BWW Reviews: A Tiring RACE Runs at TheaterWorks

Race
by David Mamet
Directed by Tazewell Thompson
at TheaterWorks at City Arts on Pearl in downtown Hartford through July 10
www.theaterworkshartford.org

Pomposity, platitudes and phoniness are abundant in Race, a weak play by a major American playwright.  David Mamet has rightly earned his place in the pantheon of important dramatists with works like American Buffalo, Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross.  His unflinching willingness to cut into the ugliest things we as Americans try to bury under our skin usually finds him not only puncturing, but gleefully tearing open the incision.  With Race, playing at TheaterWorks in downtown Hartford through July 10^th, Mamet actually focuses on skin itself or, more specifically, the psychological trauma caused by the color of our skin and its complicated national history.  Unfortunately, his approach to race relations attempts to tear open old wounds and festering sores with weakly-drawn characters, a play full of Red Herrings and a dubious understanding of the black psyche.  The paucity of the play is only exacerbated by actors struggling with the famed "Mamet-speak," miscasting and challenged direction.

When I attended the performance, I thought it best to try to see Race from both sides.  As a white male reviewer, I thought it would be responsible to invite an African American woman to attend with me.  The plot of Race centers around a wealthy white male, accused of raping a black female, seeking to engage the services of a prestigious mixed-race law firm.  In inviting my friend Kamora to be my guest, I wanted to pick her brain post-performance to see if Mamet, as a white male dramatist, was able to submerse himself into the Black community's mindframe.   Proudly mixed-race herself, Kamora eagerly accepted my invitation.

As electronic music remixed with Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech ends abruptly, Mamet comes out swinging in the first few moments, dropping bombshell statement after bombshell statement about the psychological divide between blacks and whites.  "Do all black people hate whites?  You bet we do."   Two lawyers, one black and one white, lace into their potential client with unrelenting brutality while a female black attorney looks mutely on from the sidelines.  The accused, played thoughtfully by Jack Koenig in the only performance that approximates a fully fleshed-out human being, sits there and takes it.  Why?  Because he has approached them specifically because their firm is mixed race, therefore giving him a courtroom advantage and earning the lawyers' mistrust.  And because Mamet would not have a play or an opportunity to lecture audiences on race matters if the guy does what any normal wealthy, white American male would do:  tell them to kiss his ass and take his money to someone who will do what he wants, no questions asked.   Charles, the defendant in question, betrays none of the entitlement that his race, gender and position affords him.

As such, the first round of phoniness is off and running.  Character dialogue has been replaced with polemic.  The only character that I could empathize with for the majority of the piece is the potential racist/rapist, which hopelessly throws the play out of balance.  Mamet starts with harsh platitudes on race, continues to browbeat us with statements on race while throwing in sex and gender and ends with the same.  The play, other than some occasionally interesting insights and courtroom/investigation machinations, goes nowhere. 

The African American attorney Henry, played by Avery Glymph (who appears to be too young in a role I presumed to be a 20-year partner in the law firm), starts one-note and stays one-note: angry.  The only time his seething performance truly catches fire is in an extended give-and-take with the firm's other black attorney, Susan, played by Hartford-native Taneisha Duggan.  Duggan, a fine actor that I have had the pleasure of seeing on multiple occasions, struggles mightily to make something of what little depth and potential duplicity that Mamet has granted her character.  Most of the time, she is on the sidelines taking her cues from the men who refer to her as "the girl," gender-speak that is not explored in any meaningful way. 

R. Ward Duffy plays the white attorney in a performance that is all surfaces, pronouncements, and fakery.  Some of this is inherent in the character, but in the hands of a skilled actor like James Spader (who created the role on Broadway), Jack's smarm could have some charm and eventually evidence a pulse of humanity or regret.  Duffy seems to be waiting for the other actors to finish speaking so he can continue posturing and blowharding Mamet's diatribes.

The lawyers, one and all, are not realistic characters and the actors, with the exception of Koenig, evidence little facility with Mamet's cross-cutting form of dialogue.  They all end up as points of view, circling each other and their put-upon client, occasionally lashing out at each other, their client and America, and then retreating to their respective corners.  It is as if Mamet has taken a Sunday morning roundtable news program and put it onstage with a middling plot holding it together.   Shameless pieces of timely "evidence" arrive to complicate matters, but they too felt faked and smelled of lazy dramaturgy on Mamet's part.  The playwright has built in little sense of how time is elapsing so we go from the client's initial meeting with the lawyers, to hiring the firm, to their case coming together, a flurry of curveballs throwing the case into turmoil, to the case lying in ruins in well under two hours (including an intermission).  In real time has a law firm ever gained, won and lost a case in such record time and still found time to question America's complicated views on race?

