Everyone’s a whore

Soulpepper’s take on Speed-the-plow is a seductive one

David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow is Mamet lite. It’s also Mamet funny, and Soulpepper, under David Storch’s direction, has given it a tight and entertaining production: the best, I think, of the three or four I’ve seen. That I can’t remember the exact number may well say something about me, but I think it also says something about the play.

Speed-the-Plow arrived in the world in 1998, five years after Mamet’s masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s a further exploration of the masculine jungle he’d charted in that play and American Buffalo, with the action transferred to happier hunting grounds, or at least to more luxurious ones. We’ve travelled from the worlds of Chicago junk dealers and desperate real-estate pitchers to that of Hollywood movers and shakers — or at least to that of those who would dearly love to move and shake. One of them may even, at long last, be in a position to do so. Bobby Gould has crawled his way up the studio ladder to the office of Head of Production, meaning he can say “no” to nearly everybody and “yes” to a favoured few whose ideas may end up doing him some favours. To him comes Charlie Fox, a long-time hanger-on (by his fingernails, chiefly) who has acquired a) the rights to a prison melodrama whose main attraction is that it’s like all other prison melodramas, and more importantly, b) the interest of an A-list star who, Charlie says breathlessly, has come

to his house. The catch is, the star has only given him a 24-hour window to clinch the deal. Bobby promises to take this sweetheart proposition to the studio head the very next morning and get him to rubber-stamp it.

In the outer office sits Karen, Bobby’s shy and self-effacing temp. Charlie, euphoric over his imminent riches, bets Bobby that he can’t seduce her. On Bobby’s desk sits a long novel, about radiation and the end of the world, to which he has promised to give a “courtesy read” as a necessary preliminary to declaring it unfilmable. Bobby asks Karen to read it, and to come to his house that evening with a report, which she does. She loves the book and — still shy but no longer so self-effacing, and terribly earnest — tells Bobby that it’s his duty to film it, as his contribution to saving humanity. (It’s not quite clear how this would work out as, from what we hear, the author regards Armageddon as a benign necessity, and radiation as God’s chosen instrument. I guess you have to take your divine radiance where you find it.) She convinces Bobby. She also falls into his bed. Charlie, arriving next day for his meeting, is furious to discover he’s lost his bet, and a lot more furious to realize that, since Bobby is only allowed to green-light one project of his own, he’s lost his one chance of a big score. Violence ensues, not all of it verbal.

It’s a watertight parable whose moral is, once again, that everyone’s a whore. It’s satisfactorily worked out, but not quite satisfyingly. The stakes aren’t as high as in Mamet’s previous plays. Yes, there’s more money at risk — millions, in fact — but nobody’s going to go to jail, or even be thrown on the street, if the deal doesn’t go through. Compare that to Shelley “the Machine” Levene ineluctably digging his own grave in Glengarry. Or, in a later Mamet, the professor in Oleanna doing much the same thing. Mamet’s ear for the poetry of profanity is as acute as ever, but the medium here outpaces the message; it’s hardly news that Hollywood is corrupt and that pictures get made for all the wrong reasons, which may be why, for all the snappiness of the dialogue, this quite short play feels quite long. At least, it does if you’ve seen it before. You’re not so deep, play, and your case is rigged. Get on with it, already.

The unfair though certainly amusing wrinkle is that whatever choice Bobby made would probably be the wrong one. Each character gets a shot at reading extracts from the disputed novel and, though they all read it in different tones and for different reasons, none of them leaves us in any doubt that it’s a terrible, pretentious book that would make a terrible pretentious picture. Bobby is an insecure slob who likes to play genial and to disparage any suggestion that he might be in the art-making business but in fact, even on artistic grounds, Charlie’s jailbreak story would be a better bet — at least somebody might enjoy it. It’s hard to believe Bobby wouldn’t realize this, even without Charlie’s prompting, maybe not while sleeping with Karen but certainly after waking up.

Ari Cohen plays Bobby brilliantly, all blubber and bluster, but it’s still hard to believe in him: not in his character but in his choices. Except his last one, which does have the old Mamet inevitability. Jordan Pettle has an easier job as Charlie; he’s a highenergy snake, jubilant at getting a break, terrified at the prospect of it slipping away, doing everything possible to hang on to it. He has, after years of humiliation, a love-hate relationship with his boss; Pettle, who has never been better, is unflaggingly on target. That includes his beating up on Bobby, of which the production, to its credit, makes less of a meal than others have done. There’s no suggestion that Charlie is out of control; on the contrary he knows exactly what he’s doing.

So does Karen; but it’s one of the play’s and the production’s best points that we can never be sure just what that is. She may be a genuine idealist; she may be a predatory cat posing as a mouse; she may well be all those things. Sarah Wilson makes her a sphinx with three faces; she’s a different person, in a smarter outfit, the morning after than she was the morning before, never mind the night during. In the central scene, when she and Bobby are sounding one another out on his sofa, it’s impossible to determine which of them is the seducer. Which is exactly as it should be.