Race, David Mamet’s legal drama, flopped on Broadway in 2009, but that hasn’t kept the Center Theater Group from mounting its own production of the play, this one starring Chris Bauer, kingpin of the HBO series “True Blood.”
In Race, Bauer, bald head glistening like a cue ball, plays a cynical lawyer named Jack Lawson who talks his dubious partner Henry Brown (Dominic Hoffman) into taking on a tricky and controversial case involving the alleged rape of a young West Indian woman. The man accused of raping her, a rich and arrogant WASP named Charles Strickland (Jonno Roberts), denies not only his guilt but any connection to the plaintiff. When confronted by evidence that shows he’s been keeping her as a mistress, he changes his story – but only a little bit of it. An important person like him doesn’t need to tell the truth, especially when he has high-powered lawyers to cover up for him.
Brown, a light-skinned African-American, scorns Strickland’s story and wants no part of the man – or of the racial aspects of the case. Black/white relations in the USA are just too complicated and incendiary these days. Bauer agrees but is arrogant enough in his own fashion to believe he can beat the odds and get Strickland off.
Opposing him vigorously is a third lawyer in the firm, Susan (DeWanda Wise). A young, dark-skinned African-American woman with an Ivy League pedigree, she is the only one with a shred of idealism about her, especially when it comes to questions of justice and fair play for poor folk and minorities. Unfortunately, Mamet hasn’t fleshed out her character sufficiently, and she is easily dominated by her male peers and even by the uptight, insufferable Charles Strickland.
The verbal battles over sex, race and the law are often caustically witty and funny, but they do tend to repeat themselves in this thinly constructed and written drama. And with all of the action restricted to a single set, a book-lined law office, Race has an airless, claustrophobic feel to it, making Mamet’s story seem more of a lecture than a drama.
