DIRECTING THE SPECTATOR:

AUTHOR/AUDIENCE RELATIONS IN

DAVID MAMET'S AND

JAMES KELLY GULDI

A thesis presented to the Faculty of the College

of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment

of the degree of Master of Arts

Stetson University

May 1995 STETSON UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE DIVISION

This Thesis by James Kelly Guldi

Is approved as meeting the research requirement of the

Department of English

for the degree of Master of Arts

by

Ujfh 0 frofe!ofesso r of English

\

Accepted for the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences:

D&e

315541 the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (Barthes 226)

™T Theatrical events are necessarily social constructs. As Jerzy Grotowski indicates, "at least one spectator is needed to make it a performance" (in Bennett 1). Artistic production in theater takes place in performance; thus, production of meaning depends upon the collaboration of all those involved-author, actors and audience. The author must consider the spectators when writing a text that will ultimately be performed before them. Susan Bennett explains, "The playwright invariably shapes a text and the director invariably shapes a production to provoke particular expectations and responses within an audience" (20). While each writer and director allows a different degree of participation from them, depends heavily upon the complicity of the audience in theatrical production. To better describe his particular techniques of provoking "expectations and responses" in them, it is necessary to explain contemporary understanding of techniques of reading texts.

In "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach", Wolfgang Iser presents

Roman Ingarden's theories of intentional sentence correlatives, which "remain only 'component parts'-they are not the sum total of the text itself' (Iser 128). The reader's imagination produces the text. Iser explains:

If one regards the sentence sequence as a continual flow, this implies that the anticipation aroused by one sentence will generally be realized by the next, and the frustration of one's expectations will arouse feelings of exasperation. And yet literary texts are full of unexpected twists and turns, and frustration of expectations.... Indeed, it is only through the inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamicism. Thus, whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in unexpected directions, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty of establishing connections—for filling in the gaps left by the text itself. (130-3)

Iser declares that all texts do this, but argues that "modern texts frequentlyexploi t it quite deliberately. They are often so fragmentarytha t one's attention is almost exclusively occupied with the search for connections between the fragments." The intention is not merely to confuse the reader, but "to make us aware of the nature of our own capacity for providing links" (131),

Among the modern texts that operate in this manner are the works of Joyce, Wool£ Hemingway, and, I argue, to an even greater extent, the diverse body of work collectively know as the Theatre of the Absurd,

Martin Esslin, in his seminal text cataloguing and explaining the movement, refers to a production of Waiting for Godot in the San Quentin penitentiary. He quotes an article by an inmate: "It was an expression, symbolic in order to avoid all personal error, by an author who expected each member of his audience to draw his own conclusions, make his own errors"

(Absurd 2). Samuel Beckett's play launched a new effort by playwrights to exploit the possibilities hinted at by Iser and Ingarden. Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and many others followed suit by making the audience a character in the drama, producing them as subject. This is not the only project the absurdists set upon. Esslin describes how "the Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought." It "has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being—that is in terms of concrete stage images" (6) Finally, it "tends to a radical devaluation of language,. .

. what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters" (7). These projects, though, are all subsumed under the author's intention to stimulate the audience into activity.

The performances of early absurdist plays often shocked audiences by completely skewing their expectations. Bennett notes that "at first audiences were unaccustomed to Beckettian theatre practice and responses were ... at best confused. But certainly after Martin Esslin's publication of The Theatre of the Absurd(1961) and, more importantly, the opportunity to see more such plays, this theatre practice became familiar and thus generally expected from playwrights like Beckett and Pinter" (50). Gradually, the rejection of expectations, the sense of the senselessness of the human condition, and the devaluation of language have come to comprise the natural expectations of audiences. These characteristics of modern theater provide the pretext for new plays by the time Mamet begins to write.

The way Mamet (who writes and directs for both stage and screen) provokes expectations and responses depends partly on the medium in which he works. Performance in the theater commands a different relationship with the audience than showing a film in a movie house. Esslin describes that "stage drama, being 'five', has the excitement of spontaneity, however well- rehearsed it may be, and it has—this is its main asset as against any mechanically reproduced drama—the feed-back from the audience to the actors ..." (Anatomy 78). He continues by comparing that

the most essential difference between the stage and all three mechanical media lies elsewhere: the camera and the microphone are extensions of the director, his eye and ear; they enable him to choose his point of view (or hearing) and to move the audience there by varying long-shots and close-ups, by cutting from one face, one locale, to another at will. (79)

Mamet capitalizes on these differences in two specific works—in the film,Hous e of Games, and the play, Oleanna.

hi House of Games, he crafts the point of view of the audience by tying them to the protagonist. He forces the audience to fill gaps in the text that are being filled simultaneously by the protagonist. The audience is actively engaged in production, but not to the extent of producing a wildly different story from the protagonist. Near the end of the film Mamet severs the audience from the protagonist and allows, even encourages, them to deconstruct the final scenes and apply their own conclusions. In Oleanna. the audience is actively engaged in making meaning synchronically with the characters on stage, but with a wider scope of perception than in the film They are not harnessed to one character's point of view—all parties (characters and spectators alike) witness the gaps in the text. As production of connections differs between individuals, the audience chooses how to view the actions of the characters and how to privilege what they see.

