About The Book

Speed-the-Plow is an exhilaratingly sharp, comical, disturbing play about the power of money and sex in Hollywood, and how they corrupt two movie producers. Speed-the-Plow opened at Lincoln Center to sold-out seats, rave reviews and much fanfare in March 1988 – staring Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver–and later moved to and had a long-standing run on Broadway.

Praise

“By turns hilarious and chilling . . . the culmination of this playwright’s work to date. . . . Riveting theater.”—Frank Rich, New York Times

“A brilliant black comedy, a dazzling dissection of Hollywood cupidity and another tone poem by our foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy. . . .On its deepest level it belongs with the darker disclosures of movie-biz pathology like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. In a sense Speed-the-Plow distills all of these to a stark quintessence: there’s hardly a line in it that isn’t somehow insanely funny or scarily insane. . . . [It is a] scathingly comic play.”—Jack Kroll, Newsweek

“Speed-the-Plow is the deftest and funniest of Mamet’s works. His ear for language has never been more certain or more subtle. . . .”—Robert Brustein, The New Republic

“Crammed with wonderful, dazzling, brilliant lines like a plum pudding with fruit, like a gagbook with jokes. A harvest of riches. Mamet here is so damned entertaining—I laughed and laughed.”—Clive Barnes, New York Post