False Witnesses in Oleanna and The Crucible

In the filmed version of the play, directed by Mamet, William Macy portrayed John with qualities of pedantry and pompousness that, though they didn’t justify Carol’s attacks upon him, came closer to providing Carol with a comprehensible response to a power-wielding professor who would make anybody’s teeth itch. The only line of defense against this play’s intrinsic misogyny is the argument that both characters are equally horrible. Pullman’s affability throws that argument right out the window of Neil Patel’s opulent set.

Oleanna was written in reaction to Anita Hill’s charges against then–Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of him lacing his conversations and interactions with gratuitous sexual references when she worked as his secretary in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Hill testified in 1991 against her former boss before the U.S. Senate in an attempt to block him from being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Mamet was clearly incensed by the way Hill tried to twist Thomas’ words, though unrelated to his jurisprudence, into a noose. The ’90s were a decade in which hypersensitivity to words and images belittling women and minorities led to a kind of Orwellian tyranny in academia and government. And this is the tyranny Mamet attempts to expose in Oleanna, through his condemnation of Carol and her “group.”

In 1953, playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, similarly in reaction to a tyranny of that era — the anti-Communist witch hunts perpetrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. (Marianne Savelle directed a powerful if sometimes overwrought production that just closed over the weekend at Actors Co-op.) Through the prism of 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, here too it’s a group of women who, in this case, bear false witness against any number of villagers for conspiring with the devil. If the accused don’t confess, they face the gallows; in both plays, the court grants almost holy powers to accusers who make things up. Both plays provide a hardy rebuttal to those who presume that fiction necessarily sets us free.

Miller, however, gave at least some credit to female victims of those abuses. Mamet does just the opposite.

Both hysterias were bone-headed and have since been discredited, though the political-religious zealotry that Miller placed in his sights obviously remains part of the American DNA, whereas the tyrannies of political correctness would seem more of an aberration.

In retrospect, the hysteria in Oleanna now looks like Mamet’s. If he was using his play to assail the lacks of mercy and freedom of thought by progressives of that era, the damage done by Thomas’ 17 years on the Supreme Court, compared to the damage Hill might have inflicted had she succeeded in blocking his nomination, make Mamet’s reaction, and reactionary play, seem socially short-sighted and politically muddle-headed.

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