Madonna Comes to Broadway

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

A newly promoted movie executive strides purposefully around his office with a would-be producer tagging behind. At every step or two, the aspiring dealmaker histrionically kisses the mogul's hindquarters. Ostensibly this scene of ritual abasement between old, close friends is being staged for an audience of one, the mogul's new secretary. It is also a central metaphor in Broadway's hottest new hit, Speed-the-Plow, a foulmouthed and ferociously funny slice of Hollywood life.

The show, which opened last week amid a hubbub of publicity, blends snob appeal with raw marquee value. The playwright, David Mamet, won a 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his previous Broadway effort, Glengarry Glen Ross, and has since become a hot film writer (The Untouchables) and director (House of Games). The shy but surprising secretary is played by Rock Star Madonna (Material Girl, Like a Virgin), whose program biography cites "13 consecutive top five recordings, bettered only by Elvis and the Beatles." While reviewers seemed transfixed by the question "Can she act?" -- most said no -- audiences seemed not to care. Advance sales promptly topped $1 million.

In such stellar company, Co-Stars Joe Mantegna, a 1984 Tony Award winner for Glengarry, and Ron Silver, a movie and TV veteran (Silkwood, NBC's Billionaire Boys Club), might almost be an afterthought. In fact, the interaction between Mantegna as the mogul and Silver as a shameless huckster is the core of Mamet's pell-mell 88-minute play. Of all American playwrights, Mamet, 40, remains the shrewdest observer of the evil that men do unto each other in the name of buddyhood. Obsessed with the need for ethical debate, he nonetheless brings as much delight as despair to his portraits of panthers on the prowl, sharks in a feeding frenzy, business guys in suits. This may be partly because the characters are drawn from Mamet's real life in Hollywood. Part of last week's media furor about the play, in fact, was the assertion that Mantegna's role is based on Ned Tanen, head of production at Paramount, which made The Untouchables, while the obsequious producer is said to be a sketch of Untouchables Producer Art Linson, a self-described Silver look-alike. Says the apparently flattered Linson: "Mamet has to get his material somewhere."

Mamet added to the production's mystique by declining all requests for interviews and refusing to explain the play's odd title. It appears to derive from a blessing in medieval verse and song, "God speed your plough." According to Silver, it means approximately, "Do your work, and God will help you." Director Gregory Mosher, who has staged twelve of Mamet's plays and is one of his closest friends, suggests instead that the phrase "has to do with turning fresh earth -- and of course there is a sexual pun."

By far the biggest hullabaloo, however, was generated by Madonna. Although she has darkened her hair, is costumed in almost pristine propriety and speaks in grave, restrained tones with no hint of her trademark teen defiance, her entrance halfway through the first act evokes immediate gasps of recognition. From there, opinion sharply divides. New York Times Critic Frank Rich hailed her for "intelligent, scrupulously disciplined comic acting." Clive Barnes of the New York Post said, "There is a genuine, reticent charm here, but it is not ready to light the lamps on Broadway." But most first-nighters implied she had been hired for celebrity rather than talent. The New York Daily News headlined its lead review NO, SHE CAN'T ACT. Dennis Cunningham of WCBS-TV not only lambasted Madonna on the air but also later attacked Rich for praising her: "Frank has taken leave of his senses. He should apologize to every actor he has ever given a bad review to." Cunningham described himself as "in a righteous rage," and said he would seek a meeting with Mosher and Mamet to protest the casting.

Madonna, 28, who has made five films -- to raves for Desperately Seeking Susan and pans for Shanghai Surprise, with her husband, Actor Sean Penn -- greeted her tumultuous stage debut with outward calm. In an interview with TIME she said, "They always say horrible things about me. They'll be saying those things for the rest of my life." Then she joked about inviting one of her harshest critics to her birthday party. While everyone involved in the show acknowledges that she has helped at the box office, Director Mosher says her notoriety cuts both ways: "You don't want a play that you have worked on for five years to be overshadowed by a rock star."

Madonna says her role in Speed-the-Plow stemmed indirectly from a letter she wrote to Mamet in September 1987, praising House of Games. "It was the first movie I had seen in a long time that had stimulating language," she says. "I didn't feel it had been written for the masses. So I wrote my first fan letter." A few months later, she heard about Mamet's play through veteran Director Mike Nichols, and contacted Mosher, with whom she and Penn had worked in a nonpublic, workshop staging of David Rabe's play Goose and Tom-Tom.

That led to two multi-hour auditions and, later, what Mosher calls "small but significant rewrites during rehearsal" to accommodate the part to her. Adds Mosher: "Madonna brings a backbone of steel. Mamet made the character, rather than a poor soul who is battered to the ground, someone about whom there is an element of doubt." Indeed, the play's pivotal question is the true nature of her role, the smallest of the three but the engine of the plot. Says Mosher: "The audience is meant to go out asking one another: Is she an angel? Is she a whore?"

