Mamet the loser in Race
Race
(out of 4) By David Mamet. Directed by Daniel Brooks. Until May 5 at the Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front St. E. 416-368-3110
In the interest of consumer advocacy, if you’re thinking of buying a ticket to see Race, by David Mamet, now running at Canadian Stage through May 5, it will run you $99 for a decent orchestra seat and here’s what you will get:
a) Two very good performances by black actors.
b) Two mediocre performances by white actors.
c) One set, which looks like the urologist’s office of your nightmares.
d) One lump of turgid misogyny posing as a play: 90 minutes long and covered up with enough fourletter words and racial slurs to make you think it’s about something other than the author’s pro- found fear and hatred of women.
For many years, I claimed to like David Mamet’s writing. Plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross had a hard edge, a mordant view of the world we live in and enough obscenities to make me feel that even my normal unbridled conversation was suitable for family listening by comparison.
But something happened to Mamet in the late 1980s, as his marriage to actress Lindsay Crouse was falling apart: the American Dream ceased to be Mamet’s villain and the American Woman took over.
The most dishonestly manipulative character in Speed-the-Plow is the wannabe female producer, not the Hollywood sharks she devours. In Oleanna, a fuzzy professor with an unraised consciousness has his life destroyed by a guerrilla warfare feminist. The mother in The Cryptogram destroys her husband and son when her marriage fails.
And so it goes. I don’t want to offer a spoiler to anyone visiting Race, but there’s only one woman in the cast, played by the brilliant Cara Ricketts in her most searing performance yet. The plot? A rich white man has been accused of raping a black woman. Two male lawyers line up to defend him (one black, one white). A new young female intern (black), joins the team. And we’re off. A lot of it is just vintage Mamet f-word banter about what whites think about blacks and vice versa. But in the end, the play says nothing truly new, or shocking, or informative about race relations. It doesn’t really look as though Daniel Brooks directed this play. It seems like he just placed his actors in a straight line on Debra Hanson’s implausibly horizontal set and told them to earn their salaries. Some of them do. Nigel Shawn Williams has a fine vein of scorching anger he taps into with frighten- ing effect, and Ricketts grows in strength with each performance she gives. She is a powerhouse. But Matthew Edison does absolutely nothing with the role of the spoiled white man whose actions drive the script and Jason Priestley is little more than solid in the quicksilver role of the lawyer whose perceptions are up for examination.