PublicPerspective is the PittsburghPublicTheater's newslettertorsll/Jscribers andfriends. Pittsburgh Stars Go Hollywood In David Mamet's Comedy Speed-The-Plow .Pittsburgh-bred talent takes the stage January 3 through February 10 when the Pittsburgh Public Theater presents SpeedThe-Plow, David Mamet's smash-hit Broadway comedy about dog-eat-dog Hollywood. Directed by Tony and Obie Award winner Mel Shapiro, the former Head of Carnegie Mellon Drama, Speed-The-Plow will star Robinson Township native David Butler, widely considered one of the city's finest actors; James Anthony Shanta, a native of McKees Rocks who starred in the Public's critically acclaimed production of Orphans, and Ming-Na Wen, who hails from Mt. Lebanon and currently portrays Lien Hughes on As The World Turns. Shanta and Wen were classmates at Carnegie Mellon when Shapiro chaired the program in the early and mid-eighties. A phenomenal hit on Broadway that starred Madonna, Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver, Speed-The-Plowgarnered three Tony nominations, including Best Play, and won Silver a Tony for Best Actor. By turns hilarious and chilling, Speed-The-Plow tells the story of Hollywood sharpies Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox, who started out in the mailroom together and now, "in the HighestTradition of the Motion Picture Industry" have an opportunity to co-produce a film. Gould has just been named Head of Production for a major movie studio and, as such, has the power to "greenlight" one film for production. Fox, still a struggling producer, has miraculously secured a 24-hour option on just the project- a "buddy picture" starring the latest Tom Cruise type that's sure to make them both millionaires. But enter trouble in the form of Gould's craftily innocent temporary secretary Karen, who tests the men's loyalty, cunning, and the extremes to which they'll go to cut the deal. No stranger to Hollywood's ways, Mamet, the author of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Glengarry Glen Ross and the Obie Award winners American Buffalo and Sexual Perversity In Chicago, also wrote • the screenplays for The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, (Oscar nomination), The Untouchables, and House Of Games, which he also directed. "SpeedThe-Plow is the culmination of Mamet's work to date," said Frank Rich in his New York Times review of the Broadway production. "Even as Mr. Mamet savages the Hollywood he called 'a sinkhole of slime and depravity,' he pitilessly implicates the society whose own fantasies about power and money keep the dream factory in business.'' Bobby Gould's and Charlie Fox's lines, like their lives in the Hollywood fast lane, fly back and forth at break-neck speed, requiring actors with inexhaustible agility and energy to play them at their utmost comic and frenetic potential. Portraying the soughtafter Gould is David Butler, who didn't even audition for the part. Shapiro cast him on the strength of his tour-de-force performance as Pale in last season's Burn This at the Public. Butler, a Mamet veteran, won critical and popular praise for his starring appearances in Mamet's American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross at City Theater. This summer, he performed in The Closerand Connemara
January· February 1991
Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa! Asks New Questions About Apartheid
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Public Theater favorite William Jay (right), who received critical raves in PPT's 1986 Fugard hit " MASTER HAROLD" . . . and the boys, will be featured as Mr. M in My Children! My Africa!. Shown here with Robert Jason in ''MASTER HAROLD'' . .. , Jay also won praise for his performances in the Public's Orphans and Fences. Censorship is a concern that South African playwright Athol Fugard has been struggling with his entire career. That struggle has helped produce some of the most provocative and groundbreaking work in the theater: Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, The Blood Knot(which marked the first time black and white actors appeared side by side on a South African stage) and "MASTER HAROLD" . .. and the boys (all produced at the Public). The Pittsburgh premiere of My Children! My Africa!, which begins February 21 and runs through March 31, will make Fugard the most produced contemporary playwright in Public Theater history. My Children! My Africa! is an impassioned indictment of the education of blacks in South Africa. It pits a black teacher, Mr. M, and two prize pupils- Thami, a black male, and Isabel, a white female - against the destructive realities of apartheid. Eventually, Mr. M's belief in education and the power of dialogue is challenged by Thami's rebellion against Western values and the slow pace of change in his country. Isabel, friend to them both, struggles to understand the passion and rage which drives each to seek, so differently, the same result. Athol Fugard first found what he calls his
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Public Perspective . Pittsburgh Public Theater •
"own voice" nearly thirty years ago when he wrote The Blood Knot. Until that historic moment he'd only produced two apprentice works, not yet aware of the power in his words. The Blood Knot led to his work with the Serpent Players, a group of blacks who came to Fugard asking his assistance to help form a theater company. The experience of working with people "who had been silenced and gagged - who had endured throttles of every conceivable form, legal and physical, from prison cells and banning orders to legislation on statute books" and who had discovered their voices through the theater, forever marked his creative work: "Whatever morality I have finally acquired, whatever responsibility informs my work in theater, comes from the realization that we were at the center of a historical event of extraordinary importance." The Blood Knotwas written in 1961, before apartheid became the rigidly defined social and political structure that is being slowly and often savagely dismantled in the 1990's. As apartheid developed, with Fugard's work alongside it, his literary language became an integral part of the art that allowed people who had been silenced for decades to finally speak - to shout if necessary. Continued on page 2