Word: madonna
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...Madonna, 28, who has made five films -- to raves for Desperately Seeking Susan and pans for Shanghai Surprise, with her husband, Actor Sean Penn -- greeted her tumultuous stage debut with outward calm. In an interview with TIME she said, "They always say horrible things about me. They'll be saying those things for the rest of my life." Then she joked about inviting one of her harshest critics to her birthday party. While everyone involved in the show acknowledges that she has helped at the box office, Director Mosher says her notoriety cuts both ways: "You don't want...
...Madonna says her role in Speed-the-Plow stemmed indirectly from a letter she wrote to Mamet in September 1987, praising House of Games. "It was the first movie I had seen in a long time that had stimulating language," she says. "I didn't feel it had been written for the masses. So I wrote my first fan letter." A few months later, she heard about Mamet's play through veteran Director Mike Nichols, and contacted Mosher, with whom she and Penn had worked in a nonpublic, workshop staging of David Rabe's play Goose...
That led to two multi-hour auditions and, later, what Mosher calls "small but significant rewrites during rehearsal" to accommodate the part to her. Adds Mosher: "Madonna brings a backbone of steel. Mamet made the character, rather than a poor soul who is battered to the ground, someone about whom there is an element of doubt." Indeed, the play's pivotal question is the true nature of her role, the smallest of the three but the engine of the plot. Says Mosher: "The audience is meant to go out asking one another: Is she an angel? Is she a whore...
...plot, such as it is, turns on the attempts of the Madonna character to interpose her own project, an adaptation of a high-flown allegorical novel about the risks of living in an overly technologized world. The opaque and overwrought passages that she quotes sound unfilmable. Yet even if the text is drivel -- and it resonates that way from the stage -- its search for meaning touches some inarticulate longing in the secretary who is given it to read and, eventually, in her boss, who for a while joins her quixotic crusade. He starts out trying to seduce...
...Madonna's awkward, indecisive characterization seems calculated to help paper over those gaps and sustain suspense by keeping the audience from reaching conclusions. Thus the question "Can she act?" cannot be answered. The shrewdness in her performance is clear, but so, alas, is her thinking process: she lacks ease and naturalness. Mantegna, by contrast, superbly manages his character's clashing mental states. Silver is captivating, especially in a second-act tantrum that is equal parts rage, hurt, con-artist scam and genuine grief at a betrayal...