Stage: Race

Ethel Barrymore Theatre

New York

(212) 239-6200

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There was a time when a new David Mamet play was virtually guaranteed to “knock the breath out of you,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. If Race is any indication, those days are over. We first encounter law partners Jack Lawson (James Spader) and Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) as they’re interviewing a prospective client—a white billionaire accused of raping a black woman. In the background is the firm’s new legal associate, Susan, a young black woman who, like most of Mamet’s women, seems ever ready to “throw a wrench into the masculine machinery.” All the Mamet ingredients are here: a hot-button social issue, barbed one-liners, a corkscrew of a plot. Missing, however, is the “syncopated urgency that makes a Mamet play sing and sting.”

The playwright kicks things off with the declaration by Spader’s character that “race is the most incendiary topic in our history,” said Scott Brown in New York. He then suggests he’s going to unpack this difficult suitcase. But really, all he wants to do is “put white guilt on trial, which he does with gusto.” Whether the billionaire really committed the crime seems beside the point. What we learn of the case is “remarkably pedestrian,” and the characters exist merely to support the (admittedly fantastic) dialogue. Race might just as easily have been called Language, “which in Mamet-land is the only thing that exists.”

Though Race is a bit hollow at the center, “the dialogue is tasty, the confrontations spiky, and the observations more than occasionally

biting,” said David Rooney in Variety. As the accused, Richard Thomas plays on the audience’s uncertainty as to whether he’s an “innocent or a creep.” Kerry Washington is somewhat stiff as Susan, but does an admirable job with a character who seems more of a “plot function” than a human being. The real enjoyment comes from “watching the taut verbal interplay between Spader and Grier,” who keep the play’s 90 minutes from dragging. With a little more work, Race could have been truly incisive. As it stands, it’s merely a “witty provocation.”