The 'Plow' and the stars: A family reunion (Thanks so much Carol)

Chicago Tribune, Sid Smith, Entertainment writer, Feb 19, 1989

If William L. Petersen and D. W. Moffett ever envisioned their reunion onstage after six years as a return to their good ol' boy days as chief hellraisers of the off-Loop theater community, they were wrong.

Joel Schumacher, handpicked to direct "Speed-the-Plow" by Petersen (who worked with the filmaker on the new hit movie "Cousins"), issued his first order in unequivocal terms: No booze.

Schumacher wasn't concerned about their health. "It's the memorization," says Moffett between sips of a non-alcoholic "beer." "Much of our dialogue is a series of 'hmmms' and 'hu-huhs' and 'yeahs.' There's an internal rhythm to it, and if you screw up one word, the whole scene can go."

Like "Glengarry Glen Ross," in which David Mamet provided a rhythmical, poetic rendering of the four-letter speech of sleazy real-estate salesmen, "Speed-the-Plow," which opens March 1 at Wisdom Bridge Theatre, is a linguistic boat ride atop waves of modern, conversational monosyllables. "I have a theory that David first writes a 140-page play," says Petersen. "But by the time he edits all the sentences down to phrases and a single words, it's barely longer than 50."

Though their party ways are on hold for the moment, the memories are still there, and, ironically, that has an important rehearsal value. Petersen and Moffett play Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox, a couple of longtime Hollywood shysters who have worked themselves into powerful positions in the movie industry. In the play, Charlie arrives to pitch a shlocky buddy script to his old buddy, Bobby, who says he'll produce it-until his idealistic young temporary secretary begins arguing otherwise.

The play is about much more than their friendship, but their camaraderie is an important subtext, and for Moffett and Petersen, that part didn't have to be imagined. "We don't have to invent a friendship," Moffett says. "We've schemed together, we've produced plays together. We've even (as do Bobby and Charlie over the temporary) made bets with each other about women."

Make no mistake, though this is serious stuff for both actors. "I think this is a great play because the characters are both normal and mythic," says Petersen. "There's more than manipulation about the making of a movie going on. It's a morality play with huge themes, one with a lot to say about this country right now."

For Moffett, the project is tailor-made. He's riding out his own case of Hollywood burnout, having starred in a cancelled series ("The Oldest Rookie") and recently worked in a pilot just picked up for a series by ABC-after his character wound up on the cutting room floor. "God was saying to me, 'Fine, Don, go to Chicago and do a play with Bill.' The fact that it's a play by David Mamet, and that it's this play in particular, makes it even better."

Joining "the boys," as she sometimes calls them, is 24-year-old Hope Davis, who plays the mysterious role of a young secretary on the make-or is she?-pitching a book for a film project that may just be the most profound writing of our time. As for taking the role of a novice sheep between a pair of veteran off-Loop wolves, Davis says, no problem. "I love them," she says. "They're strong personalities, but they haven't tried to boss me. The fact is, they got to age 12 and that was about it."

"The problem," says Moffett, "is that she keeps wanting us to be sensitive men." "Yeah," says Petersen, "we're pigs."

Kidding stops when any of the trio (or anyone on the Remains Theatre staff) brings up the name of the plays director. "Everybody Loves Joel" could well be his autobiography someday.

Schumacher has good reason to be nice,  "Cousins," his fifth movie, appears to be a winner, and with its predecessor, "Lost Boys," now a cult favorite, word is out that he just gets better and better. Why does his cast like him so much?

"I think I try hard not to be an ass," he says. "I fail most of the time, but I try. Maybe people are grateful for that."

The 'Plow" boy The end is near says David Mamet. And he means it.

Chicago Tribune, Richard Christiansen, Entertainment Editor, Feb 19, 1989

"It's a play about the end of the world."

David Mamet is talking here about "Speed-the-Plow," his hilarious and frightening play, and he means what he says.

He is determinedly offhand about it, since, he says, "I'm trying to be a stoic," but he is convinced nonetheless that the end is near. In other words, it's over.

