There's only one problem with this carefully marketed plan: Race, Mr. Mamet's sure-to-be-great new play, isn't great at all. It's not even very good.

The curtain comes up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Race opened Sunday night, on a stylized Santo Loquasto set of a looming book-filled law-firm library, plopped like a diorama—this is an educational lesson, after all—in the center of an otherwise bare all-black and starkly lit stage. Four actors—two middle-aged white men, one middle-aged black man and a younger black woman—are in that conference room, awkwardly already in mid-conversation. (Mr. Mamet directs his play, yielding pacing and placement often as stilted and abrupt as his famous dialogue.)

The well-known and powerful billionaire Charles Strickland (misplayed by Richard Thomas, who never seems either powerfully angry or powerfully dismissive) is in the lawyers' office, attempting to hire them. He has been accused of raping a young black woman in a hotel room, which he denies. Jack Lawson (an excellent James Spader, who it could be argued has been training his whole career for this role) is the cynical and brilliant litigator he wants to represent him, and Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) is Lawson's black law partner, which makes this firm a good choice for Strickland, considering the accusation. Susan (Kerry Washington) is a young black associate at the firm, the novice to whom Lawson can pontificate—and to whom Mr. Mamet can make his arguments. It is she who, as the wobbly third leg of the firm, will be the center of Mr. Mamet's usual swirl of possible treachery and double-crossing.

The first act has Lawson and Brown discussing whether they want to take Strickland's case, and, with Susan, whether they think he's innocent or guilty. (Don't lawyers specifically not do that?) This provides Mr. Mamet the opportunity to put in his characters' mouths—especially Lawson's—his theories about guilt and innocence, truth and perception, back and white. All black people hate all white people, all white people are guilty; everyone feels all sorts of guilt and shame, truth is flexible and a smart lawyer's skill is to manipulate all that.

It's all rendered with Mr. Mamet's expected verbal pyrotechnics, but the inherent pleasure of virtuosity aside, the fireworks fall flat. The play is reveling in its subversive political incorrectness, but political incorrectness hasn't seemed flamboyantly subversive at any point in this new century.

In the second act (the roughly 90-minute play includes what the Playbill notes is a 12-minute intermission), things make less sense. When it turns out Strickland's accuser is a prostitute, Lawson announces he won't reveal that fact to the jury. (Huh?) When it appears that associate Susan has sold out the defense's strategy to prosecutors, Lawson's partner, Brown, reminds us that he never liked her, pulling her college thesis from his desk drawer (conveniently handy!) and announcing its title, "Structural Survivals of Racism in Supposedly Bias-free Transactions" (conveniently suspicious!).

When word comes that the hotel maid has amended her testimony to police, undermining Lawson's planned defense, we're to understand that it's a false statement, proof that the prosecution is onto his strategy. But when word comes that the responding police officer has found a lost page of his report, also undermining the defense, this revelation is presented as an honestly lost-and-found document (confusing!).

Race is an intriguing play, and far better than Mr. Mamet's last Broadway effort, the mediocre sitcom November. (It's also much better than "Keep Your Pantheon," the main piece of The Two Unrelated Plays By David Mamet, which played at the Atlantic earlier this season.) Ultimately, this is not thought-provoking Mamet so much as a parody of it.

IN THE LAST CARGO CULT, MIKE DAISEY'S most recent monologue, which opened Monday night at the Public, Mr. Daisey talks about traveling to the small, primitive South Pacific island of Tanna to visit a culture almost entirely different from our own, one of communal living, with no private property and—more important—no money. He's going there to witness John Frum Day, an annual religious celebration of the island's John Frum's cargo cult, a religion based on Tanna's brief exposure to American servicemen during World War II. On John Frum Day, the people of Tanna celebrate by recounting U.S. history—or at least their version of it—in song, dance and theater.

Mr. Daisey is a funny, insightful, magnetic storyteller, and his travelogue—tales of flying to Tanna on a ramshackle plane, eating local delicacies, sleeping with a baby pig—are hilarious. They're also not really the point. Mr. Daisey is concerned with money, how Tanna survives without it and how much we rely on it. He's angry about the financial crisis; he's angry at the bankers who created it; and he's particularly angry to realize that the financial system has us all interconnected, that he can't revel in the bankers' misfortune because what's bad for them is bad for him, too.

He weaves several stories together—of the Tanna trip; of arriving at college and first being exposed to rich people; of all the "awesome stuff" in the world he wants and which require cash—to make us think about the role of money.