In Mamet's work, what the audience sees is more often a function of what they want to see than anything explicit that Mamet shows them. By encouraging the audience to engage in the production of meaning, Mamet divorces himself to a degree, from responsibility for the constructed meanings. This has caused him some criticism, both as writer and director, from those who fail to account for their personal additions to what Mamet shows them. For this reason, the present discussion of House of Games and Oleanna undertakes to examine the

structural function of Mamet's work, especially the theatrical and filmictechnique s he employs to produce the audience as subject, and to explore the effect of that structure in criticism of the texts. "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?" demands Mamet's protagonist, in House of Games (53).

Margaret Ford voices a question that haunts the audience as both try to discover what the con- men have in store for them. In House of Games, the question comes at a time when Ford has just been involved with what seemed to be a con-gone-bad. She demands some assurance from the

con-men that all will be explained; she insists on meaning. But by asking the question, by trying to fill in the gaps, she invites the production of a meaning that might put her in jeopardy (in fact,

she does end up losing thousands of dollars to them). In watching the film, the audience is lured into asking the same question; and by trying to make meaning out of seemingly uninflected incidents, they risk similar dangers. While the audience may recognize the menace implicit in the

con-men, they likely fail to discern their equal vulnerability to the film director.

As a director, Mamet relies on what Iser calls our ability as readers "to bring into play our

own faculty for establishing connections—for filling in the gaps left by the text itself' (130-1).

Mamet believes that "the rules of dramatic structure ... are based on the rules of human perception" (Words 135). "Because we need to make sense of the world," he tells us, "it is the nature of human perception to connect unrelated images into a story" (Directing 61). In Mamet's films, the connection between unrelated images is necessarily produced by the spectator, even while their arrangement is produced by the director. The shots are not inherently meaningful.

They only have meaning as they are endowed by the audience. Mamet describes a sequence of shots that try to tell the story in the mind of the audience: (1) shot of woman reading a note; (2) shot of the note which reads, "Honey, Til be home late tonight. Going bowling, I love you"; (3) shot of woman putting down her note, looking down at something on the floor; (4) her point of view, shot of the bowling ball in the bowling ball bag. (Freaks 119)

The juxtaposition of these images tells the story of a woman who discovers that her husband is deceiving her. But the telling of the story is dependent upon a series of assumptions that, if false or ambiguous, could lead the story down a different path. There is, for example, no necessary link between the note in the first shot and that in the second. Rather, because of their juxtaposition, the audience assumes that the second is the same as the first. Likewise, in the fourth frame, they assume that the ball is what the woman looks down to see in the third. This may seem a rather semantic game, but Mamet reminds us that adherence to the rules in the first place is "what enables deviation from them to work" (Words 135). As we begin to explore the more complex terrain of the structure for House of Games, the deviation from implicit rules will aid us as critics in understanding how the film director navigates the perceptions of the audience as he tells the story.

When Mamet describes how "the mechanical working of the film is just like the mechanism of a dream" (Directing 6), House of Games is a particularly lucid example. Not only are its structure and workings like those of the unconscious, its content also deals with psychic material and phenomena. The story concerns a clinical psychiatrist, Margaret Ford, who intervenes on behalf of a patient to convince some gamblers not to harm him. The patient's story is soon pushed to the background by Ford's curiosity in the business of the con-men. Until the final scenes of the film,th e audience is limited to Ford's point of view. And because the film is perceived exclusively through the perspective of the psychiatrist, it is necessary to look at the less explicit connections between scenes to understand how their juxtaposition will be received by spectators. Alongside of Ford's scenes with the con-men are her scenes with a woman patient, and with her mentor, Maria. In each of these latter instances, the exchanges between the women have meaning, but the reading of the scene is complicated when it is placed in the context of her scenes with the con-men. The ways in which attentive readers explain this complexity can elucidate the scenes in context of the film.

In the second scene of House of Games, for instance, Ford's patient asks her, "Do you think that you're exempt...?" (6). If the audience has paid as little attention to the patient as Ford has, they also have to ask, "Exempt from what...?" "Experience" (7), replies the patient. This scene holds little intrinsic meaning. The doctor is treating a patient and the patient switches the direction of the inquiry. But in the context of the rest of the film, we find out that Ford is not exempt from experience. She becomes a victim of the machinations of the con-men, and of her own folly. Though she says, "No. I don't think I'm exempt" (7), her actions indicate that she does. Ford goes to the House of Games to meet Mike, someone she believes has threatened her patient, Billy Hahn. Then, when one of the con-men threatens her with a weapon, she recognizes it as a squirtgun. Ford thinks that her wiles have guided her through her dealings with the gamblers and saved her from being conned. But, as it turns out, nothing could be farther from the truth. She has simply walked into their trap.

Back in the scene with the woman patient, the audience has no reason to doubt that Ford says what she means. The audience does not have reason to infer any meaning at all fromthi s exchange. Only by reading this scene in the context of the rest of the film does meaning begin to accrete. The scene following the poker game takes place in Ford's apartment where she is alone and preparing for bed. Just before turning out the light, Ford "picks up the House of Games chip from the bedside table, looks at it. She gives a big belly laugh, laughs for a moment Turns out the lights, snuggles down into the bed1 (28), A re-reading of the first scene with the patient now acquires context that allows the audience to make connections ("Yes, she does think she is exempt"), or at least to ask questions ("Is she as exempt as she thinks she is?").