In his belief, he is joining a long line of poet-philosophers, from the Greeks to T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. "I think it was Plato, or one of those Greeks," Mamet says, "who wrote that there never was an intelligent man who didn't look around him and become convinced that the world was going to end immediately."

Mamet, looking around the world in his time, has said (in a book of interviews of playwrights by David Savran, "In Their Own Words"):

"There are ebbs and flows in any civilization. Nothing lasts forever. We had a good time. We had Tennessee Williams. We had the Hola Hoop. We had the Edsel. All kinds of good stuff. The Constitution. To name but a few, Shelley Winters. Now you've got to pay the piper. Big deal."

Now, leaning back in his small second-floor office just off Harvard Square in Chambridge, Mass., he looks out at the warm, sunny February day and remarks, "The greenhouse effect in our environment quite obviously is going to bring the world to an end. Pollution. Overpopulation. It's all going to come down."

Still, as even the grimmest doomsayers have noted, life goes on in the midst of impending death, and "Speed-the-Plow" is also about life. Specifically, it's about life as it is practiced in that most bustling and amusing place, Hollywood.

Its surface is simple: a series of rapid-fire deal-making conversations between two studio functionaries, one recently promoted to a key post and the other his friend and lackey for many years, and a much less frenzied exchange between the new executive and an alluring temporary secretary who, for a while, convinces him that he can make a difference in life by producing an important and prophetic script by "an Eastern sissy writer."

In the process of these talks, however, Mamet shows a world built on greed and cynicism wasting its opportunities for doing good, its spirit collapsing in violent death throes.

The play began several years ago as a short work that featured Bobby Gould, the central character in Mamet's earlier, brief play of 1983, "The Disappearance of the Jews."

The new play, Mamet recalls, was to be "about Bobby and some shop girl he had insulted because she didn't recognize him." At that time, Mamet also was working on an avant-garde short story called "The Bridge," an apocalyptic tale, later incorporated into "Speed-the-Plow," which contained "basically the gnostic ideas in the point of view of the girl in the play Mamet tried out various titles on the evolving drama. An early choice was "In Mitzraim," a Hebrew phrase that means "In Egypt," or in deep, deep trouble. Another possibility was "Bobby Gould: A Polemical Play."

But polemics present a danger to Mamet. "The only time I tried to write a play of pure polemicism (Lone Canoe" in 1979), I had the biggest disaster of my or anybody else's career." Furthermore, Mamet decided, "If you're going to be (George Bernard) Shaw, you have got to be funny."

As it happens, the funniest, deadliest place Mamet knows is Hollywood, where he has written scripts for movies directed by himself ("House of Games" and "Things Change") and others ("The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "The Untouchables").

For Mamet, his new play really started to come together at a small sight he witnessed in Hollywood. "I was lounging around at Beverly Hills Hotel one day," he says, "when I saw these two guys with big cigars, sitting around the pool, poking each other and talking a deal. And I thought that this could have been the same conversation 2,000 years ago in Byzantium, where these same two Jewish guys were selling rugs to each other. It's the old Jewish joy of the deal."

Finally, on a hunting trip in East Texas, Mamet got the title for his play. "We were at a forge, watching a friend of mine pound out the steel for a hunting knife, and I remembered the saying that you see on a lot of old plates and mugs: 'Industry produceth wealth, God speed the plow.'

"This, I knew, was a play about work and about the end of the world, so 'Speed-the-Plow' was perfect, because, not only did it mean work, it also suggested having to plow under and start over again."

"Speed-the-Plow" opened last May on Broadway, with a cast of Ron Silver, Joe Mantegna and Madonna. Last month, it had its London premiere at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, again with Gregory Mosher directing. Its staging in Chicago is its first in the United States since the original New York production.

Like most Mamet works, it has engendered controversy, some critics considering it his fullest, most complete statement, others dismissing it as lightweight and second-hand. According to Mamet, "Sometimes, I look at it and think, 'Well, its not bad.' Other times, well, I don't know."

On Broadway, the play was generally well received and well attended immediately after its premiere, partly because Madonna brought in the customers and partly because it had some fiercely funny lines in its furious dialogue. It was so funny, in fact, that Mamet believes not everybody got its grim point.

