Look, Ma, Top of the World!

Review: Speed-the-Plow
Barrymore Theatre, New York
November 22, 2008

The radiation will overtake us: apocalypse now and later. It threatens to dissolve our cells, our sense, and our spirits. We will be robots on short-circuit, questioning how innocuous words transformed into formidable worlds of terror, and we will lose our collective powers of discernment. Sometimes, you see, the radiation binds us together while it blinds us, slashing across our sphere of existence so that all turns topsy-turvy, and the energy encompasses all it touches.

This end-of-the-world radiation is the primary concern of a second-rate book some cultural know-it-all tossed into the post-postmodern world we live in, where science eradicates thought and we sink further into the abyss of dehumanized anti-realism. Now this isn't actually the world we live in, but the world David Mamet presents us in Speed-the-Plow, a second-drawer play he jotted off in 1988 for Madonna's Broadway debut (maybe that's why the end-of-the-world felt so near).

The book on radiation enters the brand-spanking-new office of a movie producer promoted yesterday. Whenever anyone reads from it, the destruction that this book proclaims sounds more new-age-hippie than science. None of its prose sounds eidetic enough to be captured on film. Why would anyone make a movie about this, we have to ask?

Which leads us to: why would Mamet write a play about a movie about a terrible book on radiation? Does he earnestly believe that the hoopla about an overwritten beach-read has merit or relevance? Then again, look at the power of page-turners like The Da Vinci Code, or the success of secularist bestsellers like The God Delusion. No matter the artistic quality, people just might buy tickets.

When we as an audience begin to question ourselves for being judged so viciously by an admittedly average play, though, the energy takes over. Speed-the-Plow has a three-person cast, composed of two carnivorous producers and a meek little lamb, the temp secretary. And boy do they tear into it when they fling papers and profanities all over the stage.

Jeremy Piven starts out as Ari Gold 2.0, but he reveals himself to be an honest guy beneath the promotion and the new shiny nameplate: a shark on the outside, but a teddy bear beneath. By day three, he's already disheveled, with his morals and his passion and his goodheartedness splitting him down the center. How could he survive among the phony smiles without selling his soul? Fortunately, he only has to sell a little piece to his longtime amigo Raul Esparza, who flies off the handle when he senses betrayal but subverts any wily schemes that hinder his ladder-climbing. He's a ladder-climber without scruples who's glad to fellate anybody for a shot at the top.

Between the two of these men comes a woman: Elizabeth Moss. She's temping, she's easy in bed, and she's just gosh-darn sincere. Or is she? The producers allows her to read the radiation book so that he may sleep with her, which he does. But in the process, she converts him to her hippie way of believing in the truth behind the Hollywood illusion. Effectively shattered, he buys into her ridiculous plan to make the movie about the radiation, betraying his friend but upholding some moral high ground. The sweet girl-next-door, though, reveals herself to be as duplicitous as the others when she struggles - and fails - to stay in the game. Mamet's world is no place for women. Though the secretary's role has interesting implications, it seems better in theory than in practice; there's just not much for her to play.

Thankfully, the acting provides such energy that it overpowers the weaknesses of the writing. Piven and Esparza in particular chew the scenery to shreds with glee and, at least on Piven's part, with a touch of honesty. They sped through so rapidly when performing that it was hard to find the flaws; we can't entirely tell whether Mamet wants us to see an elaborate fantasy or something more realistic.

If it's the former, which I hope, there's nothing earnest about Speed-the-Plow, but a jolt of solid acting and directing animate and electrify what could have seemed in lesser hands like the end of the world.