Speed-the-Plow [Paperback]

David Mamet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 1994

Speed-the-Plow's Broadway run is the most recent triumph of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's astonishingly productive career. "By turns hilarious and chilling....the culmination of this playwright's work to date....Riveting theater."-Frank Rich, New York Times; "A brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity and another tone poem by our foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy... On its deepest level it belongs with the darker disclosures of movie-biz pathology like Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. In a sense Speed-the-Plow distills all of these to a stark quintessence: there's hardly a line in it that isn't somehow insanely funny or scarily insane... [It is a] scathingly comic play."-Jack Kroll, Newsweek

Editorial Reviews

Review

David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow is infinitely more than a brutal satire on Hollywood. It is a study of male panic and the denial of redemptive grace. Michael Billington - Guardian Sitting through a David Mamet play is like being caught in a sudden shower of verbal broken glass. The dialogue is so sharp that it slices the senses and there is an iciness to the darkness of the humour ... his sheer skill with language makes for commanding power. Daily Express --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

David Mamet is a world-leading author, playwright and screenwriter, whose many awards include the Pulitzer Prize, Joseph Jefferson Award, Obie Award, New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Tony Award. Many of his plays are considered modern classics and include Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, Edmond, The Cryptogram and Speed the Plow. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 82 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; First Edition edition (January 12, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802130461
• ISBN-13: 978-0802130464
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #373,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intoxicating prose, uncertain structure, March 6, 2002

By 

Tyler Smith (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Speed-the-Plow (Paperback)

Mamet gives us blinding pace in this spare play, a mere 82 pages in print. It can easily be read in an hour. The rapid-fire exchanges between characters put the reader in the position of a rubber-necked viewer at a tennis match between serve-and-volley powerhouses. If merely keeping the reader/viewer engaged is the goal of good theater, Mamet succeeds, in spades.

But truly great theater resonates after the reader has laid the play aside or exited the playhouse. In this regard, "Speed-the-Plow," superior work though it may be, falls just a bit short for me, although I confess I have not seen it performed on stage, and would jump at the chance to do so. In any event, as a piece of reading, the play is too slight in its ideas for me to classify it as top-notch.

The play is built on a simple idea. Two movie execs, Charlie Fox and Bobby Gould, meet in Gould's office. Fox has brought Gould, his superior, a sure-fire hit, which from all we can gather will be a typical piece of Hollywood pap sure to please the masses. Fox has sold the script idea to a big-time Hollywood performer who has given them a short-time to put the deal together.

Enter Karen, Gould's temporary office assistant. Gould has been giving an obtuse, esoteric novel a "courtesy read," and as a ploy to seduce her, Gould asks Karen to read the novel and give him a report on it. Fox offers Gould a friendly bet that he won't succeed with Karen. Somehow -- and this is a key weakness in the play -- Karen manages in the second act to convince the hard-boiled Gould to produce the film of the novel, at the expense of Fox's project. When Fox learns of this, the following day, he is of course outraged and manages in the end to convince Gould that the seemingly idealistic Karen is in fact no different than either of them and has used Gould sexually in return for the promise to produce the "art" film.

Much of the play's power derives from Mamet's undeniable gift with language. Fox and Gould sound absolutely real as Hollywood types: borderline slimeball, jaded, absolutely devoid of idealism, but very funny, precisely because of all these things.

Language, however, is only one element of successful theater. The motivations of Karen are obscure, but more importantly one is hard-pressed to believe that Gould, who spends much of the play developing in different ways the idea that he's not paid to produce art, would even momentarily be convinced to dump a sure box office smash and endure the humiliation that Fox heaps on him. All I could think of was, That Karen must have been some dame. Trouble is, I didn't get enough of her through Mamet's development to buy that.

I'm a big Mamet fan, and even work that is not his best is for me worth reading. "Speed-the-Plow" was, simply put, intoxicating the first time I read it because of its rhythmic intensity. Even if its intoxication fades a bit in the aftermath of reading, enough of a glow lingers to make the time spent worthwhile.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best of Mamet (along with Glen Garry), June 28, 2002

By 

JackOfMostTrades "Jack" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Speed-the-Plow (Paperback)

This is probably Mamet's best work, in my opinion, since he focuses on truthful characters without the rather contrived repartee of many of his other plays in which he seems to attempt to develop some metrical dramturgical quirkiness to provide the viewer/reader with a sense of originality. I find Mamet's screenplays usually better than his plays, try The Spanish Prisoner for example. But in Speed the Plow, he provides us with fully fleshed characters who speak like real people (with the necessary artistic license and not so hung up about verbal pyrotechnics. By the way, his style is obviously influenced by studies with Sandy Meisner from the Neighborhood Playhouse. Read the book in the the year of the life of Sandy Meisner "Meisner on Acting" and you'll see the acting exercises that influenced Mamet's writings.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mamet Headed for Another Revival, September 28, 2008

By 

John F. Rooney - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Speed-the-Plow (Paperback)

This play on Broadway originally starred Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver. To me David Mamet is an overrated playwright and an underrated screenwriter. The play is going to be revived in the 2008-2009 season along with Mamet's "American Buffalo." They are both slight efforts which pale in comparison to Pinter, Stoppard, Albee etcetera. He puts three characters on the stage and lets them blabber on, but he adds some comedy. Supposedly there's a deep and portentous subtext related to the American psyche.
In this play two movie makers have to decide upon presenting socially significant films or the usual commercial drivel. Karen (Madonna) tries to convince Gould to choose art over commerce by bedding him. Fox tries to persuade Gould that the only reason she acquiesced was to get the art film greenlighted.
Mamet in a New York Times 2008 article says this play belongs to "that particularly American subgenre, the Workplace Drama." In the occupational drama he sets up circumstances in which characters have to choose between two evils. Of Americans he says, "We live to work." This play he says deals with "the difference between Work and Art, and how is one to draw the line."
Of his play Mamet says, it's "a ripping yarn, with a bunch of sex, some nifty plot twists, and a lot of snappy dialogue." For this play I think he's wrong on all four counts. True, in the play business drives out idealism; it's the ruthless versus the toothless, but it's not ripping, nifty, snapping, or sexy.
The title phrase is like a good luck wish for swift and profitable plowing. It's a behest that you speedily plow under and start over. There's dirty work to be done, and somebody has to do it, and if you don't do it, you'll be plowed under and someone else will do it. Why is the movie business garbage? "Why? Why should nickels be bigger than dimes? That's the way it is."
The play does not read well, and it cries out for the voices and gestures of flesh and blood actors.