David Mamet's 1988 play "Speed the Plow" is a profane, high-powered satire of the movie business and the unrelenting cynicism and underlying fear of those who pursue money and power at all costs. It takes an equally high-powered cast of three to pull off its sudden changes in mood and tempo and its free-for-all profanity, along with the blunt but fragmented rhythms of Mamet's powerful dialogue.

The production of the play currently at the Jewish Community Center's Centerstage is typical of what can happen when an ambitious community theater tackles a difficult, demanding play. With only three characters and a number of long set speeches, it offers actors opportunities to shine but also little place to hide.

The production successfully illuminates the lust for power with all its attendant jealousies, resentments, manipulations, and terrors. The brutality of Mamet's dialogue makes it impossible to avoid. Bobby Gould (Jonathan Ntheketha) has recently become head of production for a movie studio. He and Charlie Fox (Ted Limpert) have worked together for the last dozen years, but now Charlie proposes and Bobby decides. The heavy-handed badinage between them suggests how long they've known one another and how much tension and favor-currying infects their relationship. They possess too much ambition to be friends, yet their careers are intertwined. Things begin to boil because Charlie has managed to work a deal for a routine but violent shoot-em-up starring an in-demand leading man; it is bound to make money. He takes the project to Bobby. Both men know that if they can convince the studio head to "green light" the movie, it will give them position and earn them a great deal of money.

Bobby has also been given a "courtesy read" to an apocalyptic novel about the end of the world by an "Eastern sissy writer." I have always thought Mamet's tongue was in his cheek here because I have rarely heard such artsy-fartsy drivel read onstage. Ultimately, though, he will have to choose between the two movies, between art and commerce. But Bobby's young and attractive temp, Karen (Rhiannon Kramer), finds the book powerful. In an attempt to bed her, Bobby invites her to read it, drive to his apartment that night, and tell him what she thinks of it. She sees the book as her ticket to working in the movies, and she seduces Bobby to get what she wants. When the three of them confront one another the next morning, what remains is the re-forming of usable alliances, the burying of resentments, and the ever-present smell of greed.

The more intense the scene, the more the cast struggled with Mamet's style - the interruptions, half-sentences, and broken rhythms that typify his dialogue for people driven by desperation. It is a suitable vehicle for rage and fear, but it is very hard to master. The cast loses its rhythms when they are most difficult, but also most important.

Ntheketha is virtually unflappable as Bobby; his generally affable, contained demeanor makes him the most grounded and commanding of the cast members. His character has learned the ropes and the lingo, and a style for being in charge. Among those he manipulates is Charlie, who is desperate to move up after so many years of toadying, but Limpert's performance borders on the unrelievedly manic. His jittery mannerisms soon become a parody of a method actor on the loose. Rhiannon Kramer as Karen, the secretary, was unpolished except for her most important scene, when she effectively turns the sexual tables on Bobby. Yet their sense of purpose was nearly palpable; if only their achievement had matched it.

"Speed the Plow"

Through October 31

Jewish Community Center, 1200 Edgewood Ave.

$16-$24 | 461-2000 x235, jccrochester.org