David Mamet's "Race' by Philadelphia Theatre Company (1st review)

David Mamet's Race seeks to stimulate a dialogue about race and gender in America through the prism of a legal case. Charles, a wealthy and prominent married white man accused of raping a young black woman, seeks counsel from a two-man bi-racial law firm that just happens to have recently hired a young black woman as an associate.

Charles (played by John Preston) may be clueless about the law and race relations, but he understands feelings and nuance: He is innocent of rape, he insists, but he harbors guilty feelings that in some way he may have wronged his black mistress, for whom he seems to care. For this expression of doubt, and for his lack of legal acumen, the lawyers— who care only about winning the case— mock and berate him.

Suffice it to say that Charles has come to the wrong law firm. Mamet would have us believe that his four characters are guided above all by their subconscious racial bigotry. But black or white, his two attorneys behave less like lawyers than characters in a David Mamet play.

Billable hours?

Instead of either testing or reassuring their putative client, they bombard him with grandiose wisecracks: "Do you know what you can say to a black man on the subject of race? Nothing"; "Whites will screw you any chance we get— we can't help ourselves— because we know you hate us"; "Jews deal with guilt; blacks deal with shame"; "The press exists to gratify envy and greed"; and my personal favorite, "If you're not doing it, sex looks funny." I couldn't help wondering: Are they charging billable hours for this banter?

Like Mamet's script itself, the white lawyer Jack (Jordan Lage) and his black partner Henry (Ray Anthony Thomas) are brilliant and cynical but not wise. These seasoned barristers allow their novice associate (Nicole Lewis) to manipulate them into accepting a client they don't want. They constantly interrupt conversations, with the result that they get incomplete information; and, as a further consequence, they jump to unwarranted assumptions.

Tired racial dialogue

OK, OK— David Mamet lacks the legal credentials (not to mention the humanity) of Clarence Darrow. For all the heavy-handedness of his script, Race makes compelling theater nevertheless. I found myself swept along by the tight dialogue and Scott Zigler's equally tight direction, even if Mamet failed to provide any flesh-and-blood character with whom I could empathize.

Race seeks to provoke an American dialogue about race, and I expect it will succeed, which is all to the good. My real gripe with Race lies in its tendency to fall back on the simplistic old dialectic of white guilt/black shame/American sin rather than examine the subject's deeper complexities. So let me give it a shot.

Who started slavery?

Let us stipulate, as lawyers like to say, that 244 years of legal slavery in North America, followed by another century of legal racial segregation, constituted a despicable outrage. The fact remains that this outrage wasn't uniquely American.

Well before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, the Portuguese were importing slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to work on sugar plantations in Madeira and Sao Tomé, off the coast of West Africa. Black Africans as well as white Europeans engaged in this trade. By 1619, when a Virginia colonist named John Rolfe noted in his journal that "a dutch man of warre… sold us twenty Negars," African slaves had already been imported to the Caribbean, to Spanish America and to Portuguese Brazil.

What the Gospels said

For that matter, slavery has pervaded the globe since ancient times, when it was first perceived as a humane alternative to the mass murder (and sometimes cannibalism) of soldiers defeated in battle. The Hebrew Scriptures, to which antebellum American plantation owners often turned for validation, contained several injunctions against mistreatment of slaves but no condemnation of slavery per se. Nor did the four Gospels of the New Testament record any criticism of slavery from Jesus. Through most of history, slavery was perceived as merely one of many imperfect human social and economic arrangements, not as a uniquely evil institution in itself.

Granted, many other ostensibly less enlightened countries— Mexico, Britain, even Cuba— managed to eliminate slavery without sacrificing one-tenth of their adult male populations, as America did. On the other hand, the United States is the only country in the long history of global slavery where free men gave their lives by the hundreds of thousands to end it.

Mamet to the contrary, change is inevitable, and not just in the White House. Precisely how it occurs, and how it varies from one place to another— to me, that's the interesting part. Now, there's something for Mamet to chew on next time he sets out to confront America's purportedly immutable racial divide.♦


To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read responses, click here.