High praise from THE NEW YORK TIMES...

Do You Speak Hollywood?

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: October 24, 2008
The Barrymore Theater should provide seat belts for as long as Neil Pepe’s revival of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” is in residence. The production that opened Thursday night — starring the ace team of Jeremy Piven, Raúl Esparza and Elisabeth Moss — pursues its corkscrew course at such velocity that your instinct is to check yourself for whiplash.

When the curtain falls on this short and unsparing study of sharks in the shallows of the movie industry, it’s as if you had stepped off a world-class roller coaster. The ride was over before you knew it, but you’re too dizzy and exhilarated to think you didn’t get your money’s worth.

Is cynicism supposed to be this energizing?

“Speed-the-Plow” has no business feeling so fresh. There was novelty in Mr. Mamet’s acid-etched portrait of greedy, foulmouthed Hollywood players when it opened in 1988. But since then the dirty business of film production has become the stuff of daily business pages, nightly telecasts, snarky Web sites and a slew of self-flagellating movies about movies, from “The Player” (1992) to the current “What Just Happened.” Yet this production is, for me at least, even more vital than the original, which starred an excellent Ron Silver and Joe Mantegna and a shockingly unmemorable Madonna. And the reasons have very little to do with film and everything to do with theater. What makes “Speed-the-Plow” so exciting is its power to define and destroy an entire self-contained world through the tools and weapons of spoken words, expertly wielded by a very live cast.

Boil this 85-minute work down to the sort of single selling sentence that is the lingua franca of its moviemaking characters, and it isn’t much: Two foulmouthed Hollywood executives are all set to pitch a can’t-lose deal to the big boss when an unexpected obstacle blocks their way. This obstacle never pushes its characters out of their insular natural habitat. There’s nothing as extreme as a murder (as in “The Player”) or political crisis (à la “Wag the Dog,” the Hollywood-meets-Washington spoof on which Mr. Mamet worked as a screenwriter).

What there is is talk. And as in his earlier “American Buffalo” (to be revived on Broadway later this season) and “Glengarry Glen Ross,” talk is rich, even when it sounds cheap: a mighty means of measuring and asserting power, of confirming one’s place in the scheme of things.

The slangy, zingy patter of exaggerated insult and tribute swapped by the studio executives Bobby Gould (Mr. Piven) and Charlie Fox (Mr. Esparza) isn’t just air filler; it’s the existential warp and woof of their lives. (Scott Pask’s tasteful, sterile sets for Bobby’s office and house are blank slates; words are what furnish these rooms.) “Speed-the-Plow” is about what happens when the shiny bubble produced by this talk is punctured by someone who doesn’t speak the language.

Bobby is the new head of production at a movie studio; Charlie is his longtime (and lower-tier) associate, who shows up with the deal of a lifetime: the chance to make a prison-themed buddy picture with the box-office king Douggie Brown. Bobby happens to have on his desk an apocalyptic, literary novel by “an Eastern sissy writer,” the antithesis of the kind of movies these men stand for.

The obscenities, sentence shards and machine-gun cadences common to Mr. Mamet’s dialogue are in evidence as Bobby and Charlie celebrate the commercial project and dis the arty one. But unlike the two-bit con men and salesmen of “Buffalo” and “Glengarry,” these small-minded Hollywood big shots, who happily describe themselves as whores, have been endowed with a sense of irony, of self-consciousness.

Both satirical and sentimental about who and what they are, they turn conversation into a ritualistic art. Under Mr. Pepe’s juggernaut direction, Mr. Piven and Mr. Esparza invest that art with the souped-up, self-inflating rhythms of cokeheads (which seemed to be the condition of everyone in Hollywood in the 1980s, even non-users).

Listening to their rapid-fire exchanges is like watching top-seeded tennis opponents locked in an endless rally. And when Karen (Ms. Moss), a temp agency secretary working for Bobby that day, enters the room, you feel the deflation that comes when such volleys end. In speech Karen is a plodder, earnest and dogged. This means that in Bobby’s world she’s exotic, and he starts to listen to her as if she were a siren singing.

