RACE
Plays with ideas are great. There are far too few of them around these days. But plays about philosophical ideas, written to express a point of view rather than tell a story, are almost always clunky and dull: dramatic intrigue is held hostage to the author’s need to preach.
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Pachino was already at something of a disadvantage bringing Terkel’s Race to the stage. A nonfictional, almost encyclopedic work in the usual Terkelian style–long monologues grouped together by theme–Race does not immediately strike the reader as theatrical. There are moments of gripping drama–the resignation of a woman who lost her son to senseless racial violence, for example, and the racist, ironically humorous patter of a working-class Bridgeport tough–but unedited the monologues are cumbersome and rambling. And despite the fact that all of them concern race relations, each one is a separate entity, and they can’t be edited and spliced together to approximate theater dialogue.
The biographical information Terkel provided about his subjects has been largely ignored–the characters are anonymous voices who might be played by any actor. A retired police officer who put in nearly 40 years on the force comes across as a youthful upstart; a professional woman is performed as if her words were spoken by a teenager in detention. Sometimes Strawdog engages in its own forms of stereotyping. Was it my imagination, or did all the white racists speak with either south-side or country accents, while most of the white “progressives” spoke standard, accentless English? Many of the characterizations never rise above impersonations. Any reactionary or otherwise distasteful speech is recited with a winking irony and accompanied by the other cast members’ sighing, sneering, and head shaking.
In the classical tradition of buddy movies, the pair fight at first but soon realize that they have more in common than they thought. In the short time they spend together, Kingsley teaches Glober about the merits of black literature, and Glober convinces Kingsley that the civil rights movement has changed the American landscape, which Kingsley and his parents escaped back in 1949. Fellow outcasts, the two decide to live together, apart from the society that looks down on minorities and returning Army veterans.
