SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “Acts of Violence.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4675 (6 November 1992): 16-17.

In the following review, Showalter contends that Mamet fails to objectively address harassment in Oleanna.

By all counts, this should be a championship season for the playwright David Mamet. The movie version of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross, opened to rave reviews and a prediction of an Oscar for Jack Lemmon; there's great anticipation of another movie, Hoffa, for which he wrote the screenplay, and which is expected to garner more Oscar nominations for its star, Jack Nicholson; his latest book of essays, The Cabin, is about to be published; and his new play, Oleanna, takes a controversial plunge into the raging rapids of the American debate over sexual harassment, political correctness and academic elitism.

A disciple of Stanislavsky and the Method, the master of a rough, spare, often very funny dialogue that draws...