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 starring Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver and later moved to and had a long-standing run on Broadway.
"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
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…"
