Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by David Mamet, directed by David Storch
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
July 16-September 22, 2012
“The Half-Life of Society”
Soulpepper’s current production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow is a hilarious razor-sharp comedy satirizing the utter moral vacuity of Hollywood. The key word is comedy. Those who know Mamet only from such emotionally wrenching plays as Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) or Oleanna (1992), may forget that he also wrote the screenplay for the satiric film Wag the Dog (1997) and submits cartoons to the Huffington Post. Directors fail who have tried to give Speed-the-Plow the gravitas of his darker work because the play does not support that approach. We’re in the same male-dominated dog-eat-dog world as Glengarry Glen Ross, but Mamet portrays the male posturing as so patently false that we can view characters as men who have played the game so long they have become fools.
Bobby Gould (Ari Cohen) has just been made head of production at a big Hollywood studio with the job of finding scripts to be made into big budget movies. Suddenly his longtime associate Charlie Fox (Jordan Pettle) bursts into the office, which has not yet been redecorated, to announce incredible news. Movie star Doug Brown (some kind of analog to Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt) has just gone to Fox’s house to say he’d like to do an old script Fox sent him several years ago. Fox has until the next morning to make a “package” for Brown or the deal is off. Rather than go to another studio, Fox has brought the project to Gould out of loyalty and because he counts on their long association as a key to getting his name above the title as an associate producer.
Before Fox’s entrance, Gould had been struggling with a thick apocalyptic novel by an East Coast intellectual called The Bridge: or, Radiation and the Half-Life of Society. He had agreed to give the publisher a courtesy read of the tome with no intention of ever making it into a movie. But when Charlie and Bobby start fantasizes about the wealth they will have after the Doug Brown picture, Charlie goads Bobby into a bet whether Bobby can bed Karen (Sarah Wilson) his temporary secretary that night or not. Bobby’s strategy is to ask her as an ordinary member of the public to read The Bridge and deliver her opinion to him that night.
What Bobby hasn’t counted on is Karen’s dedication. While his eyes alternately leer and glaze over, Karen explains how The Bridge has profoundly moved her and has actually changed her life. Against his will, he is drawn into her arguments drawn from the book that life is short and must be used not for selfish gain but to benefit humanity. To Fox’s utter disbelief, he decides to greenlight The Bridge and not the Doug Brown film.
Though written in 1988, Mamet’s satire of Hollywood rings even truer now than it did then. Bobby says that his job is to find the movies that the public wants to see and that simply means making new versions of whatever movie that was the biggest financial hit of last year. Before his discussion with Karen, he proudly says that he’s in the business of money not art. Mamet makes his satire cut both ways since the excerpts so frequently read from The Bridge show that the book is turgid and pretentious and has the loony premise that God has put all the radiation we daily encounter on earth in order to prepare us for the next stage of evolution. Yet, the fact that The Bridge may not be a great work of fiction does not mean the deeply emotional effect it has on a reader like Karen is false.
Under Storch’s taut direction Cohen and Pettle’s rapid-fire dialogue snaps with electricity while Wilson’s slower cadences provide necessary counterbalance to the men’s overheated exchanges as they wind themselves up. All three are in top form. Beneath Bobby and Charlie’s extolling each other as buddies, we can’t avoid seeing Bobby’s disdain for Charlie or Charlie’s desperate envy of Bobby. Storch as wisely has Wilson avoid any hint that Karen is anything other than as naive and earnest as she says she is. To give her any note of calculation makes Bobby’s conversion to his “purer” self less funny and feeds into Charlie’s general misogyny.
No one will claim that Speed-the-Plow (its title a Puritan injunction to industry) is one of Mamet’s finest plays, but it is a very funny satire not just of Hollywood but of any corporate endeavour that has lost its moral compass. Since the number of such entities has only increased, the play seems more relevant now that did when it first appeared.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Ari Cohen and Jordan Pettle. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2012-07-17
Speed-the-Plow