Broadway Blog - RACE Reviews Roundup

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).

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: "An assured craftsman, Mr. Mamet builds his structure with precision and with what feels like a certain weariness with his own facility. What's lacking is the fusion of story, theme and character that lends bona fide suspense to his plays. In "American Buffalo," "Glengarry GLen Ross" and "Oleanna" (which received a less-than-exemplary Broadway production this season), the dialogue is fueled by the desperation of the characters. Much of the excitement in listening to them comes from hearing how their words, initially used as tools and weapons, become their prisons."

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: "Bottom Line: Mamet's provocative and entertaining legal drama doesn't quite deliver on its promise."

David Rooney, Variety: "As one of the characters in David Mamet's teasing faux-polemic on the subject says, "Race is the most incendiary topic in our history." The slender play that takes its terse title from that declaration seems hatched more out of an urge to inflame arguments easily triggered in the age of Obama than out of the need to tell this particular story or even to explore the issue with any real conclusiveness. This being Mamet, however, the dialogue is tasty, the confrontations spiky and the observations more than occasionally biting. Slick but hollow, "Race" entertains as it unfolds, but grows increasingly wobbly as it twists its way to an unsatisfying wrap-up."

Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune: "Race" is wholly watchable. Gripping, actually. Don't believe anyone who argues otherwise. Granted, it is gripping within a dangerously narrow and familiar palette; "Race" is like a contrived composite of "Oleanna," "Speed-the-Plow" and a TV legal procedural. There are many holes in its dramatic logic. Mamet doesn't so much write plays driven by characters anymore. His shell-like characters are the whores of his ideas. And for all the dramatic provocations (and the brilliant matching of the richly contrasting Grier and Spader), there's a certain weariness that comes from watching the way that "Race" stubbornly ignores any and all differences in generational thinking and reduces its characters' loyalties to the color of their skin. It's a juicily argued reduction, sure, but also a very troubling one. Which is, of course, Mamet's point.

Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press: "Yet the four-letter words don't fly with as much frequency as they do in previous Mamet efforts such as "Glengarry GLen Ross" or "Plow." And the dialogue isn't as rapid-fire staccato as the language found in other Mamet plays. Maybe that's because the overwhelming complexity of the subject matter can't be compressed into short, definitive answers. Mamet's all-too-human creations may be talking about black and white, but these all-too-human people are dealing with a hot-button subject in various incendiary shades of gray."

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: "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. C"

Elysa Gardner, USA Today: "And Mamet deserves credit for a briskly entertaining, if flawed, study. It is indeed a world full of misunderstandings, and Race offers an absorbing glimpse."

David Sheward, Backstage: "There are plenty of pointed and thought-provoking exchanges, and the play's structure is sound. Several casually mentioned details later take on great significance. But Mamet, who also directs with a sure hand, fails to get beyond the editorializing to create characters with whom we can identify. Such identification may not be his intention, but it makes "Race" more a political tract than a compelling drama."

Linda Winer, Newsday: "'Do you know what you can say to a black man on the subject of race?" the black attorney asks the rich white defendant. "Nothing," answers the accused, perhaps convinced, but maybe not. Whether David Mamet is himself convinced, well, we never know. The more troubling question is whether, ultimately, we end up caring what he thinks in "Race," the attractively cast, surprisingly stale new play.."

Charles McNulty, LA Times: "With a title like "Race," controversy would seem to be a given. Yet Mamet plays a strange shell game with his theme, leaving his characters in a limbo where they're neither winners nor losers. There might be some truth to this stalemate, but the indecisive drama fizzles to a close. "

More reviews to come in the AM...