In David Mamet's Oleanna, John, a university teacher, attempts to explain to his student Carol how he himself struggled with education as a child, in order to make her feel better about her own hardships and create an emotional connection with...

David Mamet’s short, two-character play Oleanna deals with the shifting linguistic power dynamics between professor John and student Carol over the series of three separate meetings. Both characters continually trail off, interrupt one another,...

In the play Oleanna by David Mamet, knowledge is power. The ability to be the more intellectually adept individual in a room allows for both John and Carol to capture and lose the role of teacher in their student-teacher relationship. John, the...

Theatre has always been an outlet for the articulation of opinion and the careful expression of controversial or uncomfortable topics. It may be easy to forget in this current age of trigger warnings and hypersensitivity, but some of the theatre’s...

With regard to his own work, David Mamet admits that “What I write about is what I think is missing from our society. And that’s communication on a basic level.” In his play <i>Glengarry Glen Ross</i>, Mamet uses an ironic technique to...

George Santayana’ s oft-quoted aphorism—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—has entered cultural ubiquity and become a cliché, paraphrased ad nauseam by politicians and philosophically-inclined college students. Still,...

America has long prided itself on being a land of opportunity. Since the fifteenth century, pilgrims have flocked to American shores, urged onward by the thought of making money, off the rich lands and resources available here. As time has gone...

David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) is a postmodern drama that portrays the stereotypical and traditional images about women during that era. This piece of work really concentrates on the power relations based on gender, and the void...