Mamet’s “Hill” and “Thomas” are Carol (Rebecca Pidgeon), a college undergrad, and John (William Macy), a fortyish professor. She has come to his office, desperate to escape flunking his course. Their conversation is a chaos of unfinished, short-circuited, clashing sentences. Carol confesses bewilderment in his course. John reassures her that she’s “not stupid,” speaks of his own youthful self-doubts, puts down higher education as “warehousing the young.” He tells an academic risque joke, offers to change her grade, promises to help her “start over.”
In the second act, all hell has broken loose. Carol, the pathetic self-doubter, has become a nemesis. She has accused John of sexual harassment and worse, which will cost him his career and possibly his freedom. John is now the pathetic figure, begging her to reconsider. But as her denunciation escalates, violence erupts in a shocking denouement.
The disturbing power of Mamet’s play lies in its cunning logic. We don’t know what happened between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, but we see exactly what happens with Carol and John. On the surface, her accusations seem frightening in their lethal absurdity. But inexorably we realize that she is telling the truth-her truth. His compliments (“Don’t you look fetching”) she sees as sexist put-downs coming from his position of power. Gestures like his hand on her shoulder are “paternal prerogatives” amounting to rape. She even denounces his mild critique of higher education, saying: “You mock and exploit the system that pays your rent.” What’s truly Kafkaesque is not these accusations but John’s shaken sense, through his helpless rage, that he may harbor a guilt he’s never examined.
There will be family fights over this play. “The guy never raped her! She’s a feminist fascist!” “He’s the fascist with his power trips!” But the play isn’t about two people; it’s about two worlds colliding: “I came here to instruct you,” says Carol. She is one of the new commissars, seething with self-righteous jargon. He is one of the old standard-issue profs, burbling with shopworn pedantries and condescensions. These antagonists are caught with unnerving precision by Macy, as always the perfect Mamet actor, and Pidgeon, Mamet’s English-born wife. Staging his play off-Broadway, Mamet has sent a riveting report from the war zone between genders and classes, a war that will cause great havoc before it can create a new human order.
