SOURCE: Sauvage, Leo. “Mamet's Unreal Hollywood.” New Leader 121, no. 10 (13 June 1988): 20-1.

In the following review, Sauvage contends that Speed-the-Plow displays good acting and directorship, but is a stagnant commentary on the Hollywood film industry.

The new David Mamet play that opened recently at the Royale Theater is called Speed-the-Plow, apparently after an old form of farewell once used among farmers. This seems apt, given the author's fondness for spreading stercoreaceous metaphors around like manure. Yet we are probably meant to understand the title as applying to the field of sex rather than agriculture.

Speed-the-Plow wants to be a sharp and rousing satire of the American motion picture industry, still symbolized outside that urban dispersion known as Los Angeles by the name Hollywood. The play does give us a sardonic and entirely appropriate view of the process by which films are conceived there, if not necessarily born. But it...