James Spader, David Alan Grier and Richard Thomas in Race.

David Mamet’s newest drama, Race, currently showing at the Ethel Barrymore, begins with black attorney Henry Brown (David Alan Grier), of the high profile law firm Lawson and Brown, lecturing his potential client, the white and wealthy Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), about black people.  Charles has been accused of raping a black woman and his lawyers-to-be are trying to get the facts.  Henry’s monologue, ostensibly an attempt to intimidate Charles into honesty and submissiveness, is also an accusation that the defendant is a thinly veiled racist:

HENRY: You want to tell me about Black folks?

I’ll help you: O.J.  Was guilty.  Rodney

King was in the wrong place, but the

police have the right to use force.

Malcolm X was noble when he renounced

violence.  Prior to that he was

misguided.  Dr.  King was, of course, a

saint.  He was killed by a jealous

husband, and you had a maid when you were

young who was better to you than your

mother.  She raised you.  You’ve never

fucked a black girl, but one sat near you

in science class, and she was actually

rather shy.

Brown assumes that Strickland sides with the cops who beat Rodney King, and he posits that Charles subscribes to right-wing conspiracy theories about who killed MLK.  The most pertinent detail in the opening monologue, though, is the last one.  Brown assumes that Strickland was surprised by what he suspects to be Strickland’s one experience with a black girl because it defied what he had previously held to be true about black girls.

As he speaks, though, Henry is exhibiting the very behavior of which he is accusing Charles Strickland: making assumptions about a person based on his ethnicity and class.

While it seems initially that Race is about whether Lawson and Brown can successfully defend Strickland, the real dramatic question posed by Mamet is: Will the play’s protagonist, the cynical but brilliant attorney Jack Lawson (James Spader), get tripped up by his own brand of racial profiling?

Lawson’s journey in Race is not merely to defend his client, but also to navigate his professional relationship with his pretty, black assistant and protégée, Susan (Kerry Washington), who accuses Lawson of racial profiling. She gets her way by playing on Lawson’s sense of guilt as a white man living in a world where white men have a history of abusing power.  Despite his shrewdness, Lawson overlooks Susan’s disloyalty to the firm because of his feelings of self-reproach as well as the fear that he will be accused of racism.

Mamet creates drama not so much by questioning the morality of racial profiling, but rather by questioning its usefulness.  Each of the principal characters in Race is depicted as using ethnic stereotypes as guideposts for his or her actions.  Susan is convinced of Strickland’s guilt because of his whiteness; Henry Brown is convinced that Strickland is a racist; and Jack Lawson has a habit of summing people up in a hurry based on demographics.

Consider the following interaction between Lawson and Susan, after Lawson discovers that a Latina hotel chambermaid, whose testimony is crucial to his defense of Strickland, has gone to the district attorney to revise her description of the room where the rape occurred:

Jack: You’re telling me, some half-literate illegal hotel maid

suddenly takes it upon herself to go back to the police…

Susan: “Half-literate…”

Jack (off sheet of paper): Rosa fucking Gonzales. (To phone)  I have to call you         back.

SUSAN: “Half-literate.” Hotel Maid.

JACK: Can we call things by their name?  Her social security number is false, her employment application is written in a misspelled scrawl, she is illegal.  God

bless her, that’s what she is.

Lawson’s coarse assessment of the “hotel maid” is offensive, but he seems to redeem himself a moment later when he demonstrates he is merely describing in bald terms the woman’s cultural background.  Or does he redeem himself?  Mamet ultimately shows Lawson as having made a mistake by following assumptions based on the hotel maid’s race.

The play’s ending may remind Mamet fans of Speed-the-Plow, Mamet’s tale of two Hollywood film producers, the more powerful of whom almost makes a career-ending error when he over-sympathizes with a scheming female before being saved by his more level-headed partner, whose desire to make money has not been so disastrously clouded.  In both Speed-the-Plow and Race, a boys’ club is almost penetrated by a dangerous, self-interested and attractive woman.  It is surprising to see Mamet recycle this dramatic structure—here it feels like the use of a deus ex machina; Susan’s character doesn’t seem sufficiently developed in the first part of the play to justify her actions in its conclusion.

Also surprising in Race is the pervading assumption shared by the characters that all black people hate white people and all white people are out to screw black people.  Consider the following exchange, in which Jack Lawson proclaims blacks and whites to be mortal enemies:

Jack: I’ll prove it to you. Black know things no white man knows.

Susan: Tell me one thing.

Jack:  That the whites will screw you. Any chance we get. We cannot help

ourselves.

Susan: Now tell me why.

Jack:  Because we know you hate us.

Similarly, Henry Brown says to Strickland  in Act Two:

Henry: “Do I hate Whitefolks?” Z’at your question? “Do all black people hate

whites?” Let me put your mind at rest.  You bet we do. White folks are “scared?”  All to the good. You understand?

This feels like an unsubtle idea, and, although Mamet is famous for using rhetorical devices to present and examine bold concepts, he often looks at an idea from all angles—to the point where it’s difficult to understand where the play itself stand on the issue.  Most conspicuously missing, though, is a dissenting opinion.  Two characters in the play share the above assumption—they express it repeatedly—and no one challenges them.

Lawson and Brown’s assumption that all blacks hate whites calls to mind the paranoid but earnest opening line of Mamet’s 2006 book on modern-day Judaism, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews.  Mamet writes: “As you have taken the time to read and I to write this book, I believe we should be frank: The world hates the Jews.  The world has always and will continue to do so.”

Does Mamet really believe this?  In an essay about Race in the Times last September, the playwright quotes from a joke comedian Chris Rock made about the American public being surprised that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was a 75-year-old black man who hates white people.   “Is there any other kind of a 75-year-old black man?” Rock asked the audience.

“This rang true to me,” Mamet writes in his Times essay. But it doesn’t feel as true coming out of the mouths of Brown and Lawson, two men in their mid-forties, who came of age after the Civil Rights Era.  Perhaps this facet of Lawson and Brown’s beliefs is congruous with the fact that all these characters live and die by racially-based assumptions, but there are additional moments when the lawyers’ dialogue seems out of line with what otherwise seems to be razor sharp intelligence.  Take Lawson’s summations of the different types of self-disdain that blacks and Jews experience: “All people deal with shame or guilt,” he says.  “Jews deal with guilt.  Blacks deal with shame.  It’s two of the wonderful ways we metabolize feelings of inferiority.”  Of course, the last line here is lovely, but Lawson provides no useful distinction between shame and guilt.  And in regards Jews having guilt, he seems to be merely repeating an age-old cliché.

Race is most successful when Lawson or Brown incisively dissect the legal system as they scheme how to best defend their client.  “There are no ‘facts of the case,’” Lawson explains to Charles Strickland.  “There are two opposing fictions.  Which the opposing teams each seek to impose upon the jury.  That is part of the wisdom you’d be paying us for.” As he did with real estate sales in Glengarry Glen Ross, higher education in Oleanna, and the Hollywood machine in Speed-the-Plow, in Race, Mamet brilliantly lays bare the legal profession.

Race, which seems unusually broad and blunt for the title of a Mamet play (think how esoteric are his titles Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna), is perhaps a double entendre meant to indicate that the true subject of this drama is the one that Mamet returns to again and again: the rat race.  Despite the play’s shortcomings, Race is a bold and nuanced dramatic meditation on race relations and Mamet’s most exciting drama since The Cryptogram in 1995.