Broadway Comes Face to Face With the Subject of Race

By Stuart Miller
21 Dec 2009

James Spader and Kerry Washington in Race
James Spader and Kerry Washington in Race
Photo by Robert J. Saferstein

David Mamet debuts a new play on Broadway with a title that seems to sum up an entire season of thought-provoking shows in one word: Race.

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When David Mamet named his new play Race he couldn't have imagined he might be naming the fall season on Broadway. While race relations are certainly not a new topic for the theatre, especially for Broadway, the first new season of the Obama era is, perhaps not surprisingly, filled with an unprecedented number of plays touching on racial issues:

  • Ragtime tells three interlocking stories at the turn of the last century, one of which revolves around a black musician who tires of enduring racism and reacts with threats of violence.

  • Finian's Rainbow takes place in the mythical state of Missitucky, where white and black sharecroppers live together and a bigoted white politician turns black (and then white again).

  • Memphis tackles the tale of "race music" in the 1950s, navigating the tricky relationships between blacks and whites both in romance and on the business side of music.

  • Superior Donuts is about an aging white hippie and a young black writer forming a friendship.

  • A Steady Rain is about cops who think they've lost a promotion because of affirmative action, while one may be done in by his own racism.

  • Race explores the tension between two law firm partners — one black, one white — whose white client is charged with sexual impropriety with an African-American woman.

    Add these titles to the other shows currently on the boards that also take on racial understanding — In The Heights, Hair, South Pacific and West Side Story — and you've got a season fit to speak to modern America. Even the lighthearted musical Bye Bye Birdie touches on the subject.

    "There has been a profound sea change in this country because of Barack Obama," says Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the lyrics for Ragtime.

    Tracy Letts, who wrote Superior Donuts, agrees and adds that since to a large extent the story of America is the story of race relations, "this is a massive, shocking change. Playwrights, like other writers and thinkers, are trying to get our arms around this idea and define it for ourselves in some way."

    Chad Kimball and Montego Glover
    photo by Joan Marcus
    Christopher Ashley, director of Memphis, says that electing a black president has not ended racial issues — he points to the Henry Louis Gates arrest incident and the "I want my America back" and "birther" hysteria from some — and in fact has lent "urgency to the conversation." (Still, he says, the plethora of race-related plays may be "good planning on the part of some and lucky timing on the part of others.")

    David Alan Grier, who stars in Race and who just published a memoir called "Barack Like Me," finds the public dialogue on race fascinating — he was struck by an Atlantic magazine cover saying "The End of White America?" — and says it has "forced us to mature as a populace."

    He points out that theatre's contribution is vital since it's distinct from news commentary — playwrights like Mamet think about the subject "long and hard and then write and rewrite."  Continued...