Playwright: David Mamet. At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St. Phone: 312-443-3800 or www.goodmantheatre.org; $25-$94. Runs through: Feb. 19
The play is short—100 minutes with an intermission—the characters talk very fast, and there's almost no physical action, so you have to listen closely. The author's trademark salty language is conspicuously meager. (Three of the four people we see onstage are lawyers, you see, and they choose their words carefully.) Chicago theatergoers who feared that their homeboy had lost his touch after the slam-bang farce of Romance in 2006 can relax, however—David Mamet is back, doing what he does best.
The premise is simple enough: A man has been charged with raping a woman in a hotel room. The man is rich, powerful, married, middle-aged and white. The woman is poor, young and African-American. The slowly emerging evidence of the police and hotel staff point to a violent struggle, but the accused proclaims his innocence, declaring the encounter to have been consensual. His attorneys don't care about any of this. Instead, their focus is minority-group resentment, privileged-elite guilt and how to manipulate the jury's share of these factors to engineer an acquittal for their client. Oh, by the way—attorney Jack Lawson is white, co-counsel Henry Brown is Black and Susan, their rookie associate, is both female and Black.
When Susan protests the skewing of the case away from the alleged sex crime toward racial attitudes, her boss snaps "What's the difference?" Mamet makes the case that, in our society, the two are inseparable. The clueless perpetrator gets his comeuppance, if not his day in court. So does the smug Lawson, whose cynicism renders him oblivious to what Brown calls "postmodern" prejudice—a dynamic not only interracial, but gender-linked as well. (However, savvy Mamet aficionados know to always keep a watchful eye on the woman in the picture.)
In the end, we never learn what really happened. Credit the Goodman production's restrained overall concept—deft direction by Chuck Smith, a smartly chosen cast (Marc Grapey, Geoffrey Owens, Tamberla Perry and Patrick Clear) swapping dialogue as incisively hyperarticulate as if they were doing Stoppard and Linda Buchanan's straight-from-the-store decor for the law offices—for riveting our attention to discourse calculated to guide us wherever Mamet wants us to go, lobbed at rat-a-tat tempo to send us home with brains humming so busily, you can almost hear them in the lobby.
