THEATRE
SPEED-THE-PLOW 
October 18-November 8, 2009
Avg. Event Rating (4.5 Stars):
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a drama by David Mamet
directed by Robert Walsh
featuring Gabriel Kuttner*, Robert Pemberton*, and Aimee Doherty*
*member of Actors' Equity Association, the union of professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States
It’s a money-hungry business.
Speed-the-Plow exposes the greedy and opportunistic world of doing business. When an ambitious woman comes between two long-time friends, she threatens to derail the greenlighting of their surefire screenplay. In the business of making movies, we quickly learn that money talks, sex sells, and doing the right thing can be professional suicide. Coming off of a much-discussed, successful Broadway run, this 85-minute, hard-hitting play, by one of America's most revered writers, will have you questioning who your friends are and where your alliances lie.
"What makes Speed-the-Plow so exciting is its power to define and destroy an entire self-contained world through the tools and weapons of spoken words..." – The New York Times
"Mamet's clearest, wittiest play." – The New York Daily News
Approximately 85 minutes. There will not be an intermission.
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At-a-
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Venue Info
New Repertory Theatre in Residence at The Arsenal Center for the Arts Charles Mosesian Theater
321 Arsenal Street
Watertown, MA 02472 -
Admission Info
Tickets: Off Peak: All seats-Sun Eve, Thu Mat, Wed, Thu Eve, Fri, (Monday Opening Tr-B only). Orch $48.00 Tr-B $42.00 Peak: All Seats--Sun Mat, Sat Mat, Sat Eve, (Monday Opening Orch seats only). Orch $54.00 Tr-B $49.00 All Shows: Tr-C $35.00 Discounts available for Seniors (60 and older), Full Time Students, WGBH members, WBUR members, MTA members, Harvard University Employees, Concierge members of USO, Arsenal Center for the Arts members, and TCG members.
Info Phone: 617-923-8487
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Dates & Times
Dates:
October 18-November 8, 2009Times:
Sun 10/18 2pm (Panel Discussion)
Sun 10/18 7:30 pm
Mon 10/19 7:30 pm (Opening)
Thu 10/22 2 pm
Thu 10/22 7:30 pm
Fri 10/23 8 pm
Sat 10/24 8 pm
Sun 10/25 2 pm (Talkback)
Thu 10/29 7:30 pm
Fri 10/30 8 pm
Sat 10/31 3:30 pm
Sat 10/31 8 pm
Sun 11/1 2 pm (Talkback)
Sun 11/1 7:30 pm
Wed 11/4 7:30 pm
Thu 11/5 7:30 pm
Fri 11/6 8 pm
Sat 11/7 3:30 pm
Sat 11/7 8 pm (Closing)
Sun 11/8 2 pm (New Added Show!!!) -
Accessibility Info
TTY: 617-923-2067 or email tickets@newrep.org
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Member Reviews
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
"A Must-See!"
Review posted by: janet243 from Boston, Oct 22, 2009
Even if you're not a huge Mamet fan (as I'm not), this is a terrific play -- well written, complex but hilarious -- and beautifully acted. Definitely not to be missed.
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
"Its a business!"
Review posted by: Andrew Broussard from Chestnut Hill, MA, USA, Oct 20, 2009
A terrific revival of a still-potent play. A simplistic set, three incredibly talented actors, and stellar direction made for a very enjoyable evening. Any quibbles I had with the production were... Expand
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
"A Must-See!"
Review posted by: janet243 from Boston, Oct 22, 2009
Even if you're not a huge Mamet fan (as I'm not), this is a terrific play -- well written, complex but hilarious -- and beautifully acted. Definitely not to be missed.
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
"Its a business!"
Review posted by: Andrew Broussard from Chestnut Hill, MA, USA, Oct 20, 2009
A terrific revival of a still-potent play. A simplistic set, three incredibly talented actors, and stellar direction made for a very enjoyable evening. Any quibbles I had with the production were... Expand
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Media Reviews
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
Article: Speed up 'The Plow'
TAB - Oct 23, 2009
By Alexander StevensThey’re having fun down at the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, happily doing battle in David Mamet’s war of words, “Speed-The-Plow.” You’ll have fun, too. Sure Hollywood is an easy target — perhaps even easier now than when Mamet wrote the play i… Expand
They’re having fun down at the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, happily doing battle in David Mamet’s war of words, “Speed-The-Plow.” You’ll have fun, too. Sure Hollywood is an easy target — perhaps even easier now than when Mamet wrote the play in 1988. But director Robert Walsh has seized upon the play’s wit and its rat-a-tat-tat rhythms, turning it into a musical of words. And even if some of Mamet’s plotting remains a little creaky and suspect, you’ll forgive the play’s lapses because the characters are so richly comical, so pathetically human, and so much fun to hate.
At the center of it all are two Hollywood insiders who are also Hollywood stereotypes — fast-talking, self-loathing salesmen who almost believe their own chatter. As a comic vein to mine, it’s rich. They have no illusions about their professions, readily and repeatedly describing themselves as whores. “Bobby likes his coffee like he makes his movies,” jokes Charlie, “nothing in it.” But there’s more truth than jest in his jibe.
The two men appear headed for Easy Street. Charlie (Gabriel Kuttner) is on the verge of sealing a movie deal with A-list actor Doug Brown (think: Tom Cruise), and he’s brought the project straight to his longtime friend, and boss, Bobby (Robert Pemberton).
One more meeting to seal the deal, and then nothing to do but sit back and tally the boffo box office receipts. But this is a Mamet play — things aren’t going to go that smoothly. Surely, there are plot twists, power plays and f-bombs to follow.
Enter Karen (Aimee Doherty). She’s the comely temp who’s apparently as naive as they come. But when Bobby bets Charlie that he can bed her, Karen soon holds the key as to whether or not this Doug Brown picture ever gets made.
Bobby offers her an assignment as a ruse to get her back to his house. She’s supposed to read a book about radiation and the end of the world, and report to Bobby — at his house, that night, over wine, of course — about whether the book would make a good (translation: profitable) movie.
That’s where Karen turns on the charm. She’s wowed by the book, and makes an impassioned pitch to Bobby to green-light it. And Doherty has such a beguiling beauty and wholesome delivery that you start to think a movie about radiation just might be a good idea. And as Karen’s hair comes down and the wine flows, Bobby starts to think that way, too. The next morning, at the office, he’s had a change of heart that just might give Charlie — who’s so close to pay dirt he can taste it — an aneurism.
It’s in this last scene that the play really fires on all cylinders. The gloves come off, and out comes the hostility, profanity and misogyny that have been the foundation of Mamet’s career. It’s a pleasing bit of fireworks, and if you haven’t seen the play before, you’ll have a hard time figuring out how the whole thing is going to end.
But the fireworks — as resplendent as they may be — aren’t quite enough to distract you from some obvious holes in the story. The biggest comes during Bobby’s planned seduction. When Karen says that she’d like to help make the radiation movie, Bobby (inexplicably) tells the truth, saying it will never be turned into a film. Mis-take. Why would a guy who’s trying to seduce a woman crush the dream that has her so fawning and excited? A guy who’s slimy enough to make a $500 bet that he can bed a woman would promise her that she’ll play an important role as creative adviser on the movie, and, of course, she’ll also be his personal assistant.
As much fun as the cast is having with the show right now, they’ll be having more fun in a week. They’re still wrestling a bit with their lines, and “Speed-The-Plow” is really one long breathless 90-minute sentence. Director Robert Walsh can clearly hear the tumble of words in his head, but his cast isn’t quite delivering it, yet. When they do, this one-act will be a pleasing little roller coaster ride.
And Gabriel Kuttner, who’s already terrific, will be delivering one of the finest performances of the theater season. He’s astounding, bringing depth and dimension to a Charlie who’s pitbull, hitman and schlep. He shifts effortlessly from pathetic to loyal to scary. When the three actors are completely up to speed, “The Plow” will be a ferocious little jazz trio that’ll be mighty fun to watch. Collapse -
Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
Article: Witty repartee keeps New Rep's 'Plow' moving
The Boston Globe - Oct 22, 2009
By Don AucoinWATERTOWN - There was reason to worry about the vitality of the New Repertory Theatre last month when Kate Warner began her tenure as artistic director with a sluggish production of the dated “Mister Roberts.’’
Paging Dr. Mamet: W… ExpandWATERTOWN - There was reason to worry about the vitality of the New Repertory Theatre last month when Kate Warner began her tenure as artistic director with a sluggish production of the dated “Mister Roberts.’’
Paging Dr. Mamet: With “Speed-the-Plow,’’ a Hollywood satire by the ever-provocative David Mamet, the New Rep stage has come back to life. Cursing, scheming, down-and-dirty life.
Though “Speed-the-Plow’’ sags a bit in the middle, Mamet was mostly in top form with this tale of two blockbuster-obsessed movie producers and the idealistic temp who upends their moral universe. The playwright ingeniously maps the shifting balance of power, as first one character seems to be holding all the cards, and then another, and finally another.
“Speed-the-Plow’’ has a production history as colorful as the events onstage. It twice created a stir on Broadway: first, at its premiere in 1988, when Madonna made her stage debut amid great hullabaloo (with costars Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver), and again last December, when Jeremy Piven abruptly left the cast because of elevated levels of mercury in his blood, which he attributed to the excessive consumption of fish. “My understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer,’’ Mamet cracked at the time.
In the snappy New Rep production, Robert Pemberton plays Bobby Gould, the newly appointed head of production at a film studio. As Gould is sitting at his desk one day, rolling his eyes while giving a “courtesy read’’ to “The Bridge,’’ a turgid piece of literary fiction about radiation and the Meaning of Life, in walks a lower-ranking producer, Charlie Fox (Gabriel Kuttner), with some marvelous news.
Fox has uncovered an old action-caper script from a studio file, gotten it into the hands of a major movie star named Doug Brown, and Brown loved it! He wants to make the film! The script is preposterous, of course. Here is how Gould sums it up after hearing Fox’s outline: “. . . a buddy film, a prison film, Douggie Brown, blah, blah, some girl . . . action, blood, a social theme. . .’’
And dollars. Lots and lots of dollars. Fox, who is badly in need of a break, is jubilant. But beneath his excitement is a discernible undercurrent of resentment toward the more successful Gould. Unable to resist tweaking him, Fox bets Gould $500 that he cannot seduce Karen (Aimee Doherty), Gould’s temporary secretary. Gould takes the bet. He asks Karen to read “The Bridge,’’ then come to his house that night and give him a full report on whether it would make a good movie. She does so, which is when things get complicated. A seduction does indeed take place, but who seduces whom? And which movie will get made, the sure-thing blockbuster or the art film?
As these questions get entertainingly thrashed out, director Robert Walsh gives us Mamet in all his complexity. An actor who has performed in Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre,’’ Walsh knows that the suspense in Mamet-land stems from the sense that just beneath the verbal violence lurks the threat of physical violence. Sooner or later, Mamet’s people run out of words and things get primal.
But while few writers deliver a jolt to the nervous system (or a punch to the gut) quite like Mamet, the dialogue is of course central to his work, including “Speed-the-Plow.’’ With its choppy, rat-a-tat-tat rhythms and half-finished sentences, Mamet-speak poses a challenge to actors: If it doesn’t seem like their natural idiom, you could end up with the stilted tough-guy patter of, say, HBO’s “Deadwood’’ or ABC’s “NYPD Blue.’’
In their fast-paced scenes together - part conversation, part duel - Pemberton and Kuttner avoid this pitfall. Kuttner endows Fox with an edge of desperation; he has jittery limbs and jumpy eyes, like a man who knows this is his last chance. There is a stillness to Pemberton’s Gould; for all his bluster, he sometimes appears to be listening to an inner voice. Is that his conscience calling? Doherty’s nuanced Karen, meanwhile, has an air of mystery. Does she have an agenda? Is she as interested in power as everyone else in Hollywood? The actress smartly leaves us guessing.
Eric Levenson’s set establishes a visual correlative to the prevailing mood: It is all sharp planes and angles, not unlike the characters. But as always with Mamet, it is our ears, not our eyes, that have most of the fun.
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
Article: Get up to 'Speed' with Mamet's biting wit
Boston Herald - Oct 21, 2009
By Jenna Scherer“Speed-the-Plow,” David Mamet’s play about the movie business, has been beset by industry dramaitself. The original 1988 production marked Madonna’s controversial stage debut. And last year’s Broadway revival resulted in a media storm when Jeremy Piv… Expand
“Speed-the-Plow,” David Mamet’s play about the movie business, has been beset by industry dramaitself. The original 1988 production marked Madonna’s controversial stage debut. And last year’s Broadway revival resulted in a media storm when Jeremy Piven (“Entourage”) bowed out, claiming sushi-related health troubles.
New Repertory Theatre’s production doesn’t have any big names or behind-the-scenes gossip to call its own, but it does have a solid local cast and a keen grasp of Mamet’s caustic wit.
This three-hander goes down in the belly of the Hollywood beast - a production company. And Mamet takes no small pleasure in showing us how the sausage gets made. Bobby Gould (Robert Pemberton) has just been made head of production and everyone wants a piece of him. He’s got two offers on his desk: an arty, apocalyptic novel, hilariously titled “The Bridge: or, Radiation and theHalf-Life of Society. A Study of Decay”; and a big-budget prison movie starring megawatt celeb Doug Brown (think Tom Cruise).
Bobby’s business associate and frenemy Charlie Fox (Gabriel Kuttner) is dead-set on co-producing the Doug Brown picture. At first there’s no question Bobby will make the profitable choice. The monkey in the machine is Karen(Aimee Doherty), a secretary who gulps “The Bridge’s” end-of-days Kool-Aid and will do whatever it takes to make Bobby green-light it.
Director Robert Walsh’s production is short and sour, like a hard candy you never crack. His “Speed-the-Plow” has a physical, rough-edged quality in keeping with Walsh’s background as a fight choreographer.
Mamet’s insult-peppered exchanges play like a fast game of squash in the hands of Pemberton and Kuttner. New Rep regular Doherty, who chiefly performs in musicals, proves she’s got dramatic chops. Some of the funniest moments come during Karen’s readings of pseudo-intellectual passages from “The Bridge.” Doherty infuses them with the right dose of airheaded reverence.
“Speed-the-Plow” is a Mamet classic that covers two of the playwright’s favorite subjects - business politics and men behaving badly. Everyone is trying to cut through the bull. But the point is that it’s all bull, whether the pretentious kind in “The Bridge” or the pulp action kind in the prison movie.
Real human stuff like friendship and desire is also not free from a choking layer of hot air, and that’s what “Speed-the-Plow” really has to say about the industry - that all this game-playing can be bad for your system. Heck, just look at Jeremy Piven.
“SPEED-THE-PLOW” Presented by New Repertory Theatre at Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, Monday night. Through Nov. 7.
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
Article: Speed-the-Plow
The EDGE - Oct 21, 2009
By Killian MelloyThe New Repertory Theatre’s production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow starts off at a jolly boil and stays there, rattling the lid and sending up plumes of coarse language together with elegant plotting and characterization.
Bob (Robert… ExpandThe New Repertory Theatre’s production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow starts off at a jolly boil and stays there, rattling the lid and sending up plumes of coarse language together with elegant plotting and characterization.
Bob (Robert Pembleton) has just been given a promotion at the movie studio where he’s long been employed along with best friend Charlie (Gabriel Kutter). On his first day, Bob is besieged with scripts from hopefuls looking to break into the film business. But Charlie has a golden opportunity for him: a film starring Hollywood hunk and box-office draw Doug Brown. (Evidently, in the world Bob and Charlie inhabit, Doug Brown is the equivalent of Tom Cruise of George Clooney--his plain-as-dishwater stage name notwithstanding.)
