"Race" - A play by David Mamet

"Race" A play by David Mamet
New Rep Theatre Company
The Arsenal Center for the Arts
Mosesian Theater
321 Arsenal Street
Watertown, MA 02472

October 14-November 4, 2012

This David Mamet play might make your head explode. Billed as a comedy, it’s more like a forced march into territory not directly addressed in polite conversation.  A white man accused of raping a black woman hires a law firm of two lawyers, one black, one white, and one black female associate, to defend him.  Race and sex: Mamet’s got all the ingredients for a provocative story in his pot – then he lights up the fire.

“Race is the most incendiary topic in our history,” the white lawyer says. No headline there but what happens over the play’s 80 minutes is some of the bluntest talk about race that you’re likely to hear on a mainstream stage.
 
“Do black people hate white people?”

Lines like that - and the black lawyer’s answer to the white lawyer’s question - are hammers that nail down Mamet’s belief that shame, guilt and lies shape any communication between white people talking to black people about race. 

The cast is up to the task of delivering Mamet’s rapid-fire lines with the range of emotions required to make them feel authentic. The lines often have the subtlety of an anvil with a point to make but Ken Cheeseman as white lawyer Jack Lawson; Miranda Craigswell as newly hired associate Susan (no last name); Cliff Odle as the black lawyer Henry Brown; and Patrick Shea as the white defendant Charles Strickland play well off each other.

The dialogue Mamet puts in his character’s mouths makes us think about our own deeply held beliefs about race, the ones that lurk under our public pronouncements. Mamet’s use of silence adds to the squirm quotient.

When one of the lawyers asks the client a question about a sensitive subject, say, why a white man would want to have sex with a black woman, it’s not only the client he’s asking. It’s every man in the audience. The flustered client clams up, then tries to offer a scrubbed version of his truth but the two lawyers get him to admit the stereotyped belief he’s too self-conscious to acknowledge.

Mamet’s heavy hand is at work when Lawson says, “It’s not beliefs were talking about, it’s the perception of beliefs.”  It’s no surprise when Lawson and Brown think of ways to exploit those perceptions in their arguments in front of a jury. Near the play’s final minutes, a scene between Lawson and Susan twists the plot to show Mamet's construct of perceived beliefs blacks have of whites.

Required reading, whether you see the play or not, is David Mamet’s 2009 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/theater/13mame.html

One excerpt:

I have never spent much time thinking about the themes of my plays, as, I have noticed, when an audience begins to talk about the play’s theme, it means the plot was no good. But my current play does have a theme, and that theme is race and the lies we tell each other on the subject.

Chris Rock, in his last tour, addressed the subject of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and asked, rhetorically and on behalf of the whites in the audience: Is it possible that a 70-year-old black man hates the whites? Let me enlighten you. You cannot find a 70-year-old black man who does not hate the whites.

 There has always been, at the very least, a little bit of hate between blacks and whites in this country, with each side, in its turn, taking advantage of its political strength (as who does not?). But that relationship is also perhaps like a marriage. Both sides at different times are bitching, and both at different times are bailing, but we’re all in the same boat.

We are bound to each other, as are all Americans. Bound though subdivided, not only by race, but by religion, politics, age, region and culture. And we not only seem to be but are working it out.

The play’s most powerful moment is its quietest. “I’ve done great harm to a friend and never knew it,” defendant Charles Strickland says of a male black friend in a moment of self-revelation. Whether he is convicted or not, Strickland's worldview has been transformed. He is, as Mamet writes,  “working it out.”

Final observation: I saw half dozen black people in the near capacity audience of the 340-seat Charles Mosesian Theater. Why weren’t there more? Perhaps they don’t have to attend a theater performance to be told what they already know about race.

Photo courtesy of Boston Globe, Andrew Brilliant - left to right, Cheeseman, Craigswell, Odle, Shea

Comments

[Ann Baker]

Great review, if I can get a ticket for tomorrow I'll go. What a cast. What a subject.