Volume 35, Number 12 · July 21, 1988
The Prophet of Broadway
By Jonathan Lieberson
Speed-the-Plow
a play by David Mamet, directed by Gregory Mosher
David Mamet, whose new play, Speed-the-Plow, is having a successful run in New York, grew up in Chicago, where he sought a career in the theater by, among other things, working as a busboy at the Second City and (because his uncle was director of broadcasting for the Chicago Board of Rabbis) performing as an actor on religious programs on television. His success as a playwright began with his plays Sexual Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo, both of which were praised for their fine construction and the skillful way in which Mamet was able to re-create the talk of his characters, most of them con artists and deadbeats. He went on to write other kinds of plays, like A Life in the Theater, and Glengarry Glen Ross, which won both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. He has also written the screenplays of the films The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Untouchables, among others.
Review, 5085 words
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