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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...