Speed the Plow: A review of a play more interesting in the disection than the viewing

Saturday rained like a million Clydesdales pissing, and I, seemingly in some egotistical notion that by virtue of not being prepared for inclement weather, the weather would bend to my will. Instead, in the attempt to find the A.C.T. theater on Ellis, after my consultation group, I couldn't drive my scooter fast enough to get between the rain drops. Drenched from top to bottom, in a punishment of my hubris.

And then I get to the theater, looking for my wife to be standing there, awaiting me with pitying eyes, I see no one familiar. She hasn't left yet, telling me to come home and get dry, and we'll set out again. I'm irked by her absence, but at the thought of sitting through lunch and a two hour play wet, it seems a pretty good idea.

So, to the play. "Speed the Plow," by David Mamet, is a piece of theater that talks a lot, has people move around in small spaces, and says very little. Not that the characters say little; they actually are saying a lot, even when they're saying nothing. It's the work itself that has people expressing meaning in empty patter, and yet, in its gestalt, says nothing particularly revealing about its subject. I found more in it on the walk back to the car with Heather than actually sitting in the theater.

So. "Speed the Plow" is about two old Hollywood survivors who have risen together through the studio ranks, one in the lead and the other ("The Parasite," my term) on his coattails, struggling through a 24 hour period, blown around by the introduction of Kathy the temporary secretary ("The Idealist"). The Mogul and Parasite are set to make an empty but profitable blockbuster with someone I kept hearing as Tom Cruise, a prison buddy movie blah blah. They're going to make a lot of money: the Mogul will continue to rise, and the Parasite will finally get some juice around town, and long coveted wealth, and longer coveted ability to get some payback for having to eat shit the last 20 years.

Enter the foil, a young woman working as a temp, filling in for the Mogul's sick secretary. She acts as the voice of idealism, who, in a bid to get her in bed, the Mogul invites to read a book on the transformative value of radiation in human history and soul. She comes to his house and pitches the book to him, which he buys because she taps into his long dormant need for basic human sustenance: purpose and emotional meaning.

But he's a duck out of water in those realms, and stumbles into the office the next day, the day of the big meeting with the head of the studio, and tells his old partner that he'd doing the book, not the blockbuster. The Parasite struggles through the next 20 minutes, from cajoling to physical attack, and finally does a brilliant maneuver on the Idealist, a beautiful judo move that throws her to the mat and out of the ring. The partners go off to serve their appropriate function.

Now, I have never like Mamet. I find his people odd cyphers, not devoid of real life, just so filtered as to be relatively useless. His men are a particular narrow, and at the end of the day, particularly uninteresting and unrepresentative variety of humanness. They're like testosterone that has been thinned with water. They have the carapace of power, they move like power, but they're wispy inside.

As a send up of the Hollywood system, it was a bit of a yawner, and besides, what's easier to skewer? But it's not really a satire, because the most likable person, the most honest and worthy of empathy is actually the Parasite. He isn't confused about who he is or what he wants. The Mogul wants redemption, in the same way a dim ember wants to burst into flame, but finds itself on a dark night, totally without wind. The Idealist closets her yearning for power in ideas and phony emotions, in intellectualized pathos for the world, in her desire to reshape the world in her own image, the right image.

The Parasite calls it right and honestly when he says to the Mogul, "You're a whore and I'm a whore." That is true. And there is integrity in the admission and embrace of that. The Idealist is the ugliest character on stage because she doesn't really know herself, is lying to herself throughout the play, learning nothing at the end, baffled by her own failure because she cannot recognize her own machinations. The Mogul's redemption is actually his return to lucidity about his own identity: he is no longer lying to himself.

The Idealist is willing to have the Mogul sacrifice his 20 year relationship with the Parasite, and all that the Parasite has yearned and worked for, without a second thought, without a trace of empathy or understanding of what she is doing. She sells the Mogul on the arrogant totalizing of the Radiation book without realizing she's selling, or that she's manipulating. When she says to the Mogul, after admitting, when pushed by the Parasite, that she wouldn't have slept with the Mogul if he hadn't agreed to making the book, "Come, we have a meeting," you see the ugliness of her unacknowledged manipulations.

When, in the program notes, the play's director, in a single paragraph in a two page article, refers to the Idealist as pure or honest, I was totally surprised. The Idealist is the dishonest one, and more brutal in her way than the business men because she will sacrifice both on the altar of her own righteous ideals. The book won't make a great movie; it's horribly written, and intellectualized in its spirituality. The Mogul will be ruined and not at all redeemed, because he has found only a toxic mimic of spirituality and soul, and will realize this in the hail of scorn over the movie. The Parasite will be thrown away, made the scapegoat of venality for the other two's palsied reach for salvation.

The Parasite and the Mogul actually have a bond, a relationship, and when the Parasite says he loves the Mogul, you believe him. Thus the Idealist's encouragement for the Mogul to toss away the Parasite is not an indictment of the Mogul--he's been exposed to the pheromones of Spirit and is totally un-moored--but of the Idealist, who in the guise of caring and meaning will cut the throat of the unworthy and unconverted. She doesn't know it; it's buried a few layers down and only emerges in a couple comments, but is there in her actions. Given enough power, you could see in her why the far left and right often come out acting the same, even if one is dressed in organic cotton and the other blue blazer.

At the end of the day, it's the aware corruptions who are more sympathetic than the unaware idealism. The system is what it is; you're dealing with huge sums of money and therefore there's huge constraints and dynamics at work. That's the real world, and the Parasite, and then the Mogul, know what world they're living in. They're not exercising a subtle violence against Spirit by insisting that the real world is a corruption of something else. Plus, they have a relationship formed out of real struggle and loyalty, and against the de-centered, other-focused pull of the Idealist, that's something to be admired.