David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, a look at cutthroat decision-making in the movie business, gets an appropriately speedy production at GableStage: start to finish in under 90 minutes.
Outside of adjusting for inflation and for changing attitudes toward indoor smoking, there's no time warp two decades after its Broadway debut. But in what has become a 24/7 celebrity-driven information cycle, there may not be many surprises either. Still, the cast -- Paul Tei, Gregg Weiner and Amy Elane Anderson under director Joseph Adler-- keeps things steaming along.
This is 24 hours in the life of Bobby Gould (Tei), the studio's latest golden boy, starting his first workday as head of production. (He himself doesn't make movies, but he can approve their making if the price is right; above that he's got to go to the studio boss.) Into his new office comes a friend, Charlie Fox (Weiner), another of the studio's ambitious longtime production denizens. Charlie has just been visited by a hot actor who wants them to make his next movie, a violent and big-budget prison film that promises to make Bobby and Charlie rich as co-producers. A meeting with the boss is needed, but in the meantime there a stack of other possibilities.
Bobby tells Charlie: "If it's not quite art and it's not quite entertainment, it's here on my desk." Among the offerings: an end-of-the-world novel that the boss has ordered Bobby to give "a courtesy read" before it's rejected. Much foul-mouthed derision toward the artsy novel ensues, much Mametian coarse talk about spending money and settling scores -- talk that turns more crude when a temp secretary, Karen (Anderson), arrives with coffee.
There's sycophancy, anger, the question of whether to go with a buddy film starring "the flavor of the month" or a something artsy -- or merely tedious -- about thousands of years of radiation. All that in three scenes that break down to: Boy (Gould) bets buddy over bedding girl; girl (Karen) visits boy's home, and, finally, a test of the cleverness of Fox.
There's some subtlety in tech. Gould's office still is being painted and there's a ladder leaning against the wall of one of the seating areas, reinforcing the idea of a long climb to the (almost) top. The office windows show a sky of baby blue. When Karen shows up at Bobby's home (the lower-level office set has given way to a couch-dominated room) the windows give way to a cobalt sky than darkens during the scene.
http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2009/08/13/14/74-5751368.embedded.pr..." />