Immediately following is the second scene with the woman patient in which she begins to talk about an unnamed man who has said and done things to her. It is important that she does not divulge the man's identity yet, because this lack of information allows the audience to draw connections they otherwise might not. The patient explains that the man "didn't realize what he had done," to which Ford counters, "And what tafhe done...?" (29). If this scene occurred in

:~r™" 10

some other film, a filmabou t the patient, the audience might quickly connect "he" with the woman's husband, or father. But this filmi s not about the patient; it is about Ford. And if she asks "what had he done," the audience might also connect "he" with Mike. Esslin reminds us that

"the dramatic form of expression leaves the spectator free to make up his own mind about the sub-text concealed behind the overt text" (Anatomy 18). Mamet encourages the spectator to ask questions about the sub-text: What had Mike done in that last scene? Did he really try to con

Ford? And if he did, why did he let her off so easy?

The tendency to read into the ambiguities of the text may be dangerous since it will often reveal as much about the reader as the text; but ignoring them is more dangerous since it will leave gaping holes in the framework of meaning, and this text encourages at least acknowledging them. For an instance of ambiguities that must be explained, take Ford's commission of Freudian slips throughout the film. The verbal errors communicate a different meaning fromwha t Ford consciously intends; but they reveal something about her to the audience, nonetheless. After meeting with her patient, Ford encounters Maria in a hospital corridor. While describing the patient's progress to her mentor, Ford commits a Freudian slip. "That poor girl," she explains, "all her life my father tells her she's a whore ..." (30). Maria recognizes and identifies the slip to

Ford; but she does not analyze it or try to prescribe its meaning. Neither does Mamet explain its 11

meaning to the audience. As Ford is left to make her own meaning out of this remark, so is the audience left to form their own connections between unrelated images juxtaposed in the film.

The juxtaposition of scenes can also leave gaps for which the audience supplies the connections. At the end of the scene, Ford turns down a dinner invitation prompting Maria to ask, "Tonight, excuse me for asking, you have something to do that brings you joy?" The first image of the scene that follows Ford answering "yes," is "Exterior: House of Games—Nighf

(31). The juxtaposition here is more abrupt and perhaps also more blatant than the connection implied between "what had he done?" and Mike. But it is still what Noel Burch refers to as

"temporal ellipsis or time abridgement, a short, measurable period of time is missing between shots" (in Eberwein 179). It is not necessary for the spectator to account for the missing time, but merely to acknowledge juxtaposition and read the connection.

Some of the connections that the audience must make in order to successfully read House of Games, are made in retrospect or on subsequent viewing. Others are necessary to advance the narrative in the mind of the spectator. "What had he done?" falls into the first category, and

"...something to do that brings you joy?" falls somewhere in between. But there are several places where it is necessary for the audience to make connections and, consequently, the filmdirecto r commands their attention. The first instance occurs at the end of the poker scene when the Vegas

Man demands his money. As Ford begins to fulfil her promise to pay Mike's debt, Vegas 12

threatens them with a gun. It looks real enough. It has weight when Vegas places it on the table.

And, most importantly, everyone in the scene reacts to it as if it were real. So the audience has no reason to question the menace of the weapon. Then, in a series of close-ups, the stage directions

shift the audience's attention to Ford's point of view: "Very tight on the revolver, the muzzle end

is leaking little drops of water" (House of Games 23). Suddenly, the con is up, the gaff is blown,

"it's Olley Olley In Free" (24).

While in other instances the audience making connections is important, but not imperative, in this one it is crucial. So the film director gives the audience little or no room for failure. As

Mamet tells his filmstudents , "The audience is only going to look at the most overriding thing in the frame. You must take charge of and direct their attention" (Directing 51). In this scene, he

could have shot a wider frame of the muzzle dripping, or made it possible to recognize the weapon as a squirtgun earlier in the scene. But to do either would have disturbed the rhythm of the scene and fracturedth e connection between the audience and Ford. If the realization by the

audience that the con was faulty had come earlier or later than Ford's realization, their alliance, which is based on sharing perceptions and information, would have been jeopardized for the rest

of the film.

The risk of losing the audience occurs again later in the film in a realization that depends

on the recognizability of an object, a car. After the botched suitcase con, Mike and his associate,

~T 13

Joey, convince Ford to steal a car so they can make their getaway. Later that day, she spies Billy

Hahn, who first told her about Mike, across the street from her office. She follows as he leaves a pay phone, walks around the corner to a car, and drives away. The car is the same car Ford stole earlier that day. In order for the audience to connect the two cars, there must be some degree of recognizability. The film director achieves this first by using a candy-apple red Cadillac convertible. Second, he juxtaposes the shot where Ford watches her client drive away in the car with a shot of the same car parked in front of Charlie's Tavern, where she has met Mike once before. Mamet makes the car recognizable, then places it in the appropriate context, so that the audience is certain to connect the two things.

So far in House of Games, the ability of the audience to make connections has been insured by Mamet carefully regulating their perceptions. He has allied them with the protagonist by having them see the same things at the same time; revealing information to them simultaneously. The scene in Charlie's Tavern heightens this alliance. Ford and the audience together discover that they have been the mark in the long con. William E Van Wert describes how the viewers "sympathies have been melded with Margaret's ... by the convergence of three gazes into one (character, camera, and spectator all sharing the same look)" (8). Wert points to the scene in the tavern as heightening this convergence. The process of discovering how the character and the spectator have been duped happens first on the visual level. Ford and the 14

audience see the red Cadillac parked out front. As Ford enters the tavern, she sees Billy Hahn sitting in a booth, joined by the Vegas Man. Then she sees other men who played roles in the con, including the man she thought was killed in the hotel room. In each instance, Ford and the audience see the visual image, and, if they have been attentive, the image stimulates the recognition.

