Nearly 60 years have elapsed since James Agate, the London theater critic, quipped, “The English ceased to be playgoers as soon as there was anything else to go to.” On Broadway, the American solution has been to guarantee ticket sales by casting celebrities. The cause of Agate’s complaint, as well as our Band-Aid solution, are both brought to mind by Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s first full-length play since his 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner, Glengarry Glen Ross.

If Hollywood is notorious for chewing up even the finest writers, Speed-the-Plow is apparently Mamet’s revenge after some recent forays in Hollywood. Though the play has opened to generally rave reviews, it may be a con of its own, relying on the presence of Madonna to distract attention from weaknesses in the script.

Although Mamet has a dozen works to his credit, they tell essentially the same story in a dozen different contexts—beyond that, each work, hinging on some enigmatic twist at the end, is never as satisfying as Mamet’s overrated reputation suggests. The street-smart merchants in the American Buffalo (still Mamet’s best play) become the sleazy real-estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross, who are both interchangeable with the fortune-teller medium in The Shawl (a one-act play). Even the has-been lawyer portrayed by Paul Newman in The Verdict (Mamet’s Academy Award winning script) is both the victim and perpetrator of some cons; and the psychologist swindled by the elaborate scheme posed in House of Games, Mamet’s latest film, ultimately outfoxes the gamblers who duped her.

Though the metaphorical sign on the office door of Speed-the-Plow has been changed to read “Hollywood Producer,” Mamet’s newest offering is nothing more than Mamet revisited. It is the story of two Hollywood producers, Bobby Gould (Joe Mantegna), who has just been promoted to head of production after 20 years in the business, and Charlie Fox (Ron Silver), his sidekick. As Bobby explains it, “My job, my new job is one thing—the capacity to make decisions,” and the plot circumscribes his 24-hour dilemma over which of two script ideas to endorse: a surefire moneymaker or an art film.

If Speed-the-Plow depended solely on the stereotypes it exploits, it would prove even less worthwhile than it is. Mamet’s real theme here is yet a grander cliche concerning the issue of art versus commerce. At first, Bobby gives the arty novel by an East Coast sissy writer to Karen (Madonna), his temporary office secretary, as a ploy to get her to his house later that night. The last thing he expects is that she will convince him to do “something right” with his life by filming it.

The problem and unintended irony with Mamet’s premise is that this novel, which each of the three characters frequently reads aloud from, doesn’t sound like the artistic work that his plot requires. Despite Mamet’s intent, it sounds like another apocalyptic fiction by Stephen King—exactly the sort of property any money-hungry producer would seize.

But even if the novel came across as fine literature, Mamet fails to justify its function within the play’s structure. Although Karen persuades Bobby to support the novel, rather than Charlie’s more commercial “package,” she seems to do so offstage, during the intermission. Mamet’s real play here is the one he never wrote. Mamet’s con is in the surprise reversals in Bobby’s decision in the last act, much too incredible to have the desired impact.

As for Karen’s character, is she dupee or a duper—an improbable idealist who believes in this novel, with its mushy message about nuclear holocaust, or just another powermonger seizing an opportunity to establish herself in Hollywood? While Mamet may have deliberately failed to clarify these points, he also fails Ip^convince us that Karen ever could have sold Bobby on the novel over Charlie’s more commercially viable project. And that failure is simply poor dramatic construction.

Under Gregory Mosher’s appropriately vulgar direction, both Mantegna and Silver give winning performances. But the production suffers from more than just Madonna’s flat and uncomprehending delivery. Mamet’s characteristic stammers and syntactical repetitions have by now become a device that detracts from the verisimilitude the playwright is after. The calculation is as obvious as the pretension of calling a 75-minute sketch with three scenes a three-act play. Pretentious too are the massive red drapes in lieu of a more substantial set design. While the effect may be mistaken for art, it probably reflects Madonna’s salary more than an aesthetic decision.

Aside from an implicit acceptance of Mamet’s reputation, it’s difficult to account for the reviewers’ hospitable reception to Speed-the-Plow. It fails to capture the Hollywood personae with the depth and sustained character analysis that David Rabe achieved in Hurlyburly. It fails to evoke the insanity of working on a specific film that Jonathan Reynolds engendered in Geniuses (recalling his participation as an on-location writer in the making of Apocalypse Now). It doesn’t even provide the succinct statement on today’s movies that Lanford Wilson proffered as a throw-away line in Burn This, when an incidental character says, “Movies are some banker’s speculation about how the American adolescents want to see themselves that week.”

At best, what Speed-the-Plow offers is a humorously cynical portrait of two lackey producers clawing their way up the studio ladder. But it does so by unleashing all of the stereotypes in and out of the industry—cliches suggesting that greed is the only motivation Hollywood tolerates, and vulgarity is the only style it knows.

With Speed-the-Plow as evidence, perhaps the worst comment on Agate’s prophetic epigram is that in the process of trying to win back the audience from the movies, the theater would succumb to the tawdrier methods of the medium it sired. “If it’s not quite art, [or] it’s not quite entertainment, [then] it’s here on my desk,” says Bobby in the play’s opening moments. What Mamet describes is also here now on Broadway, where it will remain at least at long as Madonna is in it.