Speed-the-Plow's Broadway run is the most recent triumph of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's astonishingly productive career. "By turns hilarious and chilling....the culmination of this playwright's work to date....Riveting theater."-Frank Rich, New York Times; "A brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity and another tone poem by our foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy... On its deepest level it belongs with the darker disclosures of movie-biz pathology like Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. In a sense Speed-the-Plow distills all of these to a stark quintessence: there's hardly a line in it that isn't somehow insanely funny or scarily insane... [It is a] scathingly comic play."-Jack Kroll, Newsweek
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
took toooo long to receive - returned to sender:
play "speed the plow" - ordered 10/30/08 - received 11/28/08 - received a copy - could have been from amazon - within 3 days after inquiring - returned first order "return to sender". hope I don't get billed for two.
Hope don't have order go through amazon again.
Mamet Headed for Another Revival:
This play on Broadway originally starred Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver. To me David Mamet is an overrated playwright and an underrated screenwriter. The play is going to be revived in the 2008-2009 season along with Mamet's "American Buffalo." They are both slight efforts which pale in comparison to Pinter, Stoppard, Albee etcetera. He puts three characters on the stage and lets them blabber on, but he adds some comedy. Supposedly there's a deep and portentous subtext related to the American psyche.... more info
The Search:
Here is Mamet and men, conspiring, dreaming, angling, betting each other, baiting 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... more info
The best of Mamet (along with Glen Garry):
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... more info
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