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Rating: 
Summary: The Search
Review: Here is Mamet and men, conspiring, dreaming, angling, betting each other, bating each other, openly using each other toward some end that maybe, maybe will see the light of day. It's like the fat versus the thin. The big versus the little. The risk versus the reward. Here comes a Mamet gal, ballsy, vocal, impassioned, solely on point to tickle the man, and call him out.
So when the man is teased enough to think beyond himself, risk that reward he so knows is coming his way, to champion something new...wait, in Hollywood....!?
Would a man let down his brother, let go of a fortune, and jeopardize a career to find himself, or even to look?
Would a woman risk giving her body away, shmoozing a guy toward taking that risk, thus advancing her, if she believed the two of them would revolutionize a medium?
Business and Hollywood and Art and Spirituality do not all mix. So says Mamet, and so goes the Reality. A lousy shoot'em up prison flick or an existential apocalyptic art film? The pros and cons are offered in Speed-The-Plow....
Rating: 
Summary: Intoxicating prose, uncertain structure
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The Amazing Mamet
Review: This is an interesting play, written in a style of short, "clipped" dialogue. It is mainly a story about the ugliness of the movie industry. Interestingly enough, Madonna played the character Karen in the broadway production. If you enjoy David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross / American Buffalo / The Spanish Prisoner / Wag the Dog), then you should enjoy this play. (Side note: the language isn't as bad as Glengarry Glen Ross).
Rating:
Summary: The best of Mamet (along with Glen Garry)
Review: 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.
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