Of course, recent revelations about Mamet's loud disillusionment and defection from the liberal fold to the conservative higher ground makes one wonder where Race falls in his own personal psycho-political continuum.  He has Henry lash out at Susan for being an Affirmative Action hire that should never have made it past the starting gate.  Score one for the conservative viewpoint!  The ostensible villain of the piece is a wealthy, white businessman who thinks he can use his money and the media to buy his way out of a conviction.  Score one for the liberals!   Overall, one does not know where Mamet stands beneath this mountain of mouthiness. 

We know many whites fear blacks while owning their collective guilt over slavery.  We know many whites hate blacks.  We know many blacks resent and/or hate white people for years of economic, political and physical oppression.  And we know many blacks have had to assimilate aspects of white culture to advance to positions of prominence in American society.  This is exactly why Barack Obama's presidency can inspire half the population while enraging or disappointing the other half.  It reveals how we have and have not advanced as a society.  Among the sweeping generalizations being swatted at us in Race, I wondered how the mixed-race couple sitting in front of me felt about Mamet's jeremiad.

At the end of the day, Mamet's Race does not add to the conversation, only inflames it.  Maybe that is Mamet's point, but sketchily drawn characters and shoddily-constructed drama offer director Tazewell Thompson and his cast an insurmountable challenge.  After the performance, the overwhelmingly white audience rose to its feet and gave the cast a standing ovation.  I am not able to speak to their motivation any more than Mamet is able to speak to the nation's racial divide, but I chalked it up to white guilt.  No doubt, the audience sat there with thoughts of that very day's news that the rape allegations by a black hotel chambermaid against International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a wealthy white man, were crumbling due to brilliant legal maneuvering.  The timeliness of seeing a stage production mirrored on the radio, television and newspaper was eerie to say the least.

After the performance, Kamora and I reconnoitered at a local restaurant to compare notes.  I had a hard time separating my dislike for the play and the production (although the physical elements of the TheaterWorks production were fine, as always) from the difficult and nettlesome racial questions raised by the play.  She did not.  When asked, "Do you think Mamet got the racial question right?," Kamora immediately said, "No, of course he didn't get it right."  A primary area of concern:  "I think he got an assumption wrong.  With black folks, when there is a black woman who accuses a white man of something, we think 'Yes, he probably did it, and, yes, he'll probably get off.'  The assumption in the black community - white guy with money?  He's gonna get off." 

In Race, what hangs in the balance is not whether or not he is guilty; it is the law firm's reputation for taking and possibly losing the case.  The victim is a cypher at best -- is she a prositute or a mistress or a hapless dupe?  Kamora adds, "When it first started and the black lawyer went off on his tirade, it kind of felt like one of those white-guilt absolutions.   There's an old, old play The Blacks (a controversial 1958 "clown show" by the French playwright Jean Genet that similarly knew how to stir the racial pot to a boil).  There are lots of these tirades against white people in general, and it kind of felt like that."  We discussed Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing as an exceptional example on art inflaming a debate on race, and the work of Amiri Baraka, a controversial black dramatist also known for picking at racial scabs.

 She felt that Mamet didn't really allow the white characters to state their opinions on race.  "Both white characters were very earnest.  Everyone is earnest.  They were painted a bit too pretty.  They were kind of above the racial fray."  The white lawyer only spouts off what will work racially in a courtroom or what society believes about race, not his own beliefs.  Again, he is all surfaces.   The accused rapist denies his racism, but we are constantly reminded by the lawyers and conveniently-supplied evidence that he is, in fact, racist.  So why would Mamet not allow the white characters to own their own feelings on race?  Kamora's answer:  "Because if they are honest, they will be perceived as racist."  And, perhaps, in so doing Mamet as a white man would have to confront his own feelings on race rather than gleefully point out our own.  Perhaps Tazewell Thompson, a black director, was afraid to push the white characters as hard as he pushed the flintier black characters.

In another area, Kamora felt Mamet got the motivations of the African American female wrong.  ""There is no black-on-black sister-love that would make a black woman who had a position at a respected law firm put her career on the line for an anonymous black possible prostitute."  As far as Susan the attorney was concerned:  "We never hear her opinion on the whore.  Are we to assume that since she is another black woman that she is supposed to have some allegiance to her?"

So did Mamet get some things right in Kamora's estimation?  Referencing the same scene that I felt was the only one that crackled with true dramatic fire, the standoff between Susan and Henry, Kamora thought Mamet nailed those moments of intra-racial turmoil or, as she put it, "the way black women and black men go at it." 

While Mamet is still able to summon up some of his undeniable way with lacerating words, Race ultimately felt tiring and tired for both of us.  And it felt good to leave the play behind as the two of us sat on a restaurant patio, a white man drinking white wine and a half-black woman drinking red wine, knowing that we could agree on something.

 

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