From Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet, comes his most explosive four-letter word yet. Race.
Race is the riveting new play by America’s foremost playwright, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, November).
Directed by the playwright, it stars Emmy Award winner James Spader (“Boston Legal,” Sex, Lies and Videotape), Tony nominee and television star David Alan Grier (“A Soldier’s Story,” “In Living Color”, “Chocolate News”), Kerry Washington (Ray, Lakeview Terrace) and Richard Thomas (“The Waltons,” Democracy, Twelve Angry Men).
David Mamet's new play, Race (Barrymore Theatre), is all blunt truthfulness—some of which, this being a Mamet play, naturally turns out to conceal lies, or to mask deeper, darker truths. Played fast, under the author's direction, its 80 or so minutes feel like a speedy round of post-Shavian ping-pong. Debating whether or not to defend a rich man (Richard Thomas) accused of rape in what's apparently a clear-cut case with racially inflammatory content, a mixed-race pair of law partners (James Spader and David Alan Grier) and their female assistant (Kerry Washington) rattle around in their spacious office like video-game pieces powered by an unseen joystick, zinging Mamet's poison-dart lines at one another. The end is a Mamet end: Somebody lied, somebody betrayed the side, nobody wins.
The shock is that the author (who previously staged a two-person dramatic tap dance about men and women, truth and lies in Oleanna) elicits little more than a shrug once all the thrusts and parries, revelations and reversals are toted up. The foursome bark out short, blunt, rhetorically provocative dialogue intended to demonstrate that black people and white people are doomed never to understand one another. But the arguments feel like moves on a game board, not words from the heart.
2009 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play | David Alan Grier |
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