In the next beat it is the verbal elements, the things that are said, that reveal the con in its several details. Mike complains, "Goddamn water pistol made a puddle big enough to swim in"

(61). He then recounts Ford's theft of his pocketknife. Another of the men remarks, "Took her money, and screwed her, too," to which Mike responds, "A small price to pay" (62). Each of these images can be imagined to cause a reaction in Ford, but the camera does not immediately show us her reaction. The visual image shown is the con-men sitting in a booth, partially concealed by wooden bars. Wert sees that

When [Ford] positions herself behind the wooden bars, we have a representation of Foucault's terms of a dialectic of power relations (men bonded together) and confinement (women isolated). The camera respects those terms. It either stays behind Margaret, showing her looking at the men, or merges with the gaze of Margaret (in which case camera, spectator, and character all share the same gaze), but it does not eliminate the bars. ... [Further,] there are no reaction shots of Margaret in this scene, so we have no register of her emotions, and we take all disclosures personally, not having Margaret's face as register, intermediary, or buffer. (6)

By the time the camera reveals Ford reacting to the words of the men, the audience has already had time to process their own reaction. They have experienced it with her. 15

In the following scene, the structure of the filmbegin s to break apart. This is primarily effected by the divorce of the audience fromFord' s perspective. She is waiting for Mike in an airport terminal. The camera begins to show us Ford's point-ofrview, but the scene holds great intrigue for the audience because they are unsure what is happening. Unlike earlier scenes in the film where the audience learned as Ford did, in this scene Ford's intentions are elusive, and the audience does not know what to expect. She is articulating a strategy that they can recognize, but cannot anticipate. Her strategy begins to unfold in the discrepancies in the story she tells Mike.

She claims she has been followed, but if there was no murder in the hotel, the police would not be after her. Next, in what appears to be a Freudian slip, Ford says, "I knew. That I was bad. Do you know why? Do you know when I knew? Because I took that knife. / Mike: What knife? /

Ford: Your pocket knife" (66), This slip, as Mike points out, causes her to "crumb the play."

The audience is in a peculiar position because they are able to recognize that Ford is attempting to dupe Mike, that she is trying to "con a con-man." But her ultimate objective is unclear. Consequently, the slip can be read in more than one way. This is the second effect of the film breaking apart—the ambiguity allows, even forces, the audience to deconstruct the scene in order to account for discrepancies, gaps, omissions. If we conclude inductively fromth e earlier

Freudian slips, then this one might also seem to be a mistake, and the outcome (shooting Mike) could be different from what Ford intended. If, however, she has come to the airport intending to 16

shoot him, this slip may be simply a "tell" that intentionally reveals the con (as in the case of the water pistol) so that Ford can carry out the rest of her plan. The point is not to privilege one reading or another, but to stimulate in the audience the desire to actively participate in the act of reading independently of Ford's perspective.

Ford's proactivity and the audience's independence of her perspective continues in the final scene of the film when she meets Maria for lunch. She recalls a conversation they had right after the hotel incident, "That's right~and you said, when youVe done something unforgivable, forgive yourself, and that's what IVe done, and it's done" (71). This single line is constructed so that the audience has no definite referents to contextualize it. Its meaning is indeterminate. The first impulse is probably to link the "something unforgivable" with the murder of Mike. But the conversation that first referred to the "unforgivable" takes place before the airport scene. The audience does not know whether the "unforgivable" refers to the ostensible murder of the cop in the hotel room, or to her gullibility in being conned. And in either reading, they are still forced to imagine how it is that Ford has forgiven herself.

The inherent ambiguity in these last two scenes, which is the primary function of the audience being distanced from the protagonist's perspective, has caused the film to be read differently by various critics. According to Gay Brewer, "The airport scene, the climax of the story's action, could be considered the penultimate act of a female revenge play" (23). This 17

argument asserts that Ford apes the "female role—frightened, hesitant, repeating her man's name like a mantra—[Mike] has imposed upon her, meanwhile manipulating his rapacity as he exploited her sexual indecisiveness" (24). Brewer is correct. Ford does perform these actions and use these tactics, and the end could be considered as he says. But it could also be read differently.

One other alternative is to see the ending as self-prescribed therapy for the doctor/patient,

Ford. Brewer quotes Alfie Kohn's interpretation: "As she sips her cocktail, Dr. Ford, perky, relaxed and free of self-blame, would seem to be the product of a successful analysis" (26). Along the same line, in Wert's reading of the film,th e

scene at the airport (the most problematic scene of the entire film) does not happen, if by "happen" we mean that she actually kills Mike. . . . And this is her triumph . .. : that she can manage to be both analyst and analysand, break the dyadic relationship therein, and effect a countertransference that frees her to enter into the new system of economic exchange of the film's last scene. (7)

Wert's version of events is an extreme example of how the audience engages in producing

connections and meaning in the film. He has read the various discrepancies, which he calls "all the

little 'tells' of the airport scene" (8), and provided connections for them, produced his own

meaning, and concluded that "for the viewer who believes that there is a dead body of Mike

anywhere other than in Margaret's mind, Mamet has succeeded in his master con, fake dead body

and all, with the spectator as mark" (8). 18

Wert cogently demonstrates that the point of the film's ambiguous ending is to allow the audience a degree of latitude in drawing conclusions to the events portrayed. Mamet's filmlack s a conclusive ending intentionally so that the audience will be drawn into the same dialogue as

