Stage:

...Yet Mamet has more in mind than a ritual chiding of Hollywood venality...

...She does so not by argument, but by sleeping with him...

...It sounds like the kind of work which fondles the annihilation of the world while it whimpers its dessicated whisper of hope...

...Mamet's up-from-the-mailroom dealers are rough diamonds-zircons, at least-who know each other so well that they can overlap one another's speeches, communicate in reiterated platitudes decorated with sometimes elegant obscenity...

...Bobby and Charlie are a reprehensible pair (each would sacrifice the other for an edge up), but Mategna and Silver give them so much energy, so much chutzpah, so much tacky charm that we find ourselves rooting for Bobby's return to chicanery...

...Grundy, whose name became a synonym for British respectability, and she never appears at all...

...His best plays (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross) are set in male enclaves, and Sexual Perversity in Chicago follows the buddy formula in its story...

...Reviewers tended to describe the book as an "anti-radiation' ' novel, but it is called Radiation and, from what we hear of the argument, the author is using radiation and Mamet uses decay and decadence in his essays in Writing in Restaurants, as a necessary destructive stage to revitalization...

...She reads a ponderous paragraph and then, faced with defeat, insists that that is not the passage she has in mind and keeps flipping the pages hopelessly...

...So does Speed-the-Plow...

...As in Morton's play, where characters are constantly guessing what Mrs...

...Silver modified her metaphor by suggesting that this was still another of Mamet's examinations of American business: "You show me one person in business who decides to do something that's good if the sacrifice is their quarterly statement...

...After the requisite feminine interruption, the two men go off together to face the studio head-like Flagg and Quirt hurrying to the front in What Price Glory?-and the woman is tossed aside...

...It's about life...

...At first she seems to be the dumb secretary stereotype, too dense to find the coffee machine, but at this stage she may be only a reflection of Bobby's attitude toward women...

...in the most recent Friday the Thirteenth topped Beetlejuice...

...Mamet seems to be using the book and Karen's naive embrace of it as a matter for satire, but there is a problem there too...

...They agree to join forces, go onward and upward with the sellable schlock, but the path of true greed never runs smooth...

...Anyone for Rambo III...

...In David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, the most pervasive character is also offstage: the American movie audience...

...There is a marvelous moment in which Karen tries to use the book to resnare Bobby after he allies himself again with Charlie...

...GERALD WEALES...

...The Mamet point of view is clear enough, but the play's successful borrowing of the buddy plot muddies the social theme...

...Her performance is not as flashily fine as those of Mategna and Silver, but she does a creditable job with a character who-unlike Bobby and Charlie-is never clearly defined...

...Whether Karen's projected movie is a joke or a serious option for Hollywood or a comic suggestion that serious options are possible, it is rejected...

...Enter the woman, for that is the way it is with buddy movies and has been at least since Gunga Din...

...In the last act, she has a new authority, a taste of power that leads her to the plural pronoun ("we have a meeting"), but if she were just another ambitious broad, as Charlie insists, she would not answer his direct question as she does, admitting that she only went to bed with Bobby to get the film made...

...It is not, as some reviewers have insisted, because Madonna is playing Karen...

...Bobby Gould (Joe Mantegna) has just become head of production at what we are to accept as a major studio and Charlie Fox (Ron Silver), who comes to him on his first day in power, has snagged a bankable star for a buddy movie he is trying to peddle...

...Grundy would think, Mamet's Hollywood hacks, who have their commercial credibility rather than their reputations to lose, assume that they know what will bring the moviegoers to the boxoffice: what brought them there last week...

...Their low estimate of the public is confirmed by the weekly listing of movie grosses...

...Greed and vulgarity triumph...

...He accepts Charlie's bet that he cannot seduce her...

...Maybe the target is not Hollywood, not American business, but the audience itself...

...If there is a difficulty in Speed-the-Plow, it lies with the woman in the case...

...It is possible that Mamet intends Karen as an innocent for whom the true heart of Hollywood is as elusive as the coffee machine-just the person to be taken in by the "Eastern wimp" author's pretentious book...

...Maybe that is the point...

...In her big scene in Act II, having read and presumably been won over by the book on nuclear destruction that Bobby asked her to give "a courtesy read," she persuades him to present it to the studio head rather than the buddy script...

...In a group interview in the New York Times (May 16), Madonna called the play a metaphor: "it's not just about Hollywood...

...Mamet's theory of decadence seems to me fair game for the satirist, but I am not sure that he is Bernard Shaw enough to guy his own ideas for the sake of the play...

...That revelation frees Bobby of his flirtation with art and social conscience and sends him back to his true calling as a junk merchant...

...Speed-the-Plow is a Mamet variation on the buddy movie...