Theatre For Thought, February 18, 2012

MAMET VS THE MAGICAL POST OBAMA TIME
joel fishbane

As frustrated as I can be with some of David Mamet’s work, I remain doggedly convinced that he is one of the finest playwrights of the modern age. It is, I think, a glorious thing to experience anything he has written: he has the ability to cut through the great chafe of life and, in prose that is lean but never anorexic, reveal wisdom in all areas: art, lust, guns, even campaign buttons. Oh and race. Let’s not forget that. 

Mamet’s 2006 book The Wicked Son dealt with anti-Semitism and self hatred among the Jews; not content with this controversy, he returned to Broadway in 2009 with Race, a play that tackles the great racial divide that has haunted America ever since Thomas Jefferson was forced to remove references to slaves from the Declaration of Independence (it’s true, look it up).

Review: (Ottawa) Speed-the-Plow

More Than Madonna

When libido and midlife crisis meet head on, impartial judgement is lost.

by Jim Murchison

I confess that I didn’t know a lot about Speed-the-Plow, other than it was the vehicle that launched Madonna’s Broadway career.  The irony of a play about marketing over substance, that used a pop star like Madonna to sell a million dollars in advance tickets, did not go unnoticed by the critics at the time. Fortunately, small Canadian theatre companies are not encumbered with the dilemma of hiring a pop icon, so we can concentrate on the merits of this production instead. Oh yeah, I hear Madonna is back in the music business.