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The soul-stripping business of Business, Mamet-style, gets the ultimate articulation a mere 2,500 miles due east, for a mini-fortune per person, at the acclaimed Alan Alda/Lieb Schreiber-led Broadway revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.
Too much trouble? Want the freak show—the fun-house mirror of the Mamet mind—without the fuss? Your wish is largely, if not wholly granted at Test Market's production of Mamet's other notable rant on the moral cost of doing business—or whoring, for short—Speed the Plow.
And if the muscular acting and strong-arm directing drains the play of nuance and texture (not often noted among Mamet's gifts), it loses little of its crackling cynicism (often noted among Mamet's gifts).
(The phrase "speed the plow," by the way, is an old British farming expression, wishing someone good luck via speedy, profitable plowing of the land—analogous, perhaps, to Mamet's take on Hollywood's rote and rigid plowing through American culture, mostly to make money, hardly to make art.)
A three-character vehicle, Plow peeks under the Hollywood hood, exposing two guys giving each other a good lube job: Gould (Erik Amblad) is a newly promoted Tinseltown player; Fox (Ernest Hemmings) is an agent-slash-friend (in Phonywood, "friend" surely gets second billing) pitching him a steaming-piece-of-excrement idea for a movie that will, they're confident, rake in tons of box-office beans and turn Fox's pockets gold.
They psychologically circle each other, carefully but jovially, in that manipulative power-dance of the business world, rife with subtle verbal gamesmanship, alpha-male behavioral cues and cheerful, utter bullshit. But beneath it all, they bond over The Product—the bottom line of bottom lines. (And when these self-proclaimed "old whores" calculate potential profits, it's a virtual revival-tent hallelujah!)
But the play pivots crucially when Gould's outwardly innocent temp-secretary, Karen (Francine Gordon), whom Gould seduces to win a bet with Fox, gives a "courtesy read" to a doom-and-gloom book about genetic degradation through radiation leading to world extinction, which would seem to have zero chance to make the page-to-screen leap given Hollywood's patronizing assessment of moviegoer taste and intellect.
Let the fireworks—and Mamet's indictment of the human animal at its opportunistic, violent core—begin.
(When Speed the Plow opened on Broadway in 1988, Karen was played by Madonna—at the height of her '80s Star-as-Product powers—lending ironic counterpoint to Mamet's theme of art and creativity unfailingly trumped by business and commerce.)
Mamet's writing here is boldly declarative, with little tolerance for shading or merely hinting at a character's essence, as when Karen asks Gould if the film he wants to produce will be any good: "Well, it's a commodity ... Can a film be good if it loses money?" Later, he adds: "Good taste will not hack it." And though Mamet indulges in vulgarity, it's not without a kind of crude poetry, as when Karen is told: "You're just a tight p---y wrapped around ambition."
The playwright has often been lambasted, with some justification, for harboring a noxious sexism through less-than-admirable female characters compared to his male protagonists, and there's an element of this in Speed the Plow—not in their actions, but in their honesty about their actions.
Fittingly, TJ Larsen's direction plays right into Mamet's profane, testosterone-fueled tone, though the dialogue's decibel level is a notch too high, even for Mamet's chest-thumping. As Gould, a slick-haired, self-important prostitute in a suit, Amblad gives a big, garrulous, unstinting performance, yet keeps his movements and gestures precise, his piercing gaze focused, never letting the portrayal spin away from him. At the outset, he's a happily vacant soul under a shiny coat of sophistication and a veneer of smarmy charm, but Amblad is no less effective later, when a wounded, terrified Gould is forced into a defensive fetal posture on the floor.
As Fox, the souped-up agent and Ritalin poster child, Hemmings—all pumping legs and tapping feet when sitting, a roving blur of rapid-fire tics when he isn't—starts out wired and ends up frying his circuits, an arc that, while thrilling to be caught up in, ultimately overreaches. Gordon's Karen, however, toggles nicely between seeming naiveté and well-concealed savvy. Her mutual seduction with Gould—one obvious, one not—is a snappy game of serve-and-return.
Mamet's tight plotting leads to an eruptive conclusion in the incendiary final scene, with characters exposed, triumphant and humiliated—and linked by the world's oldest profession.
Dressed or undressed. In bed or out.