Mr. Mamet has provided very little back story for these three characters outside of their professional relationships. Yet as embodied by Mr. Piven, Mr. Esparza and Ms. Moss, they’re not just moral archetypes or linguistic athletes. We know where they’re coming from. Or we do by the end of the show, when we realize just how carefully these performers have set us up for the final payoff.

Mr. Piven has the pivotal role, and he executes it with uncanny grace and intelligence. A three-time Emmy winner as the amoral über-agent on “Entourage,” he would be a natural for the hungry-like-a-wolf Charlie. But here he mines a subtler vein, letting you glimpse the genuine, self-questioning weariness beneath Bobby’s macho bravado. Far more than Charlie, this Bobby knows he’s playing a part, a perception that could be fatal.

In contrast, Mr. Esparza runs full speed ahead with his ambition-stoked character, tapping the full kinetic force he artfully kept under wraps in recent revivals of “Company” and “The Homecoming.” But while Charlie may be an animal in perpetual fight-or-flight mode, Mr. Esparza finds many shades and textures — of pride, humiliation, anger and resentment — within that primal instinct. And the portrayal of the shifting alpha-male status between Charlie and Bobby should be mandatory viewing for sociologists and, come to think of it, zoologists.

Ms. Moss is best known for playing another ambitious secretary (turned copywriter) in a testosterone-drenched world, on the AMC series “Mad Men.” But she definitely doesn’t just repeat what she does on television. When Madonna played Karen — as woodenly as she was to play most subsequent parts — she got a pass from the critics, who said that her role was too enigmatic to do much with. Ms. Moss proves the lie in that assessment, bringing a naked clarity to her unvarnished, tinny-voiced Karen that makes the play hang together in ways it didn’t before.

I suppose there are a few aspects of “Speed-the-Plow” that date it. That arty end-of-the-world book (titled “The Bridge”) that everyone says would never make a major motion picture sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s end-of-the-world book “The Road,” which has been made into a major motion picture. The word “maverick,” for obvious reasons, gets laughs that it didn’t in 1988. But the idea of a high roller in a money-driven society suddenly sensing a scary void beyond the getting and spending acquires a new relevance in 2008.

Not to get all deep on you, because in the final analysis, “Speed-the-Plow” isn’t much deeper than its characters. But through the simple devices of vibrant, perfectly chosen words delivered vibrantly, this production takes on helium that lifts it and its audience into the ether.

“Oh, man, I can’t come down,” says Charlie, intoxicated by the prospect of humongous success. We know how you feel, Charlie. For as long as you and your nasty workmates are on stage, we’re just as high as you are.

SPEED-THE-PLOW

By David Mamet; directed by Neil Pepe; sets by Scott Pask; costumes by Laura Bauer; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; production stage manager, Matthew Silver; technical supervisor, Larry Morley; fight director, J. David Brimmer; associate producers, Rebecca Gold and Debbie Bisno; company manager, Bruce Klinger; general manager, Richards/Climan Inc. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, JK Productions, Ronald Frankel, Ostar Productions, Peggy Hill, Bat-Barry Productions, Ken Davenport, Scott Delman, Ergo Entertainment, Dede Harris, Alan D. Marks, Patty Ann McKinnon, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, Adam Sansiveri and Jamie deRoy/Carl Moellenberg. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street; (212) 239-6200. Through Feb. 22. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

WITH: Jeremy Piven (Bobby Gould), Raúl Esparza (Charlie Fox) and Elisabeth Moss

A **** review from Clive Barnes in THE NEW YORK POST...

WHEN Hollywood meets Broadway, sparks fly and Tinseltown's incinerated - especially if the flamethrower is David Mamet.

So it is with "Speed-the-Plow." Now, 20 years after its premiere - in which Madonna took much of the initial limelight - the beautifully played revival that opened last night establishes the play as a modern classic.

The cast - Jeremy Piven as a freshly anointed Hollywood producer, Bobby Gould; Raul Esparza as Charlie Fox, Bobby's best friend, mailroom buddy and underling; and Elisabeth Moss, Bobby's new temp - are all superb, but this time around, it's Neil Pepe's smooth-as-silk direction and the play itself that hold the stage.

Charlie has been offered a "buddy" movie complete with a superstar lead and brings it, like a friendly terrier, to Bobby. The two plan a future full of riches based on selling surefire schlock.

