Mamet is back. His 2009 play Race is an offbeat courtroom drama set entirely in a lawyers’ office before the trial begins. Jack and Henry are two hotshot attorneys, one white, one black, who must decide whether to accept the case of a prosperous banker, Charles, accused of raping a black woman in a hotel. Jack and Henry have a young black trainee, Susan, whose ethnicity and gender may help them sway the jury.
The case against Charles turns on sequins. The victim swears that her dress was torn off during the attack but a hotel cleaner found no sequins on the floor. Sequinned attire is naturally deciduous, or, as Jack puts it, ‘a sequined dress, you look at it wrong, they start to fall off’. The cleaner suddenly retracts her statement and asserts that she saw sequins strewn everywhere.
Susan, who already considers Charles guilty, is accused of persuading the cleaner to change her testimony. This twin-investigation structure is ingenious. And both inquiries are niftily calibrated to pivot on the issues of skin colour, sex and exploitation. But Mamet keeps tinkering with the plot. Every five minutes a fresh detail drags the story in a new direction and the viewer begins to feel manipulated, rather than charmed and captivated. One example: Susan is a hugely intelligent, amazingly talented and highly sophisticated trainee. Yet she declares that Charles is guilty ‘because he’s white’. So what happened to her intellect, her talent and her sophistication? All are subordinated to her bigotry so that Mamet can drive the train into his chosen station and conclude that ‘race is the most incendiary topic in our history’.
The good news is that Mamet’s taut, fraught, nervy dialogue bristles with shocking and hilarious truths about the legal process.
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