"Oliana" by Carmine Capaldo

Essay by spyder227College, UndergraduateA, November 2006

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Anger, passion, love is what makes us human. In the play Oleanna, the author David Mamet is able to extract these feelings and actually create an emotional bombarding play, one where witch the feelings stay long after it has finished. The play is essentially fueled by language, this is because whomever has the superior language seemingly hold more power. As the play progresses through the three acts there are distinct changes in language between the two main characters, carol and john, thus changes in power.

Act one opens with a phone call, showing the significance of communication within the play. This act is littered with ellipses and the dialogue is not constantly continuous between the two characters. From the start we are able to see that John conveys most on the language, he constantly cuts Carol off, interpreting what she was

going to say for himself. John uses words that Carol does not understand and instead of answering her question he talks about topics that are of interest to him.

In the same respect Carol is quiet, she is unable to voice her opinion even when she is asked too, she is very fact oriented, an example of this is how she writes everything in her notebook and when asked a question or needs a fact she refers to her notebook, this also fortifies the

idea that she is unable to voice or own opinion.

The entire purpose of their conversation was because Carol wanted to learn, "teach me, teach me"(11) but in fact all she was concerned about was her grade John did

not want this to be about grades, so he proposes an idea "your grade for the whole term is an A..." (25) this being because if she was not concerned about marks then perhaps...