Race

“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.