SPEED-THE-PLOW
You’ve heard of must-sees. David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow is definitely a must-see. Not only because it’s very, very good, but because you’ve got to see it if you want to find out what makes it so good.
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Some plays can be read, but I tried reading Speed-the-Plow and it didn’t work at all. In fact, it was extremely disappointing. Here was the celebrated Mamet dialogue, with its sprung rhythms, its broken phrasings, its idioms and improvisations–at once poetic and stenographic–expressing the rhetoric of hustle, the dance of the food chain. But that language seemed to have gone soft somehow this time around. The banter seemed aimless, the serious bits insufferably portentous. I got the sense that Mamet had stage time to fill and was filling it reflexively, with imitations of himself. Glengarry Glen Ross had practically glowed up at me from the page: so sharp, so absolutely focused, even when it appeared to be taking great long rides around the point. Speed-the-Plow didn’t even glimmer. It just sort of sat there, looking gray and empty, trivial and yet terribly self-important–a famous playwright’s deeply significant dud.
Speed-the-Plow, on the other hand, takes place in Hollywood, where hotshot movie exec Bobby Gould, fortysomething, has just been anointed head of production at some studio. He and his compadre Charlie Fox speak a schmoozy, jumpy “Who’s on First” patter, full of weirdly random breaks. Charlie, especially, cuts into Bobby’s lines gratuitously, at odd and apparently arbitrary angles. I couldn’t suss the idiom until I saw the show and realized–midwestern innocent that I am–that their talk reflects the blood-in-the-nostrils excitement of capitalists pumped up not only on nerves, like the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, but on cocaine as well. Suddenly Charlie’s little frenzies made sense.
And I wouldn’t have known any of this if I hadn’t seen the Remains production, under Joel Schumacher’s cunning direction. Somebody told me William L. Petersen and D.W. Moffett are miscast as Bobby and Charlie, and it’s true: Petersen’s much too handsome to play a man who thinks he’s got to trick a woman into his bed, and Moffett’s much too goyishe to be spouting lines about playing “hide the afikomen.” Just consider that another part of the play of identities Mamet’s giving us. They’re both more than serviceable, and Moffett’s positively amazing defending his movie package with his coked-out mama-tiger hackles up. A Vassar grad herself, Hope Davis makes perfect sense of Karen as the young woman who has always gotten a lot of strokes but knows herself not at all.