At once appalled and fascinated by the ways of Hollywood, Mamet made the wheeling and dealing in "Speed-the-Plow" a vibrant affair in desolate landscape. "I do believe," he says, "that the studio people have it in their power 'to make people less afraid,' as the girl in the play says. But we simply cannot get it into our heads that they don't care. That's just not in their program. They're too busy making deals."

Mamet admits that he enjoys the dealing. "Maybe I just don't have it in me to stand apart from all this," he says. "Besides, the people in Hollywood are so funny. It's a place full of gamblers, hucksters and con artists, including me. We're all rug merchants."

For Hollywood, Mamet has written a comedy, "We're No Angels," now in production with Neil Jordan ("Mona Lisa") directing a cast that includes Robert DeNiro, Sean Penn and Demi Moore. Later, he plans to direct his new script, "Homicide," a film he hopes will satisfy "the nostalgia for viciousness" that came over him after he finished directly last year's gentle comedy "Things Change." With Mosher directing, a film version is due to start later this year of "Edmond," the 1982 play whose bleak vision of a nightmarish urban environment is in many ways a precedent for "Speed-the-Plow."

There's also a newly published children's book, "Warm and Cold," created with the artist Donald Sultan, and in the works are a book of essays, a volume of poems, a collection of lectures on filmmaking ("How's that for chutzpah?" he asks), and a TV pilot, "Bradford," about a retired big city detective who becomes the police chief of a small New England town, which he wrote for former Chicago actor Dennis Franz, but which he has not yet been able to sell to the networks. ("The first thing they say is how honored they are that you're writing for them. Then you know you're in trouble.")

Somewhere, there may be room for another full-lenght play, about growing up in Hyde Park, on which he has been working for a long time. "Maybe I'm old enough now to find an ending for it," Mamet says.

Some of the loveliest writing in Mamet's recent essays is contained in pieces reflecting on his childhood in Chicago. Riding a London bus, for example, he sharply, suddenly remembers sights and smells of 30 years ago.

This nostalgia may come about partly because of his own fatherhood, and it may be caused by his sense of growing older. Noting this, Mamet now 42, says "I think I'm still turning 40, two years later."

With his wife, Lindsay Crouse, and their two daughters, Willa, 6, and Zosia, 1, he has settled comfortably in Cambridge. He had worked in a bookstore there 25 years ago, and remembered it as "a place where nothing very bad could happen to you."

These days, he rarely goes into New York. "The theater there," he says, "used to be a community that shared interests with a greater community. Now, it's an amusement park, where you're titillated. It's a place for tourists, who are just in for a day and then out. It's not a community where people sharing values can experience the old, joyous ritual of storytelling."

Still, Mamet says, "If someone needs to tell a story, they'll tell it. That's what I did. Maybe it's because I'm older now, but I think of writing as something I do. It's what I do. You do it for a living. It's my job, and I do it. I don't have any great plan, but I know I'm a writer, and I do it as good as I can."

He speaks fondly of his early days in Chicago in the mid-1970s, when his career as a playwright was just getting started. "Speed-the-Plow" Chicago presentation happened, in fact, because of Mamet's still strong connections with Chicago's theater community. William Petersen of Remains Theatre, an old friend, wanted desperately to do the play in a small off-Loop house, and Jennifer Boznos, Remains' producing director and a Mamet colleague at Goodman Theatre, urge Mamet to give them the rights to the play. "I could refuse her absolutely nothing," Mamet says, laughing.

Family and friends are Mamet's secure places in a darkling world.  He remembers, for example, one night last year when filming was about to begin at Lake Tahoe, Nev., on "Things Change":

"I got to my room there on a cold and rainy night. I was feeling very homesick and lonely, when there was a knock on my door, and it was Joey Mantegna (another former Chicagoan who has acted in many Mamet plays and films). He said he had a pasta sauce he had been working on a couple of days, so why didn't I come over to his cabin. Then Don Ameche (also in the movie) arrived, and there we were, the three of us, talking together and enjoying fresh pasta and good wine.

"It was wonderful.