Wert, an act of exploring, even exploiting, the film's possibilities. The aim of the filmi s not to disclose whether Mike was really killed, or whether Ford has effected "a countertransference," but to stimulate the audience to wonder, to inquire, and to answer for themselves. As the film director crafts the film, he is juxtaposing uninflected images, much like the images of a dream or the randomness of the Theatre of the Absurd. The "therapeutic effect" for the audience is accomplished when they accept the "challenge to make sense out of what appears as a senseless and fragmented action" (Esslin Absurd 364). Consequently, Mamet's films succeed when he produces the audience as subject of this therapy, allowing, encouraging, and even forcing them to connect the visceral and lucid, but uninflected juxtapositions of images. 19

"What can this mean?" John, the professor in Oleanna seems to echo Margaret Ford's inquiry in House of Games, But the subtle difference between "does" and "can" allows a glimpse into the significant differences between how the film director and playwright deal with their respective audiences. In House of Games, Mamet carefully guides the audience, leaving small gaps and allowing them to provide some connections from framet o frame and scene to scene. He limits them to following the protagonist until the film's climactic moments when he forces them to think independently and draw their own conclusions. In Oleanna the playwright presents the audience with images, actions and statements, and then compels them to scrutinize, question and interpret what they have seen and heard. By asking the question, "What does this mean?", Ford implies that a meaning does exist. She demands disclosure of the meaning. John's existential muse, "What can this mean?" does not seek a definitive answer. Rather, the question implies possibilities of meaning. The open nature of the question reflects the open nature of the play.

Not necessarily "does" it mean, but it "can" mean, and the meaning will depend on the audience.

Consideration of the structure of Mamet's earlier plays locates them in a direct line descending from the Theatre of the Absurd and can aid us in understanding how an open structure in Oleanna succeeds in activating audiences. In the plays preceding , Mamet employs an episodic structure that links many (typically twenty or more) scenes without expressing direct relations between them The most obvious example is probably Duck

T" 20

Variations, in which, as the title indicates, the playwright explores the dramatic possibilities around a given theme. In other plays, Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Edmond in particular, he engages more energetically the idea of telling a story and moving the narrative forward. The order of the world of each play is disturbed at the beginning and then restored, albeit changed, by the end. In American Buffalo, the playwright condenses this style by juxtaposing only two scenes and concentrating the action of the play into fewer and more closely related incidents.

The episodic structure of Mamet's other plays activates the audience in a way similar to

Oleanna. In the earlier works the playwright depends on the audience to provide the connections between scenes that might otherwise seem disjointed. In Oleanna the audience performs a similar function by connecting events from each scene and interpreting them in the context of subsequent events. Furthermore, John and Carol each make (often erroneous) interpretations of the other's words and actions. These missed readings should signal to the audience the treacherous nature of drawing conclusions; but, if responses from critics are in anyway indicative, these important clues, rather than helping them, have become barbs and thorns pricking the middle-class sensitivities of Oleanna's audience.

"IF THIS SHOW DOESN'T BLOW YOUR MIND-YOU'VE LEFT IT AT HOME!" reads the side-bar to Alisa Solomon's article on Oleanna in the Village Voice (110). This bit of journalistic hyperbole accurately characterizes the reactions of audiences, domestic and abroad, to 21

the play. Oleanna directly engages spectators' emotions and provokes them to react. Jeanne

Silverthorne observes "that New York audiences for the play. . . routinely shout approval of the violence [Carol] suffers (10), Comparing the London crowds' reaction, Matt Wolf counters, "at the [Royal] Court [Theatre], the cheers accompanying John's climactic fury far exceeded the New

York response" (77). Gerald Weales concludes, "Judging by the conversations I overheard as I left the Orpheum Theater, the play is going to stir up a dollop of controversy" (15).

The reasons for the volatility of Oleanna are many and complex. Most reviewers of the

New York production make some mention of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings which so prominently highlighted the issue of sexual harassment in the public mind. But, while the hearings do provide a context for dialogue about the play, as Eva Resnikova points out, "Oleanna is not even primarily about sexual harassment." Nor, as Resnikova wrongly asserts, is it "a play that sets forth [Mamet's] theory of sexual anger" (54). Rather, as Arthur Holmberg points out, Oleanna

"unsettles spectators because it taps deep into the collective unconscious" (95). Grotowski has described how playwrights view relations between audiences and texts: "We are concerned with the spectator who has genuine spiritual needs and who really wishes, through confrontation with the performance, to analyse himself' (in Bennett 41). The playwright triggers the spectator's unconscious material and provokes the audience to examine themselves by posing difficult questions. Because, in Oleanna, "the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders 22

it unsusceptible to rational examination" (Mamet Restaurants 8), the audience and critics respond on a visceral, unconscious level—by shouting at the stage, applauding the violence, and decrying

Carol as a "bitch" (Wolf 78).

By the end of Act I, the audience has been so inundated by failed communication, grandstanding theorizing, and earnest pleas that it is academic at best to wonder what they have

actually seen. Soon after the start of Act n, the audience is forced to reckon with the memory of what has happened and to apply critical evaluation to it when the playwright lists the accusations made against John. They must hear the complaints and question whether Carol's characterization

of the events agrees with or departs from their own. The conclusions that the audience reaches

determine the manner in which they will perceive the remainder of the play. Naturally, the way that they reach these conclusions is influenced by the director's and actors' interpretation of the

script in the individual production. It is also affected by the meticulous care that the playwright has taken in structuring the play. But most of all, the perceptions of the audience are guided by their own contextual relationship to the play. This last factor, especially, has alienated the

audience from Carol, as an examination of her actions will show. When this alienation from the

student is combined with the location of the professor as protagonist, the effect is an

overwhelming identification with John by critics and audiences alike.

