Julia Stiles and Bill Pullman in "Oleanna." Photo by Craig Schwartz.
If you get past the Mamet speak of the first act, the beginnings of thoughts and sentences that are never completed or are interrupted before they can be completed, the play "Oleanna" itself provokes distaste and even confusion.
You might also wonder: Who the heck is Oleanna? Why was this written?
The program provided by the Mark Taper Forum attempts to provide the answer to the question of who, or in this case where, quoting a folk song:
Oh, to be in Oleanna,
That's where I would rather be.
Than be bound in Norway
And drag the chains of slavery.
Yet there are other parts of the song that might be more revealing.
The women there do all the work
As round the fields they quickly go
Each one has a hickory stick
And beats herself if she works too slow
This is American history by way of Norway interpreted by Pete Seeger and then re-interpreted for our times by David Mamet.
Does this trivialize women's concerns in academia? On the one hand, without the sexual harassment politics, there is the uneven power struggle between professor and student, something that can have deadly repercussions as in the 2007 movie, "Dark Matter." Based on the 1991 University of Iowa shootings in which a former graduate student in physics, Gang Lu gunned down faculty members and the Chinese physics student who was awarded a prize that he thought he should have won. At a screening of the movie at Caltech, there was much sympathy for the protagonist in the movie among the Caltech grad students. Graduate advisors can make life unbearable for grad students.
With the gender politics of sexual harassment, this play doesn't seem to represent the reality of academia. A quick search of the Internet, shows that in college sexual harassment is still a big concern and academia is not necessarily quick to act. In January of last year, a professor at the University of Georgia was accused of sexual harassment. This wasn't just a one time thing. It took nearly two decades of complaints. The complaints weren't just made by students. In one case, the husband of one of the professor's students complained about the sexual nature of the professor-student relationship.
A Florida university moved a bit faster. According to a news account, a Florida Gulf Coast University professor in the Division of Justice Studies, was suspended without pay in January 2009. Complaints were filed against another professor as well and that instructor was then removed as the university's internship coordinator. Yet this only came after FGCU had settled three discrimination lawsuits and fired an adjunct professor of German. That cost the university $4.85 million. By May of this year, a fourth professor was disciplined and resigned after investigations showed that he had logged more than 1,000 minutes of long-distance calls from his work phone to adult hotlines. His work computer had more than 350 sexually explicit images.
There was a time when men could write about their sexual exploits with smug assurance. At Caltech today, you can still hear male graduate students speaking of Richard Feynman and his dalliances with women, meaning adulterous affairs, with something akin to envy, as if that kind of behavior was something one should aspire to. But as one book reviewer noted, today he might have been accused of sexual harassment for his behavior toward undergraduate women during his time at Cornell.
Another troubling aspect of "Oleanna" here is the context. The play premiered in 1992. In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate against the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Her opening statement included the below graphs:
My working relationship became even more strained when Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions, he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects, or he might suggest that, because of the time pressures of his schedule, we go to lunch to a government cafeteria. After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters.
His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.
Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about these subjects. I would also try to change the subject to education matters or to nonsexual personal matters such as his background or his beliefs. My efforts to change the subject were rarely successful.
For these reasons, Mamet's "Oleanna" seems to trivialize a real concern by making the student raising the accusations a troubled woman raising accusations that are false until the third act. According to the American Association of University Women's "Drawing the Line: Sexual Harassment on Campus Research Report," nearly two-thirds of all college students (men and women) experience some form of sexual harassment on campus. Men are more likely to harass than women and men are more likely to laugh off harassment. Not all of this is between professor and students, but the problem is real enough.
See my review of Oleanna.
"Oleanna" continues until July 12 at the Mark Taper Forum. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. No 1 p.m. performance on Sunday, June 7. $20-$65.
For more info: Call (213) 628-2772 or go to www.centertheatregroup.org
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