Romance

Pulitzer Prize—winning playwright David Mamet’s Romance is an uproarious, take-no-prisoners courtroom comedy that gleefully lampoons everyone from lawyers and judges, to Arabs and Jews, to gays and chiropractors. It’s hay fever season, and in a courtroom a judge is popping antihistamines. He listens to the testimony of a Jewish chiropractor, who’s a liar, according to his anti-Semitic defense attorney. The prosecutor, a homosexual, is having a domestic squabble with his lover, who shows up in court in a leopard-print thong. And all the while, a Middle East peace conference is taking place. Masterfully wielding the argot of the courtroom, David Mamet creates a world in microcosm in which shameless fawning, petty prejudices, and sheer caprice hold sway, and the noble apparatus of law and order degenerates into riotous profanity. From the Trade Paperback edition.