Free Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet

Copyright © 1985, 1986, 1987 by David Mamet
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    First-class professional, stock, and amateur applications for permission to perform it, and those other rights stated above, must be made in advance, before rehearsals begin, to the author’s agent: Ronald Gwiazda, Abrams Artists Agency, 275 Seventh Avenue, 26 th floor, New York, NY 10001.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Mamet, David.
    Speed-the-plow.
    I. Title.
    PS3563.A4345S64 1988 812’.54 87-37252
    eISBN: 978-0-8021-9181-6
    Cover design by Royce M. Becker
    Grove Press an imprint of Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, 12 th floor, New York, NY 10011
    Distributed by Publishers Group West
    www.groveatlantic.com

T HIS PLAY IS DEDICATED
    TO H OWARD R OSENSTONE

Which is the most reasonable, and does his duty best: he who stands aloof from the struggle of life, calmly contemplating it, or he who descends to the ground, and takes his part in the contest? “That philosopher,” Pen said, “had held a great place amongst the leaders of the world, and enjoyed to the full what it had to give of rank and riches, renown and pleasure, who came, weary-hearted, out of it, and said that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. Many a teacher of those whom we reverence, and who steps out of his carriage up to his carved cathedral place, shakes his lawn ruffles over the velvet cushion, and cries out that the whole struggle is an accursed one, and the works of the world are evil. Many a conscience-stricken mystic flies from it altogether, and shuts himself out from it within convent walls (real or spiritual), whence he can only look up to the sky, and contemplate the heaven out of which there is no rest, and no good.
    “But the earth, where our feet are, is the work of the same Power as the immeasurable blue yonder, in which the future lies into which we would peer. Who ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success—to this man a foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd—to that a shameful fall, or paralyzed limb or sudden accident—to each some work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it.”
    T HACKERAY ,
    Pendennis

Speed-the-Plow was first presented in a New York Broadway production by Lincoln Center Theater at the Royale Theater, opening on May 3, 1988, with the following cast:
    B OBBY G OULD

Joe Mantegna
C HARLIE F OX

Ron Silver
K AREN

Madonna
    Directed by Gregory Mosher;