Mind Racing and Blown

If you're the least bit curious about the state of Richmond's theater scene, run, do not walk to see "Race."

Your mind will be blown and you will leave wishing you had a bigger brain to process what you just experienced.

My hired mouth and I had dinner with a girlfriend before I drove home, parked the car and walked over to Virginia Rep Center for Carol Piersol and the African American Repertory Theater's production of David Mamet's "Race."

As much as I adore good theater, I'd only seen one Mamet play produced before and that was 1999's "Boston Marriage," which I saw in Philadelphia back in the mid-aughts.

"Race" was written ten years later and boldly delves into racial differences in processing shame and guilt through the eyes of one white and two black characters who work in a law office and are defending a white man accused of raping a black woman.

An elegant and eloquent set greeted us in the Theater Gym and our usher warned us that the play ran 80 minutes, no intermission.

Fortuitously, I'd already made a pit stop.

Ten minutes of intense Mamet-speak dialog in and it was obvious why there could be no break in the action; the audience was already as enmeshed in the machinations of the story as the actors.

There were so many levels to the play: the black to black conversations, the white to black exchanges, the male to female, male to male, accused to defenders, all within the bigger context of the law and played by an all-star Richmond cast.

Billy Christopher Maupin and dl Hopkins as the two lawyers who've recently taken in a young, black female associate, play off each other with post-modern respect tempered by acknowledgement of wholly different cultural experience due to their racial differences.

Causing problems for them and their client is Katrinah Carol Lewis, who brings her own baggage to the case by being black and female, meaning she presumes their white, male client is guilty from the get-go.

The questionable client role was handled oh-so capably by Joe Inscoe, the focus of everyone's attention because he claimed the sex had been consensual, not rape.

With a Mamet play, dialog is always king ("I think all people are stupid. I don't think black people are exempt.") and provocative; between unfinished sentences, people talking over each other and as much politically incorrect dialog as could be crammed into 80 minutes, the play never let up for a second.

Twice the lights dimmed to indicate that we were going from one time of day to another and truly, it was only for those few seconds that your brain got a moment's reprieve from processing so much.

It was wildly stimulating in a way that reminds you of the wonder of live theater and the headiness of being fully mentally engaged.

When the play abruptly ended, it was with more questions than when it began and not so much as a whiff of answer in the air.

The audience was stunned and thrilled at the same time for what we'd just experienced.

My friend and I stood up but the woman at the end of our row was already asking us questions about the play.

We stood discussing it with her for about five minutes before taking our talk-back to the lobby where we found a cluster of astounded people ready to talk.

"I want there to be  a second act!" an actress lamented. "I wanna know more."

"Damn that Mamet! He throws so much at you and doesn't give you a hint of how things might go," another woman said.

"Shakespeare does the same thing; look at "King Lear" or "Merchant of Venice," someone said. "Besides..."

A half dozen or so strangers stood there for the next fifteen minutes talking about the play and the issues it raised about the court system, race relations, sexual relations and how everyone brings their own baggage to them.

It was less than an hour and a half of superbly-produced theater and I can almost bet the farm that everyone who sees it will continue to question, re-examine and return to thoughts of "Race" for weeks to come.

You know how cities choose a book and everyone reads it (Richmond Reads or something like that?) so that there can be discussion groups all over town about it?

I  make a motion that we have a Richmond Plays and everyone goes to see "Race."

Besides the thought-provoking discussion topics such a thing would raise, it would serve an even greater cultural good.

It would make a theater lover out of every single person who saw it.