Oleanna (1992)

Oleanna is undoubtedly the most widely discussed American play of the 1990s, with only Angels in America (1990–3), by Tony Kushner (born 1956), attracting a remotely similar degree of attention. There the comparisons end; critics have occasionally been led to propose that there must be something wrong with Kushner’s play because everybody seemed to like it, but Oleanna was socially and critically divisive from the outset. The explosive drama about a female student who visits the office of her male professor for advice in Act 1, accuses him of making sexual advances in Act 2, and is physically assaulted by him at the end of the play, provoked correspondingly ferocious responses from its audiences and critics.