And you do think about it, for the time you're in the theater. Thinking about money is like thinking about air; you don't need to, because it's everywhere. More likely, what you will thinkk about Cargo Cult after you walk out of the theater is what a pleasure your last two hours have been.

TO SEE SO HELP ME GOD!, A LONG-LOST and very funny 1929 backstage comedy being presented by the Mint Theater Company at the Lucille Lortel, is to wonder why this one was forgotten while so many boring old backstage comedies—The Royal Family, currently at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for example—were remembered.

So Help Me God! is a witty and goofily screwball old-fashioned three-acter written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who a few years earlier had written the play Chicago. (The Kander and Ebb musical arrived a half-century later.) It was set for an October 1929 opening, but the Great Depression interfered. This production, with a script adapted by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, who also directed, is essentially its premiere.

It's an All About Eve story, but one in which Eve is outflanked by Margo. Kristen Johnston is fantastic as Lily Darnley, the domineering diva, a 6-foot-tall force of nature in dramatic deco gowns (the costumes, I should disclose, are by my friend Clint Ramos) who casually molds people and situations and the plot of the play-within-a-play to fit her needs. My Girl star Anna Chlumsky is less strong in the Eve part, flat and insufficiently steely as she plots her rise. But the rest of the cast ably supports, especially Catherine Curtain as Belle, the blowsy broad in the company, and Jeremy Lawrence as the put-upon stage manager.

The characters are deadly serious in their backstage machinations, but, for us, it's a fun (if slight) night at the theater.

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON'S THIS, WHICH OPENED at Playwrights Horizons last week, is poorly named but impressively written, a smart, funny and affecting play about four old friends (and one sexy new addition to the group) who wrestle with changing lives as they grow up and, as people do, grow both together and apart.

Jane (Julianne Nicholson), Marrell (Eisa Davis) and Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald) were classmates at an unnamed but elite school; they've remained tight for 15 years. Tom (Darren Pettie) was a staffer at the college; he's married to Marrell and together they have a newborn son who won't sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time. Jane has a daughter, too, and a husband who died a year earlier; Alan is gay and single and wittily self-lacerating. Finally, there's a Jean-Pierre (Louis Cancelmi), a handsome French doctor-without-borders ("I always think that makes it sound like he has a messy personal life," Alan snarks), who becomes enmeshed with the group as Marrell tries to fix him up with Jane.

Marrell and Tom are drifting apart, their distance exacerbated by the stress of young parenthood. Jane is exhausted by the world's sympathy and pity, and by the idea she had an ideal marriage until her husband got sick. Alan is lonely and bored and desperate to do something useful in the world. Jane and Tom fall into a brief affair. Tom doesn't want Marrell to know because he can't deal with the repercussions; Jane doesn't want Marrell to know because she can't stand to hurt her. There are kinds of unhappiness, Marrell tells Jane at one point, "personal, marital, professional, existential or interdisciplinary." Her own, she continues, is interdisciplinary. All of their unhappiness is interdisciplinary.

The unhappiness is also honest, and real, recognizable to us all if not in specifics then at least in spirit, intelligently rendered in sharp and wise dialogue. Together with another Playwrights production, Circle Mirror Transformation—which after being twice extended in the fall returns to Playwrights' upstairs space, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, next week—it's one of the best new dramas of the season.

THE NEW A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which opened at the BAM Harvey Theater last week, is every bit as good as you've heard. What more is there to say? It's the classic and powerful Tennessee Williams play; Cate Blanchett gives a mesmerizing performance as the delusional faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois, and Joel Edgerton is hunky and duly animal (if, sometimes, a bit too Brando-sounding) as Stanley. The Liv Ullman-directed production, originally staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, is only here through Dec. If you can still find a ticket, go.

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Ms. Gibson might be a little old lady in Des Moines, for all we know, or happily married with three bonny kids. The "James" in Melissa James Gibson might suggest a marriage. But on the evidence of her plays, she's a quirky thirtysomething given to lassitude and spying on her neighbors; a wry post-graduate sunk in despair with a good dictionary; or a lost, romantic nostalgiac obsessed with those drips known as men, the Meaning of Life and the correct use of "albeit."

Albeit Ms. Gibson came from nowhere three seasons ago with her eccentrically titled play [sic] , it was clear at first sight that she is a dramatist who surprises and delights us. The witty, unusual breakthrough-brilliantly staged by Daniel Aukin at the tiny Soho Rep-was a wholly original take on urban friendship and the comedy of manners, a contemporary Design for Living expressed in articulate weirdness. Ms. Gibson's latest play, Suitcase , again directed by Mr. Aukin, is more ambitious and riskier in its neurotic way, and though it wobbles nuttily from time to time, we're left again with the pleasure of this fine playwright's company.

