list of banned, “questionable” books and “a statement … which we need you to … (75);” Mamet hardly needs to add the word “sign.” At first, the suddenly powerless professor mouths vagaries about “Academic freedom” in response, but when he finds that his book, his intellectual legacy for his son, is on the list of books to be shunned, he feels Carol at his jugular.

The through-line of a drama, Mamet has said, must move towards a conclusion that is “both inevitable and surprising,”¹⁵ but, perhaps because of the strength of Oleanna's secondary themes (gender conflict, the relationship between mentor and student, and the meaning of the word “education”), constructing the ending that best accomplishes the author's goals for Oleanna proved to be a challenge. Mamet's close friend, actor W. H. Macy, who portrayed John in both the original Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the New York productions of Oleanna, noted, just after the play opened at New York's Orpheum Theatre in November 1992, that:

We tried many variations on the ending. In one version I read a statement at the end. We kept toying with the ending as we got closer and closer to the New York opening. I'm not even sure that Dave is finished with the ending yet. He may suddenly come up with a new version even after the opening.¹⁶

While the playwright himself has written that he has “no comment on multiple endings” for the play,¹⁷ debate about Oleanna's conclusion resurfaced when Harold Pinter, as director, revived the so-called “original” or “Cambridge” ending for the play's London run. However, Mamet's decision to both direct and publish the “New York” ending (Random House and Methuen) clearly indicates his own preference and relegates the “Cambridge” ending to a discarded possibility supplanted by, in the author's mind, a superior ending. When asked by Leonard Lopate about how this earlier ending worked, the playwright tersely dismissed the query, saying “I can't remember.”¹⁸

The ending the playwright did choose both rocks the audience's sensibilities and brings the playwright's presentation on how power is wielded within his academic microcosm to a logical and unsettling conclusion. Facing public repudiation of his entire life's work, John gathers enough courage to stand up to Carol's onslaught: “You're dangerous, you're wrong, and it's my job … to say no to you” (76). But the professor quickly finds himself in an even more desperate situation when the next phone call reveals the accusation that, as Carol phrases it, “you tried to rape me. … According to the law” (77). Carol has had such success manipulating people into accepting her perceptions of John's words that re-interpreting his behavior when he tried to keep her from leaving his office as attempted rape is a logical step for her to take.

Brilliantly, Mamet uses Carol's Maoist tactics to switch the audience's sympathies to John. The professor may be patronizing and less effective as an educator than he had ever dreamed, but a rapist? Carol's feckless charge denigrates the plight of true rape victims and cheapens many of her earlier, excellent points about sexism and abuses of power in academia. But Mamet, never one to let the audience leave the theater with too facile a conclusion, readjusts the characters' relationship one last time in the closing moments of the play. Faced with the loss of job, house, and perhaps family as well, John reacts to Carol's final intrusion into his life “… and don't call your wife ‘baby’” with rage:

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.)

… 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 …

(79)

In an essay entitled “True Stories of Bitches,” Mamet stated:

… the ultimate response the man feels is, of course, physical violence. … If I get pushed just one little step further, why I might, I might just—(FILL IN THE BLANK) because she seems to have forgotten that I'M STRONGER THAN HER.¹⁹

Surprisingly, some audience members—both male and female—cheered John's violent response to Carol's overblown assault because they felt that Carol had supplied sufficient provocation; however, Carol's last words leave no room for comfortable conclusions: “Yes. That's right. (She looks away from him, and lowers her head. To herself:) “… yes. That's right” (80). Never questioning the legitimacy or morality of her own tactics, Carol's final words affirm her belief that John's after-the-fact physical battering of her body justifies all that she has previously done to him.

Whether the audience sympathizes with either of his characters at the play's conclusion is beyond the artist's control, the author says. “‘I neither do nor do not want us to side with one character or the other. It's not my job to make the audience do anything.’”²⁰ Instead, his principal duty as a writer, Mamet maintains, is to tell the story and let the audience draw its own conclusions: “To write a play with a stringent plot is wonderfully, incredibly demanding. That's what I do when I write a play: stick to the plot. If I do that, the rest will take care of itself. The theme is a post facto consideration”²¹

Nevertheless, Oleanna rapidly marches to a disturbing conclusion that engenders arguments on issues ranging far beyond John and Carol's individual behavior because, as in all of Mamet's major work, the through-line is subject to a greater purpose. Mamet has often acknowledged the powerful influence that the Russian dramatic theorist Constantin Stanislavsky has had upon his life and art; in fact, just after Oleanna's opening the playwright remarked:

Stanislavsky said that the purpose of the theater is to bring to the stage the life of the human soul. If anyone ever needed an excuse to make fun of me, there's the fact that I just said that. But I believe it to be true. The purpose of theatrical art is to bring to the stage in all its variety and terror and humor and delight the life of the human soul.²²

Like so many earlier Mamet works, Oleanna is painted on a seemingly small canvas, featuring only two characters and a very static, minimalist stage setting. Nevertheless, the play's rigid adherence to its through-line and the author's stated intention to bring the human soul to life in his work results in a ripple effect that stimulates responses, not just to John and Carol's individual struggle against each other, but also to how their confrontation reflects on more universal aspects of the human condition, including sexism, avarice, the relationship between generations, and self-awareness, not just in academia but in life in general.

Notes

1. David Mamet, “Mamet on Playwriting,” The Dramatists Guild Quarterly, 30 (Spring 1993), 10.

2. Louis Botto, “Mamet's Oleanna,” Playbill: The National Theatre Magazine. Off-Broadway edition, 92 (November 1992), 47.

3. David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989, 26.

4. David Savran, “David Mamet,” In Their Own Words. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1988, 136.

5. Leonard Lopate, “Interview with David Mamet,” New York and Company. Broadcast: WNYC (25 October 1994).

6. Lopate.

7. Benedict Nightingale, “More Aristotle Than Hemingway,” The London Times (15 September 1993), 37.

8. Savran, 136-7.

9. Ibid., 143.

10. Ibid., 137.

11. “Mamet on Playwriting,” 10-11.

12. Ibid., 11

13. David Mamet, Oleanna. New York: Random House, 1993, 67. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

14. Robert Feldberg, “Fame is a 4-Letter Word,” The Record, 89 (17 April 1984), B-1.

15. “Mamet on Playwriting,” 11.

16. Botto, 48.

17. David Mamet, Note to the author, 8 September 1994.

18. Lopate.

19. Restaurants, 44.

20. Lopate.

21. “Mamet on Playwriting,” 11.

22. Ibid., 13.