Still not ready to talk about race

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Laura Washington

Updated: January 23, 2012 2:11AM

So much conversation, but are we really talking? I mulled that question after I saw “Race,” a new production at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. It’s the latest play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet.

After successful runs in New York and San Francisco, the Chicago native has brought it home — to a place where race is on the cutting edge of every issue.

The ferociously paced, 90-minute production portrays two high-profile criminal lawyers — one black, one white — defending a wealthy white man accused of raping an African-American woman. The promo promises: “With characteristic bluntness, Mamet leaves nothing unsaid in this no-holds-barred suspense story . . .”

Indeed, race slams out of the box with the opening line. Mamet’s dialogue pops in a sizzling frying pan of our fears, foibles, guilt, stereo­types about race in America.

I was entertained, but I departed the theater unsatisfied. Perhaps Mamet left nothing unsaid, but hasn’t it all been said before?

For generations, we have been trudging along the treadmill of race. Lots of talk, but going nowhere.

Last Wednesday, I was privileged to host a decidedly non-fictional conversation at the Goodman with four Chicago theater stalwarts about “Race” — and race.

One panelist, Chuck Smith, directed “Race” and is an acclaimed Goodman mainstay. I asked Smith, who is black, whether it was a challenge to direct a play about race that was written from the perspective of a white man.

“No problem,” he replied. Smith was drawn, he said, to the “everyday” dialogue between the black and white characters. “They discuss race like they’re talking about their pets.”

The play is the “opening bell” of an honest conversation on race, Smith argued. “The conversation that these characters have in this play is the conversation that America’s going to have, eventually, when race is no longer a taboo subject. Whenever that happens, you know, a thousand years from now.”

Panelist Coya Paz agreed that “Race” starts a conversation, but it “seemed like a kind of faux honesty.” The play “felt almost like the conversation Mamet imagines we all want to have about race rather than, actually, a conversation about race,” said Paz, a Latina and co-founder of Teatro Luna, one of the city’s leading community-based theater companies.

“The only way we are going to dismantle racism as a structure, and not a personal feeling, is when everybody says, ‘OK, this isn’t about me, or how I feel,’ ” she added. “It’s about real, tangible, things.”

Things like numbers, data, patterns and the hard, cold racial inequities that darken America’s social, political and cultural landscape.

From our first black president on down, we are not ready for that conversation. We are still afraid, angry, wrapped up in emotion, history and resentment.

The bell may be ringing, but we are still at the starting gate.