Take the full title of the play-the modernist mouthful Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance . The "suitcase" suggests baggage and transition, of course; the "flies"-a note in the script informs us-are Ms. Gibson's tribute to Jorge Luis Borges' essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (from his Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952 ), in which scholarly reference is made to a Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge . It is written there that animals are divided into categories, including mermaids, those that have just broken a flower vase, and those that resemble flies from a distance .

The flies scrutinized in Ms. Gibson's Suitcase are two graduate students who can't finish their futile dissertations and won't let their clingy boyfriends into their apartments. Outwardly, we might be in a conventional sitcom with loopy overtones. Sallie and Jen phone each other often and communicate through their intercoms with Lyle and Karl, the pathetic boyfriends abandoned on the stairwell. It's the first intercom romance I've seen. Sometimes all four of them speak at the same time, which is confusing . The static of a silent intercom tells us more about Ms. Gibson's defensive, needy women living in messy, stubborn isolation.

Their dissertations are "un-going" in an "ongoing" sort of way. Sallie is failing to write hers on a typewriter , incidentally. You remember typewriters? Shakespeare used one. They go clack-clack-clack! They go thud . Typewriters no longer belong; they have no place in the world, like a horse and buggy.

Her frequently shredded dissertation happens to be about alternative means of storytelling. Aha! Ms. Gibson's calling card is surely the same. After all, she begins and ends Suitcase with a dopey, sweet song from her mismatched couples. "I wonder," goes the mordant lyric, "how we were before we weren't …. "

Ms. Gibson's fondness for wordplay, linguistic quibbles, verbal tics and misunderstanding-"yucky" for 'lucky"-are part of the fun. Then again, a prissy preoccupation with syntax can disguise real feeling as surely as the articulate smartness here substitutes for frayed emotion. Only Ms. Gibson would have a character living in self-described "semi-enlightened limbo" complain to her laboriously predictable boyfriend, "You're such a causal guy"-and get away with it!

And who else would have the aggrieved boyfriend hit back with: "Your fear of unfortunate phrases is ruining our relationship … !"

Ms. Gibson has a surprising mind, as I say. After all, the lunatic dissertation of her other trapped heroine, Jen, is about garbage found in neighbors' bins. (She believes that what we discard is far more interesting than what we keep, and on the evidence of her life, she's right .) Her enslaved, forlorn boyfriend brings her suitcases of the stuff-not that she's grateful. "I'm complicated," she protests. "You always said you like complicated women."

"Women who are complicated in a FUN way," he replies.

Jen's prize piece of garbage-evidence of some kind of life out there-is a found tape-recording made by a girl named Lizzie during various bickering family Christmases. Happy Xmas-a suicidal time of the year. We hear Lizzie as a child excitedly opening some gift; then growing up: "Please, somebody get me out of this house"; then as a 37-year-old divorcée. "Um, well it's been an uneventful couple of decades, I guess. Dad's mixing up some eggnog in the kitchen right now. I don't think he knows what he's doing …. "

Meanwhile, Sallie diverts herself by spying through binoculars on her neighbors across the way, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window . They're showing home movies of a happy, nice and normal child with her dad. "Do you ever wonder," Sallie asks later, "what happens to all those little girls at weddings who slide across the floor in their stocking feet?"

Suitcase is a near farce of graduate angst and desperation, but its heart is all about lost childhood and innocence. It is about the melancholy of growing up and a nostalgia for a younger, happier time, real or imagined-for "how we were before we weren't."

If that sounds bleak, it is. "If one could only refrain / from one's refrain," goes Ms. Gibson's surprising epilogue in maudlin, sweet song. And the closing lyric-"Sometimes small potatoes / taste the best"-isn't the most romantically uplifting I've heard lately. But Ms. Gibson, jumping through hoops as she figures out the unpredictable absurdity of life, is too bright to be content, and her wit and misanthropy delight us just the same.

The ensemble of Suitcase couldn't be better. Let's name the excellent Christina Kirk, Colleen Werthmann, Thomas Jay Ryan and Jeremy Shamos. Mr. Aukin and his scenic designer, Louisa Thompson, have once again conjured up a modernist urban landscape that's desolate and magical, like an art installation with real, live, peculiar people. I don't know where Melissa James Gibson is going from here, but I'll be there.

She's written a wonderfully original take on urban friendship and the comedy of manners-a Design for Living for our times that has been brilliantly directed by Daniel Aukin, who pulls off almost as many surprises as his dramatist. Ms. Gibson's three friends are as smart as Noël Coward's renowned artistic trio, but not as stylishly successful, not by a long chalk. Failure-or Failing to Make It-is more her calling card, her style a matter of articulate weirdness.

