Over the years, the playwright David Mamet has cultivated something of a macho image. He’s a man’s man, a whiskey-drinking, poker-playing, gun-toting writer who’s not the kind of touchy-feely guy you’ll find sitting on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa. But he’s exactly the kind of guy you’ll find inhabiting Speed-the-Plow, the Mamet play that Tennessee Repertory Theatre is currently staging at TPAC’s Johnson Theatre.
Over the years, the playwright David Mamet has cultivated something of a macho image. He’s a man’s man, a whiskey-drinking, poker-playing, gun-toting writer who’s not the kind of touchy-feely guy you’ll find sitting on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa. But he’s exactly the kind of guy you’ll find inhabiting Speed-the-Plow, the Mamet play that Tennessee Repertory Theatre is currently staging at TPAC’s Johnson Theatre.
The setting is manly enough: the inner sanctum of film executive Bobby Gould (David Alford), a glib and confident Hollywood player who revels in his power to “green-light” big commercial projects, in particular a typical Tinseltown piece of crap brought to him by junior exec Charlie Fox (Jessejames Locorriere). Enter a lone, interloping and possibly angelic female, Karen (Marin Miller), who sidetracks Gould with coy sexual overtures while attempting to interest him in another, more artfully serious film venture. For Gould, thinking with his genitals proves to be a misstep his ego can’t afford, and in the play’s climactic moment, Karen, pushed to honesty by the jaded, slimy Fox, admits that she only engages in sex if she’s gets something out of the deal. For her, intimacy is a career tool.
Speed-the-Plow is vintage Mamet as provocateur, and the Tennessee Rep, under the thoughtful direction of Rene Copland, does justice to the play. The dialogue always crackles, and the interplay between Alford and Locorriere—a kind of movie song-and-dance on its own terms—is consistently vibrant, especially in a tense Act 3 scene where they come to blows. Meanwhile, Miller provides the alluring fulcrum that allows us to watch these masculine impulses at work.
What Speed-the-Plow tells us about powerful men isn’t reassuring, but it rings with truth and is consistent with Mamet’s ideas about the male-centered community. Despite the play’s inherent seriousness, Mamet still finds a welcome amount of time for irony and humor. The Rep, for its part, delivers it all with style and dramatic flair.
Heroic effort, ordinary results
This Amun Ra Theatre/Actors Bridge Ensemble collaboration opened last week at Fisk Memorial Chapel and runs through February as a part of Black History Month. Serious computer glitches delayed the inaugural performance, which was supposed to kick off with a video documentary that was never seen through to its conclusion. With a 7:30 p.m. curtain, the show didn’t get started until 8:15 p.m., requiring patience on the part of a gala crowd eager to view this oral-history-based account of the Nashville civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
Featuring less drama and more in the way of storytelling, the script, co-authored by director jeff obafemi carr and ABE producer Vali Forrister, is a hodgepodge of narrative, a few fleshed-out scenes, and pop-oriented musical numbers with dance. As serious theater, Ordinary Heroes is lacking, with only one particular scene standing out: an interesting point-counterpoint exchange between a black man (Bobby Daniels) and a white man (Tom Mason), each using similar language but arriving at quite different destinations in conveying the state of race relations. The musical numbers add some occasionally welcome diversion, but otherwise the portrayal of the everyday citizens was, by and large, devoid of shape.
The limitations of Fisk Chapel’s playing area lent a certain sameness to the staging, and dialogue was sometimes lost due to poor acoustics. The good news is that the earnest cast of nine found a late rhythm, successfully managing to convey at least some semblance of the importance of local historical events and the role they played in helping Nashville bridge its racial divide.
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