David Mamet's "Race' by PTC (3rd review)

In Oleanna (1992), playwright David Mamet confronted the then-emerging topics of political correctness and the campus culture wars over the Western Canon. That electrifying drama intensified the stakes by intertwining these academic struggles with the perennial battle of the sexes and the war between the generation trying to hold power and the young challengers seeking their place.

Mamet's latest, Race, now in a maddening production at Philadelphia Theatre Company, chases down the more sensitive themes of race relations in contemporary America. A middle-aged white billionaire allegedly rapes a black woman and seeks out a law firm with a "favorable" racial makeup to defend him. As he did in Oleanna— and earlier in Speed-the-Plow— Mamet structures the action with betrayal and the need for one character to instruct the others in the nature of the business at hand (academia, show business, now law); then he resolves the conflict in rather ambiguous terms.

Where Oleanna could elicit anger across gender lines, Race attempts to evince terror, frustration and guilt along racial divisions. But where Oleanna found deeper truths about how the imperative for equality can devolve into a naked power grab, Race reveals more about Mamet than about his ostensible subject matter.

Mamet's problem with… people

Race should dispel the myth of Mamet's misogyny and replace it with the more correct notion of misanthropy. In considering their defense, the lawyers Jack and Henry portray any potential jurors— and the general populace from which they're drawn— as easily manipulated dimwits, who need a good "story" with "heroes" and "villains" to entice them to the "favorable" judgment. For Mamet, citizens in a jury box don't want facts, motivations, logic and evidence that would convince them of a trial's truth, they simply want to "like a guy enough to let him off."

You could easily reply that these attitudes indict lawyers more than mankind. But if you use Race as a vantage point to evaluate Mamet's work, you'll find equally reprehensible specimens of humanity in real estate, politics and show business. And how could anyone who watched the vicious antics of Mamet's male characters have seen his writing as expressing approval rather than condemnation?

"'Brain-dead liberal'

Race also illuminates— more so than Mamet's November (2008)— the evolution of Mamet's thought and political allegiances. During the run of that play, Mamet wrote an essay for the Village Voice, in which he renounced his status as a "brain-dead liberal" and proclaimed new allegiances to conservative thought.

In Race, Mamet borrows heavily from the conservative African-American economist Thomas Sowell, particularly Sowell's notion that justice represents not an ideal but the culmination of a process that we cannot perfect but can only rid of potential abuses. Such a conclusion would have been unthinkable in the playwright who 20 years ago penned Oleanna, which clearly expected audiences to take sides on the presumption that one position could be judged right and the other wrong.

Unfortunately for audiences of Race, Mamet hasn't learned to apply his sharp style to his newly adopted political attitudes. In the past Mamet seems to have taken liberal platitudes for granted, and consequently they flew easily out of his characters' mouths. Race proceeds at a clunky pace, with "Tell me" and "Explain it to me again" marking the obvious transitions and segues.

If the defendant were Jewish?

Mamet's enthusiasm for his newfound attitudes also leaves him unaware of the prejudices lurking underneath his new beliefs. At one point, Mamet's white lawyer instructs his black partner to explain the truth about race relations in America: "There is nothing a white person can say to a black person about race which is not both incorrect and offensive." A truly tough-minded Mamet would have added, "Including this one."

There lies the essential fallacy of Mamet's Race. Substitute a Tel Aviv businessman and his Palestinian mistress for the accused and his alleged victim in Race. In that situation, would any thinking theatergoer tolerate Mamet's simplistic "let me instruct you" approach to inter-group relations?

Here, the debate in Race mirrors Oleanna: It's not about resolving the conversation, but about first establishing the more nefarious issues of who gets to speak, and who gets to set the terms of future discussion. Perhaps Race should have been titled Rhetoric instead.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.