T™ 23

Within minutes of the beginning of Act n, the professor quotes from Carol's complaint to the tenure committee.

That I insist on wasting time, in nonprescribed, in self-aggrandizing and theatrical diversions from the prescribed text. . . that these have taken both sexist and pornographic forms... here we find listed... instances"... closeted with a student".. ."Told a rambling, sexually explicit story, in which the frequencyan d attitudes of fornication of the poor and rich are, it would seem, the central point. . . moved to embrace said student and . . . all part of a pattern ..." (Pause)

(He reads.) That I used the phrase "The White Man's Burden".. . that I told you how Td asked you to my room because I quote like you. (Pause)

(He reads.) "He said he 'liked' me. That he 'liked being with me.' He'd let me write my examination paper over, if I could come back oftener to see him in his office." (Pause) (47-8)

By articulating the specifics of the complaint, the playwright compels the audience to interact with the play. As the audience hears each of these accusations, they are forced to compare it to their recollection of Act I. Audience members have no direct knowledge of how John operates in the classroom, though their ignorance is unlikely to inhibit them from agreeing with the first statements of the complaint. They have observed his actions which they may be willing to characterize as "self-aggrandizing and theatrical." But, while these traits would be enough to indict John as a professor, they would probably not harm his bid for tenure. The remainder of the

"accusations" are largely factual incidents, even if they are colored by Carol's intention that they serve as an indictment. Because Carol's accusations are empirically verifiable, this scene creates a conundrum for the audience who wants to believe John.

r"^T^ 24

In order to understand the position in which the playwright has put John and the audience, it is necessary to review the individual allegations in the context of Act L Throughout the entire act, the audience has seen John ". . . closeted with a student." They recall his story: "When I was young somebody told me, are you ready, the rich copulate less often than the poor. But when they do, they take more of their clothes off' (32). They have seen John make physical contact with CaroL As the stage directions describe, "He goes over to her and puts his arm around her shoulder" (36). They have heard him say, "I like you" (27), and his offer: "I'll make you a deal.

You stay here. We'll start the whole course over . . . Your grade for the whole term is an 'A.' If you will come back and meet with me. A few more times. Your grade's an 'A' " (25). This is what John has said and done; this is what the audience has seen and heard.

"Do you deny it? Can you deny it...? Do you see? (Pause)" Carol's exhortation stuns the audience as sharply as it stifles John. "You think, you think you can deny that these things happened; or, if they did, if they did, that they meant what you said they meant. Don't you see?"

(48), This is the conundrum the audience faces. They have seen John say and do everything

Carol accuses him of saying and doing; and, although they may contextualize his actions differently, they cannot deny the actions themselves.

Lahr voices the sentiments of other critics and spectators when he equivocates, "Every gesture in Act I, every exchange, every idea has been taken out of context and turned into an

„-_r 25

indictment" (124). What Lahr fails to take into account is that he, as spectator, has created the context for the actions in Act I. He has perceived the incidents in the frame of his individual contextual reference points. If he concurs with John that "[The embrace] was devoid of sexual content" (70), it is because he wants to see it that way, not necessarily because it happened that way. The stage directions say only, "He goes over to her and puts his arm around her shoulder"

(36). So when he says that the gestures, exchanges and ideas have been taken out of context, what he means is, "That's not the way I saw it."

The particular response that the play produces in Lahr and audiences is affected by their personal context but has also been structured by the playwright. He has John act from a position of power-the establishment, the status quo-and, makes Carol, first act as object of that power, then resist it and, finally, usurp it. This developmental strategy may at first create difficulty for the audience trying to distinguish either John or Carol as the protagonist. But once Act II begins, "it is the middle-aged, middle-class family man John who engages the audience's sympathy"

(Resnikova 55). Once the audience identifies with John, they are finished. The playwright now uses Carol to provoke and abuse them with relentless accuracy.

Particularly, the playwright often provokes Oleanna's audience by revealing to them instances in which John or Carol misconstrue the other's words or actions. At the top of Act I

John prefaces statements to Carol about her academic situation with, "Carol. I find that I am at a 26

standstill" Carol interjects, "Oh, oh. You're buying a new house!" (5). Her real or pretended ignorance of John's intentions in this scene compares with his paranoid response to her desperate request for help: "Look. Look. I'm not your father" (9). The audience could use these incidents to argue against either of the characters, and it is unlikely that they have yet chosen to side with either.

Another exchange reveals essential things about the way they both operate. Carol tells

John, "You think that I'm stupid" (13). When he denies it, she refers to his reaction to a sentence from her paper as proof: Earlier, John had read from her paper, " 'I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author's feelings in a way that he intended, based on his results.' What can that mean? Do you see?" (8). Now John, not understanding how she has construed his statements, asks her, "...and what did that mean to you...?" (13). Carol concludes, "That meant that I'm stupid. And Til never learn. That's what that meant" (14). Here Carol draws conclusions from events based, not on what was said, but on what she inferred. Regardless of what John has said, there is little doubt in the audience's mind as to his opinion of her intelligence. One way of describing the nature of this exchange is that Carol is reading into John's statements. Another is that she sees through his bullshit.