Enter Karen, Bobby's new secretary, all wide-eyed freshness and, as she herself points out, naivete.

She fascinates Bobby, who gives her a book - a rather pompous one on radiation, God and death - and invites her to report on it later that night, at his house. She does. The next morning, it's the radiation film Bobby plans to green-light, rather than Charlie's sure thing.

Not surprisingly, Charlie - who sees his big break disappear - goes berserk, and a newly tougher Karen enters the fray.

Pepe's direction and Scott Pask's set, abetted by Brian MacDevitt's lighting, are spot-on slick for Mamet, holding up the mirror at just the right angle to a twisted society.

The performances catch the play on the wind. Piven (of TV's "Entourage") finds the burnt-out hollows beneath an overpromoted hack executive, while the always amazing Esparza is the pushy underdog, all rapid-fire action and virtuosic language.

Finally, there's the elegant Moss (the sveltely conniving Peggy Olson from "Mad Men"), slithering through the play's undergrowth like a grass snake.

Twenty years ago, I thought no cast could match the original trio of Joe Mantegna, Ron Silver and (what a surprise she could stand still, let alone act) Madonna.

I was wrong. For its acting alone, this new "Speed-the-Plow" is a must-see.

SPEED-THE-PLOW

A ***1/2 review from USA TODAY...

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — With Wall Street in ruins and businesses of all stripes facing greater consumer discretion, there is at least one place left where a guy or gal can safely exploit a colleague's dreams and the public's basest instincts. Hooray for Hollywood!
It's a measure of the blossoming triumph of commerce over art — not just in the movie business, but in television, music and, dare I say it, print and online media — that Speed-the-Plow seems even more topical today than when David Mamet introduced it.

Twenty years after Plow's Broadway debut, the wickedly fine revival (* * *½out of four) that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre seems less like a satire than a darkly comic documentary. Strip away the trenchant wit of Mamet's dialogue and it's not hard to imagine his narcissistic, desperate characters inhabiting a reality TV show.

There are Bobby Gould, freshly appointed head of production at a Hollywood studio, and Charlie Fox, the longtime colleague who has remained loyally and resentfully in his shadow. On Bobby's first day in his new position, Charlie arrives bearing a gift: a buddy picture, set in prison, with a big star attached.

By coincidence, Bobby is leafing through a book pitched by a "very famous Eastern writer," with the catchy title The Bridge; Or, Radiation, and the Half-Life of Society. Select passages sound predictably esoteric, and a little loopy. Mamet is too smart and unsentimental a writer to glorify this highbrow project that will rival the buddy film; he's sending up more here than just crass commercialism.

Which brings us to the play's only female character, an attractive temporary secretary named Karen. After Charlie bets Bobby that he can't close another kind of deal with her, Bobby asks Karen to read the Eastern book as a pretext for getting her to his apartment for an oral report.

That after-hours meeting sets up a breathtaking final scene, in which each character gets a reality check as Mamet ponders, hilariously, the confusing and unpredictable tensions between sex and power, ideals and ambitions, gaining insight and getting ahead

Director Neil Pepe, a frequent Mamet collaborator, brings a keen ear for the playwright's blunt, jazzy rhythms, and he couldn't have better players. Jeremy Piven's Bobby is softer-textured but also more disturbing than the showbiz animal he plays on Entourage; we see the anxiety and flickers of good intentions underlying his cool arrogance.

Rau´l Esparza's Charlie is more sharply funny, and more revelatory; his brutal resourcefulness at the end will leave you titillated and haunted. Elisabeth Moss has a tougher assignment as Karen, whose motives and, frankly, intelligence are in question. She professes to be naive, and Moss, with her wide eyes and girlish voice, never entirely rules out that possibility.

Of course, innocence isn't a terribly valuable commodity in Speed-the-Plow anyway. Mamet's response to the greed-is-good '80s wasn't just perceptive, but also sadly prophetic.

Wow, this seems really good. I will be going up to New York soon and hopefully I will have time to see this show! Is there a way to find out all the dates for the show by any chance?

The moment I heard about this production, I immediately had "BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY" flash in my head. I'm thinking a nomination is inevitable for the play, its direction, and at least Raul Esparza in Best Actor. But with The Seagull, I think it might get smacked down.