The "Best" Mamet Play?

Terry Teachout calls David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow his best play.  To which I can only say... really?? Better than American Buffalo, Glenngarry Glen Ross or The Cryptogram (which only Abe and I seem to like but I think is definitely one of the best)?  Methinks not! (Although it's certainly superior to Oleanna which almost anything is better than).

Comments

[RLewis]

Gosh, and I thought it was "Binky and the Space Pandas". Well, it's Mamet so they must all be classic, yes?

[DJA]

_The Cryptogram_ is great! Plus, it's probably the last time Mamet really pushed himself as a writer.

[herxanthikles]

Excuse me, I seem to recall when we were 14 you liked Oleanna just fine! What changed? If you play the misogyny card I will take you on.

Incidentally, re: The Cryptogram, I saw it in the Studio production in D.C. and thought it so so. Then they did it at my college (shoutout to Matthew Graham Smith) and went gimmick on it, having the boy being played by a real boy and an older young-adult version, "remembering" the events of the play. Sometimes the older-version boy would just be watching, sometimes he would take over. Of all writers, going concept on Mamet seems the most inharmonious, but I have to say they executed in a way which made it really touching, and more so than the straight version I saw before.

[Elizabeth]

Yay Binky! My favorite work of Mamet is Dark Pony and Almost Home (both are a helluva lot better than Speed the Plow). In fact, most of his shorter plays are better than his longer ones - excepting American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, or Cryptogram. I think Glengarry Glen Ross is perhaps his best (except for Binky. There'll never be another Binky.)

[isaac]

I did, indeed, like Oleanna when we saw it together. How the fuck old were we, anyway?

While I do, indeed, think that Oleanna is deeply misogynist, I also think Great Expectations is deeply anti-semitic and a good book, so let's mutually agree to take that off the table.

The real problem with Oleanna is that Mamet's own rage and political opinions completely overwhelm the text. It is a rigged game presented as a fair fight. (This is actually a similar problem that plagues A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY, in case you think it's the Right Wingedness of the politics that bothers me).

The play he claims to have written, one in which a man becomes the monster someone else thinks him to be, would be pretty interesting, but that play is overwhelmed by his desire to respond to the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill hearings (something which he is very open about having done). What we have instead is a play in which a totally compelling and complex and interesting male character squares off against a bumper sticker. It's ultimately uninteresting because Mamet is so enraged at the Carols of this world that he can't even give her agency for her own opinions ("My group says").

The first scene is pretty compelling stuff... what with its ambiguous moment of potential sexual harassment and the Professor given chances to wax longwindedly about various blowhardian topics. But it's all downhill from there. Especially in the scene where she claims that his grabbing of her arm was an attempted rape which is pretty much where the play's onesidedness is revealed in all its deep shittiness.

Part of my vehemence about the play comes from college, because it does provide fun acting tasks, and young actors really love doing it, and thus think it's good. But it's not. It has some interesting component parts but it ultimately sucks.

[Abe Goldfarb]

I actually think that Speed-The-Plow comes the closest to perfection of all Mamet's plays. Now, when I say "perfection", I mean that it has nary a wasted word and almost every joke lands with grace. It may not be his most complex, but I think it's clearly the one in which he best marries his gift for the comedy of human incomprehension to his preoccupation with the drift (this way or that) of the soul. Everyone is bluffing, everyone is getting the other guys' jokes because they have to, not because they "get" them. And then this woman, this mysterious temp, introduces a note of spiritual doubt and everything goes into a tailspin. The sequence in which Gould tries to let Fox down lightly in Act 3 is one of the most sumptuously written confrontations in any comedy for the stage. I was Fox in a reading of it once, a reading that killed just because we got out of the way.

Glengarry is amazing, Oleanna is essential, if disturbing, and The Cryptogram is lushly upsetting. I like Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Hell, I love Edmond. But Speed-the-Plow is one of those odd works that is completely, hermetically sealed off from flaws.

[Sasha]

I completely agree with you on Oleanna, Isaac. I just had a conversation about the play a few weeks ago. My friends though it was brilliant, and I had to convince them otherwise. They kept insisting that Mamet wrote it in a way so that it was open to intepretation. They insisted that Mamet did not place blame on Carol. Maybe that's true, but I've never seen a production of it with that message.
I had to do a scene from Oleanna in college, and I was frustrated to no end. My character was so one dimensional. The few times I managed to make her interesting and actually believable, my acting teacher was annoyed- probably because she felt I wasn't adhering to the message of the text, (which of course is totally sexist.)

[Prince Gomolvilas]

Ooh, I loves me a good Mamet discussion.

First of all, I love The Cryptogram. When I first read it, I didn't really get it. But then I saw a production at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, and it was like a revelation. The emotional violence in that play is deeply unsettling and far more effective than any staged physical fight I've seen.

As for Oleanna, you say, "It is a rigged game presented as a fair fight." I think it depends on the production. I saw a production at a major regional theater, as well as the movie adaptation, both of which forced you to hate Carol, despite the fact that that's not what was supposed to happen. But then I happened to catch a small community theater production and was shocked to see the "fair fight" that Mamet always wanted it to be and that he couldn't even achieve in his own movie adaptation.

[Ken]

Glengarry is probably Mamet's best play. When performed well it is sublime. Liev Schreiber was unbelievable in the Broadway revival. I will never forget that performance.
American Buffalo--also great, though I've only read it.
Speed the Plow--Very good, just saw it last week. Piven is great, Esparza just can't get Mamet's rhythms right (at least what I think is "right"), just as he had trouble with Pinter's rhythms in "The Homecoming" last year. You want to hear a great version of "Speed"? Check out the ausio version from L.A. Theatre Works (on CD). Adam Arkin and Jeff Goldblum are perfection!

[herxanthikles]

Hmm. I'm not sure that's so about Oleanna. It's true that the teacher is more central a figure than the student, and we know more about him. I see Carol as a geniunely vulnerable person, who has gone through a lot of crap, who is sacrificing a lot to be in college and is terrified of what it will mean if she fails. She responds to the fear and uncertainty not by studying harder, but searching for a power-arrangement that favors her. And isn't the play even-handed in presenting them both as basically hateful? He was the monster at the beginning that he was at the end, he just wasn't a violent monster. He was still a power-loving hypocrite.

I think I like it because among other things it also gets at a fundamental problem in education today. More and more when we are students we are aware of ourselves as consumers buying an education. But America's "the customer is always right" is at odds with the classic educational model where one submits to the professor. This is all the more tricky given the serious life consequences of grades, effecting your scholarships, your job prospects, etc. The question of how one constucts an appropriate power-relationship that is consistent with a good education is a difficult one with fluid answers. Anybody who has gone through institutions has seen instances on either side when it became about the power. If nothing else, the play is a splendid snapshot of that difficult moment in our history.

[Jeremy]

I wish someone would write an "Oleanna" in which we could actually see both sides, but as it is right now, Carol's whole argument is blown the second Act Two begins and she's ALONE with him in his office again. If she really thinks he harrassed her sexually, what's she doing in his office without a third party? And then there's a third act... The only real argument is why he doesn't hit her sooner (and get it overwith).