Speed-the-plow : a play

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—staring Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver—and later moved to and had a long-standing run on Broadway. Speed-the-Plow's Broadway run is the most recent triumph of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's astonishingly productive career. "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 hardly a line in it that isn't somehow insanely funny or scarily insane ... [It is a] scathingly comic play."-Jack Kroll, Newsweek "Hollywood producer Bobby Gould has spent a career reaping what others sow, until he's forced to choose between his friend's sure hit and a beautiful girl's art house project. During an evening of seduction and manipulation, Bobby discovers that the power he exerts is more elusive than it seems."