David Mamet should have called his short new play, now at the Orpheum, Office Hours instead of Oleanna, which is, apparently, a pointless allusion to an old Utopian community. It takes place in a bleakly functional faculty office that is furnished with—no, that is—a wooden desk, two chairs, and a sort of bench. It has the spare, stark, penitential look of such places. John, a professor of education or psychology or sociology (the vagueness here is a weakness, as we shall see), is coping with student Carol, who fears she is not succeeding in the course. Also, she wants her paper re-evaluated. Her line in argument —“I have to pass”; “I read your book”; “I did what you told me”—will be familiar to anyone who has ever taught. But Carol, with her horn-rims, ankle-length brown shift, and rigid postures of strain and pain, seems dour and troubled beyond the norm. “Am I stupid?” she asks. “Everything I do is garbage.” Her plight solicits, or at any rate exacts, from John a response that becomes personal in timbre: “I talk to you as I talk to my son. . . . I like you.” “Why would you want to be personal with me?” she whines—rather oddly, since she has been so personal in reference to herself. Her seeming torment leads the nervously chain-smoking John into self-deprecating and situation-easing patter. He doubts the value of teaching. He says, “Tests are not a gauge of your intelligence; they are garbage; they