Review: (Toronto) RACE

Jason Priestley (photo by David Hou)

Pacing to the end
RACE is whip-fast look at what divides us…
by Dave Ross

This is Canadian Stage’s 25th Anniversary season, and as it draws to a close, they are doing so with a nod to their original season, offering David Mamet’s RACE, just as they offered Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross all those years ago. But this play is more than just a nod towards their inaugural season. It is a fast, sharp, and unpleasant exploration of race in America. 

Mamet’s script is painful in its acidity, and in the reality of the dialogue. The almost complete exclusion of contractions from the script reminds the audience that this is theatre, a manufactured event, but the situation is not. A wealthy white man is accused of raping a young black woman, and he seeks representation from a firm in town willing to take his case. The firm has two high-powered attorneys, one white, and one black. This is the centre of the story, but the script uses dialogue to explore and expose race. What it reveals is uncomfortable in its authenticity. 

Review: (Vancouver) Race

l-r Craig Erickson, Marsha Regis, Kewsi Ameyaw, 

Aaron Craven (photo credit: Shimon Karmel)

Mamet and His Buttons

by David C. Jones

@iamdavidcjones

Fresh off the grand silliness of The Government Inspector director David MacKay offers up a stark and heady racially-charged drama. No music – just lights up and down. There it is, deal with it.

Race by the always-incendiary David Mamet is a behind-closed-doors story about two lawyers (one black and one white) along with their ‘honors’ student’ (also black) who are asked to defend a rich white man accused of raping a black woman. 

Mr. Mamet likes to push buttons and mocks smugness and righteousness – ironically by being pretty smug himself. He also knows how to twist and turn his plot so that at almost 10-minute intervals in the 80-minute play a new bombshell is dropped.

Theatre For Thought, February 18, 2012

MAMET VS THE MAGICAL POST OBAMA TIME
joel fishbane

As frustrated as I can be with some of David Mamet’s work, I remain doggedly convinced that he is one of the finest playwrights of the modern age. It is, I think, a glorious thing to experience anything he has written: he has the ability to cut through the great chafe of life and, in prose that is lean but never anorexic, reveal wisdom in all areas: art, lust, guns, even campaign buttons. Oh and race. Let’s not forget that. 

Mamet’s 2006 book The Wicked Son dealt with anti-Semitism and self hatred among the Jews; not content with this controversy, he returned to Broadway in 2009 with Race, a play that tackles the great racial divide that has haunted America ever since Thomas Jefferson was forced to remove references to slaves from the Declaration of Independence (it’s true, look it up).