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...tale of a man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) committed to one woman (Marie-Christine Barrault) but willing to stay the night with the divorced Maud (Françoise Fabian) just ... talking. After the pyrotechnics of Godard and Truffaut, some wondered if Rohmer had made a film or a radio play. But, as critic Andrew Sarris wisely observed, there's nothing more cinematic than the sight of a man and a woman talking at 3 a.m. in the dark night of the soul. Man and Maud connected with each other, and with the specialized moviegoing world. (See pictures from the red carpet...
None of which prevented his new play, Race--with its blunt title promising a no-holds-barred look at Topic A of the Obama era--from becoming, sight unseen, the dramatic event of the Broadway season. The fact that, once it was seen, the play turned out to be a dud was not especially surprising. But it was cause for a hard look at whether the playwright's own race has finally run its course...
Like most of Mamet's plays, Race is a relatively slight affair: three scenes, four characters, one unnecessary intermission. It opens with two principals of a law firm, one white (James Spader) and one black (David Alan Grier), quizzing a prospective client (Richard Thomas) who has been charged with raping a young black woman. In Scene 1 the lawyers badger him mercilessly, scoffing at his claims of innocence, dismissing his naive hopes that the legal system might exonerate him. By Scene 2, however, the white lawyer has done a nifty 180 (and managed to negate virtually all of his Scene...
...turning point for Mamet's theater work, it now appears, was Oleanna, his 1992 play in which a college professor's patronizing efforts to help a female student lead to an unjust charge of sexual harassment. Though the staccato dialogue was Mametspeak at its purest, a political agenda drove the characters in a way it never had any of Mamet's previous slimy, but at least self-directed, small-time crooks or real estate sharpies...
...owes to two factors. The first is loyalty to McCain. With his hatred of infighting, desire to put the campaign behind him and perhaps awareness of his complicity in foisting Palin on the world, the erstwhile Republican nominee has encouraged his people to stifle their criticisms of her and play down their disagreements with her, even though the direction for the party that Palin represents is diametrically opposed to McCain's vision. (See the fashion looks of Sarah Palin...