by Hadley Hury
atching the
current production of Speed the Plow in the Little Theatre of Theatre
Memphis is like watching David Mamet's career flash before one's eyes. The
two-act play clocks in at about 80 minutes, but in its fleet intensity it
hits all the playwright's thematic and stylistic high points.
A sort of nervous parlor aria of talk between two
Hollywood movie-biz men -- a production head and his ambitious underling
Speed the Plow, which opened on Broadway in 1988 with Ron Silver
and Joe Mantegna, has a tightly coiled structure. There are only three characters,
and for most of the play only two men are onstage. With the exception of
a brief interlude, there is one closely contained setting. And there is
the even more tightly coiled dialogue that characterizes Mamet's work --
edgy, rapid-fire, elliptical. These parameters notwithstanding, the play's
objective is to use the struggle between art and commerce to cover some
considerable ground on the frontiers between good and evil, trust and betrayal,
hope and despair in the 
human
condition.
Mamet is not a writer with a modest view of his craft; his cockiness is evident, but it isn't necessarily a weakness. Like Shaw, another dramatist of ideas, Mamet is sometimes faulted for creating characters who seem less like individuals than mere mouthpieces for the moral and intellectual questions he's examining. In all of his plays -- which include Oleanna, American Buffalo, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross, and in screenplays as well, particularly the fine House of Games, which he also directed -- he's the guy running the show. His characters may be vivid -- whether weak, strong, vulgar, desperate, or bullying -- but their spiritual capacities and pettiest fears and, most of all, the talk that lays them open before us on the stage, like patients undergoing surgery, are driven by a playwright we sense is always close at hand in the wings. In a Mamet play, the line of argument is usually some form of actual or metaphorical cross-examination. It can get pretty claustrophobic and, at its most manipulative, highly artificial. But when it clicks, it's sharp, lively, and provocative. Even among those who find his themes a bit over-reaching for the arguments that expound them, and the stylizations of his dialogue a frustrating mix of the surreal and naturalistic, few contest the fact that Mamet has a strong sense of theatre. He can make us hear -- by putting a new spin on an old question or goosing a banal confrontation with some profound urgency -- and, at his best, he can make us think.
Speed the Plow is generally recognized to be, at least in some significant measure, Mamet's bilious distillation of his own close encounter with business in La-La Land. (It opened on Broadway in 1988, about a year after he had written the screenplay for The Untouchables, an interesting movie directed by Brian DePalma which achieved commercial success -- but only after famously disputatious negotiations.)
The Little Theatre production is respectable if not always as riveting as Mamet's work demands to be. Directed by Joey Watson, the inner-office dark night of the soul comes fully alive most frequently in the performance of John Moore as Charlie Fox, the smoothly, scathingly amoral spinmeister who knows he should have been named head of production instead of his old cohort Bobby Gould (Mick Vinson). Embittered but never off his game, Charlie has brought Bobby an option for a movie that can make them both, as co-producers, rich and well-established. Bobby goes for it; a meeting is set to seal the deal the next morning.
What intervenes -- in the form of a young temp named Karen (Leigh Ann Evans) -- is Bobby's flirtation with conscience. She talks him into green-lighting a serious novel for production instead of the crass, but sure-fire, project Charlie is pitching. It is the sketchy character of the improbable temp (who says she "admittedly has no skills" but carries on articulate philosophical discussions about the teleological novel in question) that is the weak link in Mamet's fast-moving moral showdown. The character is simply hard to believe -- she's like some deus ex machina who dropped in from Manpower.
Evans gives the role a run for its money. She wisely plays it with an appealing straightforwardness and a tone of common sense. At a final preview, Vinson's performance as the insecure, embattled Bobby seemed headed in the right direction but still in need of some shaping.
Although a compelling tour-de-force, Speed the Plow is not near the top of Mamet's canon -- it bites off more than its voracious hucksters can chew. It has some exciting thoughts at work, but they don't go far enough. This director and cast do a good job with one of the essentials of any Mamet play -- they get most of the bitter, but very funny, laughs that the playwright scatters like breadcrumbs to lead us through his fierce verbal minefield.
SYLVIA, A COMEDY BY A.R. GURNEY, continues at Circuit Playhouse through June 15th. A man in mid-life crisis brings home a dog with whom he has become smitten while walking in Central Park. Much to his wife's consternation, the dog of the title makes quite a place for herself in their home. (The central conceit of Gurney's play is that Sylvia is played by an actress.)
The good cast at Circuit includes Kate Davis as the wife, Jim Ostrander as the husband who gets a new lease (leash?) on life, Randall Hartzog, and Shannon Convery as Sylvia.