Race

David Mamet

Language: English

Published: Nov 14, 2010

Description:

“Intellectually salacious…Deep in its gut, Mamet’s gripping play argues everything in America is still about race.” –Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“Tasty dialogue, spiky confrontations and more than occasionally biting observations… RACE riffs artfully on the subtleties of discrimination and guilt, resentment and shame, and its ambiguities appear designed to stir audiences into testy debates.” –David Rooney, Variety

“Edgily compelling…Few writers can grip an audience like David Mamet. He tackles urgent themes head on, and often writes with the brutality of a sawn-off shotgun held at the spectator’s head.” – Telegraph (UK)

“Fascinating and dramatically charged, Mamet’s provocative, hot-topic play is anything but simple. The questions and answers posed add up to an intriguing study of perception.” –Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press

When a rich white man is accused of raping a younger African American woman, he looks to a multicultural law firm for his defense. But even as his lawyers—one of them white, another black— begin to strategize, they must confront their own biases and assumptions about race relations in America.

David Mamet is a playwright, essayist and screenwriter who directs for both the stage and film. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Glengarry Glen Ross. His plays include China Doll, Race, The Anarchist, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, November, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Lakeboat, The Water Engine, The Duck Variations, Reunion, The Blue Hour, The Shawl, Bobby gould in Hell, Edmond, Romance, The Old Neighborhood and his adaptation of The Voysey Inheritance.

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Review

“To call David Mamet’s language scathing, snappy and whip-smart is true, but trite. So I won’t. I’ll instead refer to the playwright’s words as poetry: not the lyrical lines conjuring images of flowers, but the exceedingly clever brutality that delivers a verbal punch to the gut.” – Chicago Theater Beat

“Scalpel-edged intelligence! RACE is an examination of cultural conscience and paranoia, and a topical detective story.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times

“A high-voltage melodrama, iRACE is unafraid to raise painful questions while dispensing prickly ideas and provocative dialogue amid steady suspense. Mamet adroitly mixes comic darts with tragic arrows, and the play is full of wry jokes, epigrammatic jolts and acrid, cheeky provocations.” –John Simon, Bloomberg News

About the Author

David Mamet 's Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1984. He is also the author of Writing in Restaurants and On Directing Film, both available from Penguin.