COMMENTARY : Some Men Just Don’t Get It

In David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” an undergraduate named Carol comes to the office of a professor named John, whose class she is failing. The fallout from the unextraordinary exchange that follows goes on to destroy his life and expose her as--well, we’ll get to that. When the play had its premiere in 1992, it seemed to address the country’s obsession with the Clarence Thomas hearings; now, the Bobbitt trial will do just as nicely. The lessons of “Oleanna” are unusually malleable.

It’s high praise to say that the play, which opened Feb. 4 at the Tiffany Theatre, is much more entertaining than all of the considerable and colorful controversy it has stirred. In yards of news and magazine print, everyone had something else to say: A feminist historian saw the play as further proof, after Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” and Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” that misogynists can create great roles for women, while a reporter called “Oleanna” Mamet’s attempt to erase the brand of misogyny. A pop psychologist complained that the play makes people feel good about violence directed toward women, while a cartoonist saw the violence as cathartic. A Barnard student said Mamet makes the case that men are predatory and women victims, while a New York Times critic saw Carol as a woman who fights back and wins.

This all must be deeply gratifying to David Mamet. The tension and the fun of the play come from seeing two people misread each other and hearing them mishear each other. Almost immediately they reveal themselves: John is a phony who pretends to know the meaning of a phrase and gets caught; Carol is both not as dumb as she claims and completely incapable of telling reality from her masochistic fantasies (she claims he called her stupid when in fact we all heard him say, “You’re a very bright girl”).

With his usual chutzpah, Harvard law professor and commentator Alan Dershowitz has called “Oleanna” “an adversarial play about men and women seeing the world differently.” It isn’t, really. Very few women will identify with Carol, the wayward student. In the New York production, she was seething from the moment the house lights went down. She had the look of a lab animal. She was icky. To Carol, everything is an affront--both being ignored and being reached out to. And, in the end, Carol is malicious, militaristic and possibly psychotic.

No. This is an adversarial play about what many men fear from the modern world. Mamet sets John up for a fall in the grand Hitchcockian tradition--he’s a complacent, almost bumbling Everyman who doesn’t have a clue as to the complexity of danger in the world, and who finds out.

John’s faults are more common. He is both frustrated and self-satisfied. He is on the telephone a lot, but he only gets to spurt out half-sentences, half-words. Someone (his wife!) is constantly cutting him off. With Carol, at least in the first act, he can expand and become the pompous windbag that he is. He can ramble on to this apparent cipher about his childhood miseries, his theories on education.

Yes, he shows her dozens of tiny insults, everyday insensitivities--he keeps her waiting longer by taking notes after a phone call, he answers his own questions, he makes the arrogant assumption that his confession that he once thought himself stupid will be shocking. And that’s how he stumbles into this minefield of female resentment--centuries and centuries of it, much more dangerous than anything Hitchcock could have imagined.

Did John make a pass at Carol? There are a couple of moments that hang in the air. Most women would have filed them under “he’s interested; he’s opened an avenue for deeper interest,” and that’s it; Carol’s most insidious quality is that she doesn’t object sufficiently at the time of the offense. She festers and fumes, and only later after she regroups with her “group”--an unnamed scary collection of feminist radicals--does she make an accusation. This implies she’s being manipulated or she’s manipulating him; take your pick.

Meanwhile, his group, the heads of the unseen institution for which he works, is apparently unable or uninterested in helping him. He has no moorings, no support, no old-boy network in the great wide world. And that is the fear that is also selling Michael Crichton’s new bestseller, “Disclosure,” and that is fueling newfangled resentments from coast to coast.

When the play was published, Mamet did not take the chance to provide a preface. (Crichton, on the other hand, tells us in an afterword that his book is like a Rorschach blot and that the value of a Rorschach test lies in what it tells us about ourselves. Thanks, Mike.) Why take the mystery out of a work of fiction when there are critics to do that? But beyond the playwright’s prerogative, one senses an impishness, an impulse to exploit the Zeitgeist without really contributing to our true understanding, or even to his own.

“Oleanna” is not about a woman’s anger, because in the end Carol must be dismissed as evil or unhinged. Did Mamet have to go that far? A playwright is under no obligation to fully represent both sides, to create a good woman--how boring that would be. But one wonders why he would expertly raise fascinating questions only to have them collapse. And one can only assume that something in him loves the chaos.

“Oleanna’s” ending is as riveting and inflammatory as the subject it addresses. After the final altercation between John and Carol, she delivers the play’s last line. It is an unreadable “Yes, that’s right.” The night I saw it, the man behind me was quite certain he heard her say, “You’re right.” He assured his wife that this was what was said. She seemed to believe him.

* “Oleanna,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 289-2999. Thursday-Sunday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 5 p.m. Indefinitely. $22-$25.