TT: Lawyers under the skin

I review two shows in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, the Broadway premiere of David Mamet’s Race and the New York premiere of Brief Encounter. Both disappointed me, albeit in very different ways. Here’s an excerpt.
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David Mamet’s characters struggle for power over one another like scorpions in a bottle, determined to sting or be stung. They have no past or future, only the unremittingly bleak present. Yet they somehow manage to entertain us–if that’s the word–because of the manic energy with which they do their dances of death. “Race,” his new play, sizzles with that energy, and for most of its length I found it involving, if not quite up to form. But Mr. Mamet doesn’t quite make it to the finish line this time, and when the curtain came down I felt the kind of frustration that can only be inspired by a first-class talent who fails to deliver the goods.
The problem with “Race” is that it’s a bit too familiar. Specifically, it plays like a cross between Mr. Mamet’s “Oleanna” and his screenplay for “The Verdict.” I can’t say much more than that without giving away the “surprises” sprinkled throughout the plot, in which two lawyers, one white (James Spader) and one black (David Alan Grier), decide whether to defend a famous millionaire (Richard Thomas) who is accused of raping a young black woman–a decision complicated by the fact that one of their employees (Kerry Washington) is also a young black woman. But those who know Mr. Mamet’s work more than casually will likely be able to guess many of the directions in which he takes this conceit…
If you loved “Brief Encounter,” you might be amused by “Brief Encounter,” the Kneehigh Theatre’s avant-garde stage version of the Noël Coward-David Lean film about two stiff-lipped Brits who stumble almost inadvertently into an extramarital affair. Or, like me, you might bristle at the sniggering cuteness with which Emma Rice, who adapted Coward’s 1945 screenplay for the stage and directed this production, has sought to deconstruct his celebrated study of the emotionally constricting effects of British reticence….
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Read the whole thing here.
The original theatrical trailer for David Lean’s 1945 film of Brief Encounter: