Soulpepper Theatre's Speed-The-Plow: Review

David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow is a bitter little confection, something like a theatrical version of a Sour Patch candy. Soulpepper Theatre's production, which opened last night, is directed by David Storch and stars Ari Cohen, Jordan Pettle and Sarah Wilson.

The play's title is a reference to a Medieval poem that calls on God to "spede the plow (...) our purpose for to mak"; an apt name for a play about the battle between God or virtue and the desire for wealth and power  – specifically, in this case, in Hollywood. It's about a recently-promoted young movie producer who must choose between two proposals: a dreadful, repugnant piece of formulaic schlock that's guaranteed to make him rich, and an eminently worthy though utterly depressing book adaptation that could change lives, but which will most likely bomb at the box office.

One has to imagine that Mamet had plenty of personal experience to draw on; by the time Speed-The-Plow was produced in 1988, he had already written screenplays for The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as The Untouchables and an episode of TV's Hill Street Blues. Of the three actors, Pettle (as the proponent of the violent and soulless prison film) is closest to perfecting the driving rhythmic flow of Mamet's language, as he registers his character's growing desperation at the increasingly likely prospect of being about to be destroyed by his colleague's random access of goodness.

The issues debated in Speed-The-Plow are certainly still on everyone's minds these days, almost a quarter century after its premiere. I found it in a way comforting to be reminded that a kind of generalized angst – not just every individual's uneasy apprehension of mortality, but an oblique dread of something much bigger (global warming? zombie apocalypse?) – was already in circulation in the late '80s, long before 9-11.

Presented without intermission, this production is an apt and amusing little fable that will certainly ring with painful, funny truth for anyone involved in the arts. Speed-The-Plow runs to September 22. For tickets, call 416-866-8666 or visit Soulpepper.

Photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann. Ari Cohen (L) as Bobby Gould and Jordan Pettle (R) as Charlie Fox.