Consider this from Frank: "Be on the lookout for strange spots on otherwise uniformly colored food. That's my best advice."

Or this from Babette: "Before I knew Frank, Larry told me he was saving up money to be frozen."

Let's not leave out forlorn Theo: "In lieu of living with my wife," he announces, "I would like to end up with someone with a fondness for remaining."

I'd say the trio are all in their late 20's or early 30's, though the dramatist doesn't specify. The future and the promise of fulfilled, happy lives is a little too slyly frayed here for the usual graduate angst. Ms. Gibson transcends a specific generation by tuning into the comic, loony texture of all disconnected life. The problem with David Lindsay-Abaire's manic new comedy of marital disaster, Wonder of the World , with Sarah Jessica Parker, is that we don't believe its unhinged, unreal premise. The talented Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has cornered himself into being merely sitcom "madcap." But however nutty Ms. Gibson's [sic] might appear, the piece never loses its moorings. We believe in her lost, off-the-wall characters bonding over wicked landlords and floating party anxiety or anything else that springs to mind. They're us.

We also have three perfectly balanced, first-rate performances to match Ms. Gibson's wit. Theo (Dominic Fumusa) is a struggling composer of the theme music for an amusement-park ride called Thrill-o-Rama. He takes his Art seriously. Wouldn't you? "Are you saying," he protests with volcanic indignation, "the average pimply prepubescent doesn't deserve a real musical score for his amusement-park ride experience?" Theo composes about two bad bars of Shostakovich a year, sometimes segueing accidentally into "Mack the Knife." His wife left him without warning. He's now in love with his next-door neighbor, Babette, but that isn't going to work out.

Babette (Cristina Kirk, who's an outstanding new discovery, at least to me) is the one who announces that she gets depressed in retrospect. She's an aspiring writer of "a compendium of 20th-century outburst," and that isn't going to work out, either. She borrows money to get by, or sells her possessions. "Well, has the fur vase sold?" she asks Larry over the phone. "I know there was water damage, but …. What about the lamp covered with those charming depictions of mid-century coal-mining agitation? Are you sure you've displayed it prominently enough?"

Babette is living in fantasy limbo next-door to Frank (played by the coolly relaxed James Urbaniak in the third perfect performance of the evening). Grieving, understated Frank, the former lover of store owner Larry, is training diligently to become an auctioneer via a home-study cassette tape from the Missouri Auction School, Kansas City. Among the play's pleasures are his alliterative tongue-twisters that tutor his talky, tentative technique. At any arbitrary moment, Frank will announce, for example, "Sally sought some seeds to sow but sadly soon it snowed." Or the more insinuating "'Course your cousin couldn't kiss you 'cause you can't kiss kin." And the more mysterious "At least leave the lederhosen."

Language itself is a playful interest of Ms. Gibson's-clichés disguising feeling, words for their own sake that fill the void. ("At least leave the lederhosen.") The auction school displays its own articulate scholarship, pointing out the essential difference between mere filler words and the auctioneer's lightning-fast calling of the bids, which is closer, of course, to a rhythmically incomprehensible chant. The play is partly about the games of language, the games we play in compulsive talk as comforting and arbitrary as the friends we make.

In the closing rooftop scene, the three of them literally play games-a form of bedtime story. "Do you wanna play Choose Your Parents?" "Do you wanna play All the Conversations I Don't Want to Have?" Or "Teacher's Doubts Panned Out?"

"What about the People I Meant to Sleep With?"

"Oh, please, Babette. We don't have all night."

The master stroke of Mr. Aukin's production is the inspired oddity of his work with his set designer, Louisa Thompson. We're thrust into another world from the moment we see the friends' three minuscule apartments side-by-side, but no bigger than broom closets. That's where they live and sleep-quite comfortably, actually-while venturing out in search of harmless friendly fire. The masterly theater experimenter, RobertLepage, couldn't have dreamed up a more beguiling stage picture. Beneath the minute homes, we can even half-glimpse a warring couple living and splitting up in their apartment. We sometimes hear the dance of death, the ritual monosyllabic parting of the ways.

So Mr. Aukin has created a visual equivalent to Rear Window in his own tiny theater that matches the originality of Ms. Gibson's unusually refreshing play. At 15 bucks a ticket, you could therefore save yourself $465 by not paying the top ticket price on Broadway. If you ask me, Melissa James Gibson's [sic] is a very good reason to head downtown.