Entertainment :: Theatre
Speed-the-Plowby Kilian MelloyWednesday Oct 21, 2009 The 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.
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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