Going to see just any play is quite a different experience from going to see a David Mamet play. You see, with other playwrights, it's hard to tell what to expect, but with Mamet, the formula is always the same: clipped, fast, and oft-interrupted dialogue, filled with "but"s and "wait"s and incomplete lines, sparse sets, and loathsome, infuriating characters.
Audiences either love his work or hate it. It's hard at first to swallow his trademark bickering dialogue style as realistic, but once you get it past your gullet, it's like an addictive pill - you get lost in its rhythm, flow, and elegance.
Mamet wrote Speed-the-Plow, now playing at CenterStage in Mt. Vernon, in 1988, and it is often cited as his most mysoginistic work. While his other works (among the most notable are the plays American Buffalo and Oleanna, as well as movies Glengarry, Glen Ross and the just-released Spartan) bluntly attack the character-types that Mamet sees around him, none goes as far as Speed-the-Plow does in decrying women, or at least women in Hollywood, as sexually manipulative users and hangers-on.
The three-scene story is of two small-time movie producers, Bobby Gould (David Chandler) and Charlie Fox (Vincent Guastaferro), about to hit it big with the prospect of a "Dougie Brown picture" that has been brought to Fox's attention by a colleague. In the first scene, Charlie pitches the script idea (it's a jail movie) to Bobby, his superior, and Gould eats it up. The more they talk about it, the more excited they get, and they both congratulate themselves on the fortune they will surely make.
Midway through the first scene, Karen (Lindsay Campbell), a substitute secretary, in for Bobby's sick assistant Cathy, enters the picture. She subtly enters herself into their conversation and then decides that she wants to get in on the venture any way she can.
She finds a novel that has been sent to the company for a "courtesy read," but will never make it to the production stage, and decides to convince Bobby to produce it instead of the jail film, and to give her a job on the set. In the process, she makes Bobby think that the book - which is about finding hope in the last days of the world - has an incredibly profound meaning, and sleeps with him the first night they meet. When Bobby tries to back out of the deal he had with Charlie on the other movie, a huge screaming match ensues, culminating in a confrontation and moment of truth with Karen.
Mamet's distaste for Hollywood producers makes itself clear. "What about art?," says Bobby, "I'm not an artist. No one who sits in this chair can be." Mamet also criticizes Hollywood's sensationalism and their refusal to produce anything but smut, as Bobby goes on: "You can take good taste, shove it up your ass, and fart 'The Carnival of Venice,' but good taste still won't hack it." Other times, the characters celebrate their vile identities shamelessly. Charlie tells Bobby, "You're a bought-and-paid-for whore and you think you're a ballerina because you work with your legs."
Guastaferro does a wonderful job with the character of Charlie, who transitions from the pathetic underling to Bobby, unable to make decisions and constantly deferential, to Bobby's moral superior. In the third scene, he even socks Bobby in the face in an effort to bring him to his senses. He accuses him of "ruling [the] office with [his] dick," and eventually convinces him to go with the jail film and break things off with Karen. "But I believe in this," says Bobby, talking about the book that Karen is using to get a job. "I believe in the Yellow Pages," replies Charlie, "but I don't want to make a picture out of it."
All of the signs in the play do, in fact, point to a motif of searing criticism of women and their role in the working world. Karen is subversive and manipulative, but in the end, the is put soundly in her place after Charlie tells her, "You're just a tight pussy wrapped around ambition," and quite literally, throws the book at her. In Speed-the-Plow, Mamet trafficks in the worst kind of sexism - the subtle, discomforting kind that leaves you feeling uneasy without immediately knowing why.
Chandler plays the perfect small-time sleazeball, with his greasy hair and glasses, but a manner onstage that is slightly less sinister, slightly more clumsy. The beautiful Campbell handles her complex role with poise. She is playing a part-within-a-part for most of the play, and she nails the subversiveness of her role. By the final, surprisingly early curtain, CenterStage manages to impress roundly.