The news is thrilling; the new office temp, Karen (Aimee Doherty), not so much: she can’t find the coffee pot or, for that matter, the big button that provides direct phone access to the studio head, to whom Bob and Charlie will have to pitch their plan for the Doug Brown movie.
Karen may be at a loss when it comes to her office responsibilities, but she’s a David Mamet character and so endowed with a primal cunning and ambition to match. (In one searing, off-color rebuke, Charlie sums her up quite nicely.) She’s also pre-loaded with the full palette of Mamet dialogue tics: meeting with Bob privately, she stammers her way through an impassioned oratorio of sentence fragments and garbled nonsense, reading aloud from a book she wants Bob to green light for movie development.
The book stinks, of course, but its ludicrous message of human development through irradiation proves convincing, and Charlie is sent into a towering tizzy when he finds that Bob is ready to bail on the Doug Brown movie in favor of Karen’s new pet project. The third act’s Charlie is a thundering revelation, and a transformation: Kuttner handles both versions of Charlie-- a sweating, jittery mess of nerves and avarice, then a raging inferno of fury and disappointment--with utter authority.
Pemberton’s Bob is just as well played: Bob is slick with the professional Hollywood hustler’s varnish, but he’s also insecure and scared. Pemberton brings all that, plus Bob’s infatuation with Karen, into a crackling performance that harmonizes with Kuttner’s, creating comic sparks that just don’t stop.
Doherty has the hardest role of all, playing a scheming vixen with as much brio as the boys. We are supposed to root for Charlie and Bob as a team--an early exchange between them rhapsodizing about the money they are going to make on the Doug Brown film plays like a love duet in which cash, rather than one another is the object of their affection--and Doherty has to swim against the unfair double standard that tells us that women shouldn’t be as greedy and driven as men, not to mention the fact that her character is the archetypal female intruder that breaks up male partnerships, distracting one member of the duo from business with a promise of sex. Despite all this, Doherty--without apologizing for her character’s ambitions--comes across as one more player in a town where you either play or get played.
There’s no clear setting for the play in terms of when this is all happening, but Charles Schoonmaker’s costumes give us a few clues about the era and the attitudes that apply to the characters. Bob is dressed in what looks like early ’80s casual; Karen, in her office setting, is done up in something that could have come out of Mad Men’s early 1960s setting, before she transforms into a freer spirit, almost resembling a later ’60s flower child. Charlie is stuck in the ’70s, which fits his chattery second-banana status all too well.
J. Hagenbuckle’s sound design is minimal, but effective: the play starts off with a nod to Tinseltown by using a well-known studio’s fanfare, before jumping into a jazzy original score.
As for Eric Levenson’s set, it’s minimal but not too Spartan: the same dual-level space, its halves defined by brown and blue carpeting, serves as Bob’s office, complete with desk and chairs and suitable props, and as Bob’s apartment, where Bob thinks he’s seducing Karen--and Karen knows she’s seducing Bob.
The New Rep have taken one of Mamet’s best scripts and realized its potential for understated existentialist panic as well as for blistering, incorrect comedy.
Speed-the-Plow plays at the Arsenal Center For the Arts, located at 321 Arsenal Street in Watertown, through November 7.
Tickets cost $35-$54; seniors get discount of $7 off. Student rush tickets cost $13. Tickets can be obtained online at www.newrep.org or via phone at 617-923-8487.
Performance schedule: Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m.; Sundays at 2:00 p.m. Additional performances will take place Thursday, Oct. 22, at 2:00 p.m., Saturday Oct. 31 and Nov. 7 at 3:30 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 1, at 7:30 p.m.
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Event Name: SPEED-THE-PLOW
Article: Director aims to make Mamet's words work
The Boston Globe - Oct 20, 2009
By Joel Brown“How we talk sometimes determines who we are," Robert Walsh says, paraphrasing David Mamet. Due diligence on the dialogue is key as Walsh prepares to direct Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow’’ at the New Repertory Theatre.
“Mamet’s care in wo… Expand“How we talk sometimes determines who we are," Robert Walsh says, paraphrasing David Mamet. Due diligence on the dialogue is key as Walsh prepares to direct Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow’’ at the New Repertory Theatre.
“Mamet’s care in word selection is obvious, but also there’s a degree to which his plays are wonderfully rhythmical and musical. It’s part of the energy, part of the information,’’ Walsh says. “He is very meticulous in how he uses grammar and punctuation. There’s a lot of information in the text on what words are the dominant word or operative word in a sentence . . . the language is filled with ellipses and implied language.’’
Walsh directs Robert Pemberton, Gabriel Kuttner, and Aimee Doherty in the New Rep production, Sunday through Nov. 7 at the Watertown theater. Pemberton plays Bobby Gould, a mid-level Hollywood producer with some pull at his studio. Kuttner is Charlie Fox, another producer, who while less successful than Bobby, does have his hooks in a potential hit action film. He wants Bobby to get behind it.
“Certainly Charlie Fox and Bobby Gould have their own shorthand. They’ve been working together so long,’’ Walsh says. “Not unlike a marriage, you begin to fill in the other person’s comments. It’s how little of their language do you need, before you’ve intuited what they’re going to say?’’
Then into their lives steps Karen, a pretty young temp whom Bobby will try to bed to win a bet with Charlie. She has a more idealistic film she says Bobby should tackle instead.
“You’ve got a very male sensibility, very gritty, very sort of ‘guy language,’ and into that walks Karen, this woman who in many respects is rather mysterious,’’ Walsh said. “She brings a polar opposite dynamic to the language and how people communicate. It certainly catches Bobby Gould where he is in his life, in his age, his sensibility - she finds him at an opportune moment. So it’s fun as these paradigms of language get changed in the moment.’’
“You’re looking for signposts on a journey,’’ Pemberton said in a separate conversation. “[Mamet] gives them to you in his punctuation, in what he italicizes, in the very specific words he chooses to use, in the shortness of the sentences. That’s how you each find the rhythm.’’
The play tackles themes of art versus entertainment, idealism versus cynicism, loyalty versus betrayal, and all in less than 90 minutes. And while much has changed since “Speed-the-Plow’’ debuted on Broadway in 1988, the basic realities of life in Hollywood remain the same, Walsh said. In fact, Hollywood belt-tightening means that even the production budgets in the script didn’t have to be updated, he said.
Walsh says he has known Mamet casually for nearly two decades, since a benefit reading of Mamet’s work when the playwright lived in the Boston area. He worked briefly on a couple of Mamet films, including “State and Main,’’ which was shot in Massachusetts. “I play a state trooper. I arrest Alec Baldwin, so I have a scene with Alec Baldwin and David Paymer. The other bit was in ‘The Spanish Prisoner’; I was Steve Martin’s stunt double. At the end of the movie he gets shot with a stun gun, and they asked me to come in and pull that off for him.’’
Perhaps more relevant, Walsh directed Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre’’ for a New Jersey theater company before tackling “Speed-the-Plow.’’
What’s Walsh like as a director? “He allows each actor to go through their process. He’s very patient,’’ Pemberton says, noting that’s probably because Walsh is also an actor. Among several times they’ve worked together, the first was a Merrimack Repertory Theatre production of “Our Town’’ perhaps 15 years ago, when Walsh played his father-in-law, Pemberton says.
There have been numerous productions of “Speed-the-Plow’’ with stellar casts, from the 1988 teaming of Joe Mantegna, Ron Silver, and Madonna to a recent Broadway version that became notorious when star Jeremy Piven dropped out, claiming high mercury level, perhaps from excessive sushi consumption.
“I had the cast over for an informal reading before we got started,’’ Walsh says, “and coincidentally sushi was served, so I think we’re dispelling the notion that there are any bad omens around it.’’
“Speed-the-Plow’’ opens Sunday at the New Rep and continues through Nov. 7. Tickets, $35-$54, at 617-923-8487 or www.newrep.org.
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