BY ANNE COLEMAN

In print | Published January 21, 2010

David Mamet delights in making his audience nervous. He laces his scripts with gratuitous profanity and coarse language that most of his theatergoers would be embarrassed to overhear, much less use, in public. His newest play, “Race,” which hit Broadway in December, is no exception when it comes to language, and his choice of subject is certainly intended to push his audience. Unfortunately, his script falls short.

The play concerns a law firm of three lawyers (James Spader, David Alan Grier and Kerri Washington), one white and two black, who are sought out by a wealthy white businessman (Richard Thomas) accused of raping his African-American mistress.

The performances are, with one exception, very faithful to the script and powerful to a point. Spader invests himself entirely in his role, delivering a simultaneously sympathetic and repulsive performance as a lawyer who is both exceptionally comfortable addressing and articulating racial issues and inadvertently a victim of his own awareness. Grier, his partner at the law firm, is similarly devoted but is shortchanged by the script. So too is Washington as their underling. Thomas, the fourth member of the group, is abysmal, and by no fault of the text, although the part is no gem.

This is not the work of the same Mamet who wrote “Glenngary Glen Ross” and “Oleanna.” While his choice of topic is certainly a lightning rod, which is to be expected from him, the execution lacks fire. His lead role is a typical Mamet man, with all the long speeches and quick witticisms an actor could dream up, but he is the only interesting thing in the play. The clash of wills that Mamet seeks to establish in his script goes unrealized, and even Spader’s striking personal revelations in the second act aren’t enough to make up for the lost opportunities of the earlier scenes. It would seem Mamet unfortunately fell in love with his protagonist and gave him a straw-man adversary instead of developing one of his signature impasse endings.

The play is both a comedy and a drama, with Spader’s character spewing “truths” that are too blunt and too accurate to be anything other than funny, but Mamet so thoroughly fails to integrate the two attempted genres that the laughs are limited in number and are restricted to some of his less brilliant (and therefore less brutal) quips.

The intended counterpoint to the humor, the dark drama, reads like an episode of “Law and Order: SVU” written by a jaded ex-district attorney. The premise is promising, the plot developments are interesting and the characters are believable (with the exception of Richard Thomas’s Charles Strickland), but there is something amateurish in its neglect of Grier and Washington’s characters, who are both ready to surprise us but never get the chance, overshadowed as they are by Spader’s character.

In the past when Mamet has directed his own plays, they have been hugely successful. Ben Brantley, when reviewing this past year’s production of “Oleanna,” even commented that one of the failings of the production was that the revival wasn’t directed by Mamet (who directed the original production on Broadway).

Notwithstanding, “Race” would have fared better in the hands of one of Broadway’s recent luminaries, such as Matthew Warchus or Bartlett Sher. With distance, which Mamet as the author lacked, those directors would have had the chance to notice what someone as deeply invested as the playwright could not: that the play was dangerously close to making the audience feel better about itself, which is the last thing most Mamet plays should do.

The ultimate failure of the play is evident in the aftermath of the show. The thought-provoking and scandalizing tidbits that litter the first act are rendered dull by the end, and the faces in the audience prove it. They are happy. For them, the moral ambiguities have slipped to the back of their minds, and the lasting impression is that they’ve experienced a daring but intelligent summary of all of the issues currently facing the nation on the subject of race, particularly regarding “white guilt.”

What had the potential to be a shocking, even scarring, experience became just another talking point for those who attended the show to prove to themselves and their peers that they are progressive and enlightened.

What Mamet and “Race” needed was another voice, someone who knew how to work with “Mamet-speak” but could also recognize that this wasn’t his finest work. Undoubtedly, revivals of the show will benefit from the additional perspective, but it is unclear whether or not revisions will be necessary to really help the show achieve its potential. They certainly couldn’t hurt.

« RETURN TO LIVING & ARTS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »