In six pages, this play is analyzed in terms of structure, genre, purpose, dialogue, themes, and movement. The play's significance and impact upon contemporary theater as well as how it was critically reviewed and reviled by feminists are also discussed. Nine sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: TG15_TGolean.rtf
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and a subsequent review, and how the play angered feminists for its portrayal of women. Bibliography lists 9 sources. TGolean.rtf An Analysis of David Mamets Oleanna By
Tracy Gregory, For - April 2001 -- properly!
"Oh to be in Oleanna ! / Thats where Id like to be / Than be bound in Nor -a- way, / To drag the chains of slavery... If
you really want to live, / To Oleanna you must go, / The poorest wretch from Nor-a-way / Becomes a king in a year or so" (Oleanna). No, David
Mamets 1992 play, Oleanna, is not about a town in Norway. Rather, it is set in a contemporary American college campus during the early 1990s. Mamet has been
a major theatrical presence in New England, Chicago and New York ever since his college days of the late 1960s, when he first dabbled in experimental theater (Baym 2314).
Mamet bristles at the constraints of political correctness, and this is reflected in his art. The genre of Oleanna is that of the quintessential Mamet play, described by author
and critic Thomas Eagleton as a "modernist literary work," meaning that the content is purposely left minimal so that it is up to the audience (or the readers) to "construct
[its] reality, and so to recognize how it might all have happened differently" (Badenhausen 1). The rules of the modernist genre are, in essence, that there are few rules
in terms of construction. There are few characters and a limited setting, for it is the dialogue which fuels the action, both in terms of what the characters say,