Music has its “Mostly Mozart” festival, but theater this year has been mainly Mamet. David Mamet’s epigrammatic combats have been erupting all over the place, from the heavy bouts on Broadway—notably the superb revival of Oleanna with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles—to the slightly slighter off-off-Broadway skirmishes of School and Keep Your Pantheon. But those were the undercard for the heavyweight Mamet main event, which is his new play, Race, a clever inversion of the courtroom drama conceit: Whereas sophomore-year evergreens like The Crucible and Inherit the Wind are plays presented in the form of trials, Race is a trial in the form of a play. The action never gets beyond the book-lined law offices where Jack Lawson (James Spader) and his law partner, Henry Brown (David Alan Grier), invent the plot and characters by which they hope to secure the acquittal of their client, Charles Strickland (a wonderfully detestable Richard Thomas).

Strickland is a white billionaire tossed into the Hieronymus Bosch nightmare landscape of American racial politics when he is accused of raping a young black woman. He has parted ways with his first defense attorney to seek the services of the firm of Lawson & Brown, in no small part because Barrister Brown is brown (or, as Harry Reid would have it, light-skinned with “no trace of a Negro dialect”), as is the firm’s new associate, Susan (Kerry Washington). Strickland hopes that the complexion of the firm will color the jurors’ assessment of