Race

(Paperback)

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Intellectually salaciousDeep in its gut, Mamets gripping play argues everything in America is still about race. Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune
Tasty dialogue, spiky confrontations and more than occasionally biting observationsRACE 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 compellingFew 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 spectators head. Telegraph (UK)
Fascinating and dramatically charged, Mamets 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 lawyersone 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.

Reviews

To call David Mamets language scathing, snappy and whip-smart is true, but trite. So I wont. Ill instead refer to the playwrights 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
To call David Mamets language scathing, snappy and whip-smart is true, but trite. So I wont. Ill instead refer to the playwrights 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