If by Act II the audience thinks Carol is misconstruing John's statements, rather than seeing through them to what he really means, Carol's actions at the top of the act will make them 27

really irate. He has Carol aggressively interrogate John's intentions in the opening moments of the act. The professor asks, "What have I done to you? (Pause) And, and, I suppose, how I can make amends. Can we not settle this now? It's pointless, really, and I want to know." Carol paraphrases his objectives in one caustic phrase: "What you can do to force me to retract?" (46).

Of course John wants her to retract, but neither he nor the audience will condescend themselves to the point of asking her to remove her complaint.

Then, in Act III when Carol has assumed a degree of power over John, she meticulously restricts his use of language. The professor begins to refer the tenure committee report using the term "accusations." Carol retorts sharply, "Excuse me, but those are not accusations. They have been proved. They are facts" (62). Nor will she concede "alleged," "I cannot allow that. Nothing is alleged. Everything is proved ..." (63). The audience who doubted the allegations in Act II are incensed that the tenure committee has accepted her accusations, and it grates them as much as John to suffer Carol's semantics.

Even as the audience follows John's point of view during Act II and the beginning of Act

HI, they have not yet suffered half the abuse that Carol's quest for revenge or retribution will cause them As she gains the upper hand, she changes places with John. Lahr points out that "by this last scene, it is the student who is dishing out the humiliation to the professor." The playwright succeeds when he "puts the audience exactly where John sits: up against it" (124)—up 28

against all of Carol's fury and vengeance. When she spews a diatribe on the abuses and failings of the middle class, Carol directs it toward John and the audience:

You believe in what you call freedom of thought. Then, fine. You believe in freedom-of- thought and a home, and, and prerogatives for your kid, and tenure. And Fm going to tell you. You believe not in "freedom of thought," but in an elitist, in, in a protected hierarchy which rewards you. And for whom you are the clown. And you mock and exploit the system which pays your rent. You're wrong. I'm not wrong. You're wrong. (67-8)

Continuing, Carol explains the reason that audiences react so strongly to Oleanna, "Why do you hate me? Because you think me wrong? No. Because I have, you think, power over you" (68-9).

Empathizing with John as they do, audiences feel powerless and humiliated. But they err if they think it will not get worse still.

In defending himself John frequentlyraise s the issue of "freedom of thought" (67), or

"Academic freedom..." (74). Anathema, to those of liberal conscience, those who pride themselves on their belief in the First Amendment, is the idea of academic censorship. Little surprise, then, that audiences are completely aghast when Carol announces, "I have a list" (73).

Their middle-class morality would never allow them to contemplate such an underhanded maneuver to get what they want. By the time they discover that Carol has threatened to charge

John with rape, the audience has received "each willful misinterpretation like a body blow, audibly catching its breath at Carol's argument" (Lahr 124). And when Carol reacts to the professor's term of endearment for his spouse saying,"... and don't call your wife 'baby*" (79), Silverthorne 29

(who has tried to play devil's advocate for Carol) notes that "she and John have changed positions-for the first time she has miscalculated his feelings. He was using 'baby' affectionately"

(11). Though shocked by the moral offense of Carol's list, many members ofOleanna's audiences have been ready and more than eager to join John as he "grabs her and begins to beat her" (79).

Given what I consider to be the open nature of Oleanna, it is interesting to see the

overwhelming "desire to defend the professor on the part of some audiences, and even of critics"

(Silverthorne 10). The text is full of what Iser refers to as blanks. He explains that "blanks represent what is concealed in a text, the drawing in of the reader where he or she has [sic] left to

make connections" (in Bennett 47). While I have identified several of the instances in which

Mamet has concealed characters' intentions or veiled their actions, there is another, more

significant blank. Notably, Oleanna does not define the time between scenes—it could be days, weeks, or months. But critics have decided that "sometime between the first and second scene,

Carol undergoes a character change too radical to be explained away simply as the result of her

having fallen into the clutches of her 'group' " (Resnikova 55). Stephan Kanfer concludes that

"the only way to justify Carol I and Carol II is to assume that this is a case of entrapment." He posits that "it could, of course, be argued that the playwright deliberately left out some pieces in

order to have the audience fill them in;" but he counters, "I don't think so" (27). On the contrary,

this is exactly what Mamet has done. The failure to acknowledge such gaps has been an 30

important factor in the audience's rejection of Carol's point-of-view. Another, perhaps even more important, one I have alluded to in mentioning the middle-class sensitivities ofOleanna's audiences.

In an essay on "Women", Mamet deprecates men and their penchant for compromise, which he sees as a "male idea, [that] goes back to *being well-liked1" (Freaks 23). He compares that "Women don't give a tinker's damn about being well-liked, which means they don't know how to compromise." He acknowledges that "they will occasionally surrender to someone they love, they will fight until they have won, they will avoid a confrontation they cannot win, but they won't compromise" (22-3), This paradigm fits Carol like a glove. As she confronts each challenge in her bid for power, she will not accept anything less than everything she wants. Regardless of ethical concerns about justice and morality, there is no doubt that these characteristics make for the most exciting dramatic possibilities on stage. Characters who will stop at nothing to get what they want are inherently more interesting than those who give up or compromise.

