Summary
The play begins with John, a college professor, talking on the phone in his office while Carol, his student, sits across the desk from him. The audience hears only John’s half of the phone conversation. He seems to be talking about real estate, and he speaks to the person on the other end of the phone conversation in an aggressive and impatient manner, though he says “I love you” before hanging up.
At one point during his phone conversation, he uses the phrase “term of art.” When John hangs up the phone, Carol asks him what he meant by “term of art.” Haltingly and carefully, John tries to explain the term, using jargon that frustrates and confuses Carol. After a few awkward minutes of conversation, John pivots to asking Carol why she has come to visit him in his office. Carol explains that she is having a difficult time in John’s class, in spite of doing everything she believes she is supposed to be doing, such as buying the book John has written. Carol believes that her fundamental problem is a linguistic gap between her and John: the academic language that he uses is inaccessible to her, which makes her feel stupid. Throughout the conversation, John and Carol cut one another off constantly, interrupting and finishing each other’s sentences in a way that is often confusing.
As the conversation continues and Carol becomes more agitated, John begins to pepper his speech with compliments, telling Carol that she is in fact not stupid but very intelligent. His manner becomes more personal, and he addresses not only Carol’s academic concerns about her class grade but her more personal ones about her intellectual capacities and her ability to fit in at the university. Carol occasionally tries to redirect the conversation back to her class grade, pleading with John to help her understand his course material. John broadens the conversation to her more general concerns time and time again.
John’s phone rings and he answers, explaining impatiently to the person on the other line that he isn’t available to talk before hanging up. This disruption allows Carol to redirect the conversation to her grade. She asks John about a phrase he used, the “virtual warehousing of the young,” and his belief in the “curse of modern education.” Unable to understand John’s explanation, she grows frustrated and calls herself stupid again. John, after getting distracted and talking about an upcoming conversation with his realtor, explains his educational philosophy. He believes that higher education is arbitrarily valued by society and that it often makes young people miserable for no reason.
John then reveals that, as a child, people believed him to be a failure. He is sharing this experience with Carol when the phone rings for a second time. He answers, having another short, impatient conversation. He hangs up, then mentions to Carol that he is having some problems signing an agreement for the new house. Carol assumes that he is buying a house because of his promotion, and John concurs. She asks John why he is staying in the office with her in spite of the fact that he is clearly busy dealing with his new house. John responds that he is doing so because he likes her. This revelation leads to John pointing out that he and Carol are similar. He relates her problems as a student to his own problems as a teacher. When Carol asks him to explain more, he announces that he wishes to remove the artificial boundary between student and teacher, and he tells her about his problems in more depth—with his home and wife, but mostly with his job. John rambles on about various tests that he has faced throughout his life, most recently the evaluation of the university’s tenure committee. He has, he says, been granted tenure, but his contract is not yet finalized. John says that he fears the tenure committee will discover his dark secret. When Carol asks what this secret is, John says that it does not exist—rather, it is an “index of his badness.”
Analysis
This entire section, like the rest of “Oleanna,” is set in the confines of a professor’s office. Like the academic world in which John and Carol interact, the play is cloistered within an exclusive environment. We, as an audience, feel like privileged observers of a private relationship between student and teacher. Just as Carol feels by turns exhilarated, overwhelmed, and trapped by her new life in academia, we, too, feel by turns thrilled to be allowed in and desperate to escape this scene.
The only hint of an outside world comes from John’s phone conversations. These punctuate the scene, working as time markers so that the audience feels less disoriented. At the same time, these disruptions from the outside world highlight different aspects of Carol and John’s characters. John sees his non-academic life as precarious and anxiety-inducing, but also irritating—he is constantly trying to end his phone conversations so that he can attend to his own concerns. Carol is intrigued by the conversations, seeing John’s privileged middle-class lifestyle as a novelty.
Since the scene features only two characters, we get a sense of Carol and John fairly quickly. John is wrapped up in his academic career, attempting both to wrestle with and to avoid existential questions about academia. Some of his revelations show that he finds the university to be oppressive and unnecessary, and that he is plagued by a feeling that he does not belong. Carol, meanwhile, is quite open about the fact that she feels out of place. Her main goal is simply not to fail John’s class, so that she can stay at the university as a student. At times their concerns seem almost identical, and at other times, John’s life as a professor seems to have little in common with Carol’s as a student. Therefore, the conversation shifts between adversarial and intimate with dizzying speed, and at times it is difficult to tell which tone is being deployed.
These two characters constantly cut one another off. These interruptions make it clear that Carol and John, though each excited and eager to voice their concerns, are not actually listening to one another. In effect, each character is having a completely separate conversation, quite independently of the other person in the room. The effect is exacerbated by John’s use of academic language, which obscures his meaning, and which Carol makes quite clear that she does not understand.