Whore is precisely the term the two men in the play use to describe themselves: they are not creators of films or even fans of films but enablers of films, and they pride themselves on letting projects advance or die based solely on commercial potential. Mantegna's character, so newly installed in executive splendor that his office furniture is still covered with painters' drop cloths, solemnly explains that a quarter-century in show business has given him a certain wisdom. The cardinal rule, he says, is not to accept percentages of net profit because there is never, ever, a net. Then he muses aloud about whether there could ever be such a thing as a successful film that did not make money and announces, solemnly, that there cannot. At the outset, Silver's character is pitching a violent prison film starring a "bankable" macho star. At the end, he and the Mantegna character are on their way to meet with the next executive layer for final approval.

The plot, such as it is, turns on the attempts of the Madonna character to interpose her own project, an adaptation of a high-flown allegorical novel about the risks of living in an overly technologized world. The opaque and overwrought passages that she quotes sound unfilmable. Yet even if the text is drivel -- and it resonates that way from the stage -- its search for meaning touches some inarticulate longing in the secretary who is given it to read and, eventually, in her boss, who for a while joins her quixotic crusade. He starts out trying to seduce her on a bet and ends up considering a move that will surely destroy his career. Like many a cheap-jack hustler, he momentarily finds religion. But his faith in the book, and the woman who made him believe in it, seems to be still more illusions to be stripped away.

Mamet has said that his screenwriting, beginning with The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and including his Oscar-nominated script for The Verdict (1982), "forced on me the issue of plot." He acknowledged to friends that Glengarry was the first of his plays to have anything resembling a workable second act. But Speed-the-Plow has two huge holes in its narrative. First, the effort to persuade Mantegna's character to believe in the book takes place almost entirely offstage. Second, right up to the end it is impossible to tell whether the book is brilliance or bilge. If it is the former, then the ending is uncommercially tragic. If the latter, then the ending is a foregone conclusion and, however brief, takes too long in coming.

Madonna's awkward, indecisive characterization seems calculated to help paper over those gaps and sustain suspense by keeping the audience from reaching conclusions. Thus the question "Can she act?" cannot be answered. The shrewdness in her performance is clear, but so, alas, is her thinking process: she lacks ease and naturalness. Mantegna, by contrast, superbly manages his character's clashing mental states. Silver is captivating, especially in a second-act tantrum that is equal parts rage, hurt, con-artist scam and genuine grief at a betrayal.

For Mamet fans, Speed-the-Plow will recall many of the pleasures of Glengarry. Both center on salesmen who have no skill except persuasion, no talent but for heightened, theatrical speech and naked yet manipulative emotional outbursts. Although Mamet is highly literary -- he reads widely, and the script for Speed-the-Plow has an epigraph from Thackeray's Pendennis -- few of his witticisms translate well into print, because he does not write rounded, formal speeches. The movie men in Speed-the-Plow, much like the thugs in American Buffalo (1975), the actors in A Life in the Theater (1977) and the singles-bar habitues of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, erupt naturalistically in fragments, in repetitions, in overlapping counterpoint of threats and expostulations and profuse four-letter words. Their conversation sounds authentic, yet is so idiosyncratic to its author that a couple of minutes suffice to identify it as his. This quicksilver gift of language, joined with an almost infinite slyness about the tricky uses to which words can be put, makes Mamet a superb entertainer. He is a sort of American version of Harold Pinter, but funnier, raunchier and with a keener sense of the particularities of time and place.

What is troubling in his work is a moral ambiguity that verges on cynicism, coupled with a high-minded tone that verges on sanctimony. In The Untouchables he claimed the authority of history to invent a fictitiously murderous Eliot Ness and, worse, a guilty plea made for Al Capone by his attorney against the mobster's will. That is something that could not happen in any court still observing the fundamentals of the Constitution. In Speed-the-Plow Mamet makes the unastonishing revelation that movie moguls are venal and pandering. Perhaps he means to prick spectators' consciences by holding them responsible for the box-office triumph of trivia over moral concern.

But just as the audience and, seemingly, the playwright himself cannot decide whether the laughable-sounding book under consideration is insight or eyewash, so it is hard to say whether Speed-the-Plow is an outcry against Hollywood or a cynical apologia from a man who, in real life, is finishing one Hollywood film and about to start another. Mamet has said that by being oblique, even obscure, he forces spectators to think. At least some playgoers, however, yearn for a writer straightforward enough to have the courage of his own convictions.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York