Mamet first problematizes the experience of the audience by making the most interesting and dramatically viable character the antagonist. Then he has her transgress several unwritten codes of middle-class morality when she accuses John of sexual harassment-not as an end, but as a means to a further end-and again when her ulterior motive turns out to be the proscription of his academic discourse. Critics fall into Mamet's trap when they question Carol's credibility in 31

accusing John of attempted rape (Caplan "Oleanna" 10). Whether or not John has intended to sexually assault Carol is irrelevant to her objective. Important are only those things that help her to get what she wants. Her objective is to exert pressure in the discursive relations that have, up to this point in her life/education, prescribed for her an extremely limited range of discourse. The audience's rejection of the viability of Carol's actions indicts their middle-class morality because she threatens the power relations (not to mention the ethical standards) they depend upon for their livelihood. Because of Carol's complete disregard for their system of values, the middle-class,

Off-Broadway audiences and critics reject her out of hand. The playwright cultivates their rejection ofOleanna's antagonist by giving her the upper hand in a power struggle that is as perilous for the audience as it is for the protagonist.

:-OTT,. 32

Mamet's body of work responds directly to the aims of the Theatre of the Absurd, whose writers and characters, Esslin says, search "for a way in which they can, with dignity, confront a universe deprived of what was once its centre and its living purpose, a world deprived of a generally accepted integrating principal, which has become disjointed, purposeless-absurd"

(Absurd 350). What is John if not a "man trying to stake out a modest place for himself in the cold and darkness that envelops him" (352). All he wants is to provide for his family, and yet he is assaulted on all sides by the fears of his youth and the ominous prospect of a changing world.

The same is true of Ford who has financial security, but feels that there must be something more to life, some excitement or possibility of meaning. These are the people who populate Mamet's audience.

It is these people who Bertolt Brecht refers to in an essay by Herbert Blau. They evidence

"an advanced state of the disease of catatonia:"

'True, their eyes are open,' [Brecht] wrote in his notorious description, 'but they stare rather than see, just as they listen rather than hear. , . . Seeing and hearing are activities, and can be pleasant ones, but these people seem relieved of activity and like men to whom something is being done.' (Blau 286)

Brecht believed that by using a technique called Verfremdung, he could awaken these passive spectators into a state of activity. Fredric Jameson explains that

The purpose of the Brechtian estrangement-effect is... a political one in the most thoroughgoing sense of the word; it is, as Brecht insisted over and over, to make you aware that the objects and institutions you thought to be natural were really only 33

historical: the result of change, they themselves henceforth become in their turn changeable, (in Bennett 29-30)

An analysis of the larger structure of House of Games and Oleanna reveals that they both articulate such an historical change. In each play, one character undergoes a transformation from innocence to, not knowledge so much as, savoir-faire. They learn techniques of power from mentors (Ford from Mike and Carol from John) and use this to reverse the direction of power.

While Mamet's structural articulation of historical changes is not as abrupt or overt as Brecht's

Verfremdung, he does use a final device to shock spectators out of their complacency, and as we have seen in audience reactions to Oleanna, it works well.

Mamet knows that an audience will tend to empathize with a protagonist, and it is all the more likely that a middle-class audience will do so if the protagonist is also from the middle-class.

In House of Games, Ford not only lives an upper middle-class life, but also engages in discourse with the members of her class, writing pop psychology texts on compulsion. John in Oleanna as a university professor, like the psychologist, both lives that life and engages the middle-class by teaching their offspring. The audience (a typically middle-class audience) will identify with these characters, both for the structural reasons I have already described, and because of their social proximity. The alienation effect occurs when these characters then commit acts of such extreme violence, that spectators are unable to watch complacently. When Ford slowly empties her revolver into Mike, and when John assaults Carol, the audience must locate themselves

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somewhere in that event. Audiences may enjoy the acts of violence, may deplore them, may respond one way on viewing and another on subsequent reviewing or reanalysis. But they cannot fail to respond. Mamet's strategy has succeeded.

T^r Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Falling into Theory. Ed, David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. 222-6. Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London: Routledge, 1990. Blau, Herbert. "The Oversight of Ceaseless Eyes." Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Post Modern Drama. Ed. Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990. 279- 9L Brewer, Gay. David Mmet and Film: Illusion/Disillusion in a Wounded Land. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993. Caplan, Betty. "The Gender Benders." New Statesman and Society. 2 July 1993: 34-5. —. "Oleanna. at the Duke of York's." London Theatre News. Sept/Oct. 1993: 9-10. Eberwein, Robert T. A Viewer's Guide to Film Theory and Criticism Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1979. Esslin, Martin. An Anatomy of Drama. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. —. The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969. Holmberg, Arthur. "The Language of Misunderstanding." American Theatre. Oct. 1992: 94-5. Iser, Wolfgang. "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach." New Directions in Literary History. Ed. Ralph Cohen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. 125-45. Lahr, John. "Dogma Days." New Yorker. 16 Nov. 1992: 121-5 Mamet, David. House of Games. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985. —. Interview. In Their Own Words: Contemporary Playwrights. David Savran. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988. —. Oleanna. New York: Vintage, 1993, —. On Directing Film. New York: Viking, 1991. —. Some Freaks. New York: Penguin, 199 L —. Writing in Restaurants. New York: Penguin, 1987, Resnikova, Eva. "Fool's Paradox." National Review. 18 Jan. 1993: 54-6. Silverthorne, Jeanne. "PC Playhouse." Art Forum. March 1993: 10-11. Solomon, Alisa. "He Said/He Said." Village Voice. 2 Nov. 1993: 110, 115 Van Wert, William F, "Psychoanalysis and Con Games: House of Games." Film Quarterly. 43.4 (Sum. 1990): 2-10. Weales, Gerald. "Gender Wars: Oleanna & Desdemona." Commonweal. 4 Dec, 1992: 15, 20. Wolf, Matt. "A London Oleanna. Deepens the Debate." American Theatre, Nov. 1993: 77-8.