Jason Priestley and David Mamet both achieved tremendous success in the ’90s. One as a virtuous heartthrob on a primetime soap, whose sideburns made teenage girls swoon; the other as a hard-edged playwright whose acrimonious writing made the theatre world stir.
But Priestley and Mamet are two names one wouldn’t usually associate with the other until now, as Priestley takes on the lead role in the Toronto premiere of Mamet’s controversial play, Race.
During my time as a dramatic literature student at a U.S. university, Mamet was one of those American playwrights — along with Shepard, Miller and Williams — that were thrown at me to admire and analyze. But unlike his peers, I never really “got” Mamet. I was alienated by his flagrant cynicism (such as in American Buffalo), his “Mamet-speak” (played to the tilt in Glengarry Glen Ross) and his seeming misogyny (hinted at in both Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna). Race is no exception.
In it, a rich white man (played by a meek Matthew Edison) is accused of raping a black woman. He seeks legal counsel at a firm headed up by one white lawyer, Jack Lawson (Priestley) and one black lawyer, Henry Brown (Nigel Shawn Williams), who have recently been joined by a new intern, a black woman (Cara Ricketts).
Race is a very American play. As my companion commented, “When it comes to the U.S., it seems to be only black and white; there isn’t any, so to speak, grey area.”
As much as Mamet tries to make Race work like a legal procedural drama, at its crux is his take on the contentious racial relations existing today in the U.S. between whites and blacks. He tackles everything from affirmative action to O.J. Simpson, but despite the urgent tension of its subject matter, and the legal twist-and-turns, Race lacks real dramatic tension. Mamet, for all his usual verbal jousting and four-letter expletives (a.k.a. Mamet speak), has nothing new to say on racial issues.
The actors, for the most part, deliver. Both Ricketts and Williams are outstanding. Ricketts has an almost quiet but powerful presence onstage, growing from (seemingly) naïve cub to ferocious lioness by the play’s end. Williams seems made to say Mamet’s words, with the angry verbosity flowing from him with such ease, he makes four-letter words sound almost pleasant to the ear.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Priestley. The Mamet banter didn’t seem to come naturally to the star, who seemed a bit stiff at the beginning of the play. He relaxed a bit further on, and his turn is decent, but his casting in the play seems more of the stunt kind, which is pretty much what can be said about Mamet’s Race as whole: all style, little substance.
Race, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, 27 Front St. E., 416-368-3110. Now – May 5