WILL `SPEED-THE-PLOW' RESONATE IN TINSELTOWN?

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Note: The following conversation wasn't taped live in the men's room at last year's Academy Awards ceremony:

Fox: You're just an Old Whore.

Gould: Proud of it. Yes, yes.

Fox: They kick you upstairs and you're still just some old whore.

Gould: You're an old whore, too.

Fox: I never said I wasn't. Soon to be a rich old whore.

Those words first appeared nearly a decade ago in ``Speed-the-Plow,'' written by Chicago playwright and frequent Hollywood observer David Mamet.

Not surprisingly, the exchange takes place between two hustlers scheming to cut a cheesy movie deal that will certify them as big-studio Players.

When ``Speed-the-Plow'' opened on Broadway in May 1988, the New York critics piled on the superlatives. Many called this fanged satire of Hollywood mores and morals Mamet's best work ever.

Which makes it curious why, until now, ``Speed-the-Plow'' has never been witnessed by an L.A. audience. Though it's been produced elsewhere in Southern California, the production that recently opened a seven-week run at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble is the first to take place in the industry's own back yard.

Ron Sossi, the Odyssey's artistic director, offers a simple explanation. The main obstacle, he says, was simply getting Mamet to sign off on the rights.

``Mamet, I think, is very hard about who does his plays and how they're done,'' says Sossi. ``He's very protective, and he can afford to be.''

Sossi adds that many East Coast agents tend to hang on to the L.A. rights for a major new American work, hoping to land it in a midsize theater (200 to 500 seats). Consequently, the city's slew of 99-seat theaters have learned to be patient.

Sossi points out that ``Speed-the-Plow'' is hardly the first Broadway hit to take its sweet time reaching the Pacific.

``It took (Sam Shepard's) `True West' seven or eight years and it took `Bent' a long time, over 10 years.' ''

Lately, plays depicting the phoniness and venality of Hollywood seem to be multiplying. Both Hugh Palmer's ``Backstabbers'' and John Patrick Shanley's ``Four Dogs and a Bone'' played well here, trailing Robert Altman's 1992 movie ``The Player.''

Ironically, a couple of years ago the Odyssey produced Arthur Kopit's ``The Road to Nirvana,'' a Hollywood satire that parodied ``Speed-the-Plow.'' Reportedly, Kopit was eager to twit Mamet's opportunistic casting of Madonna in the play's crucial third role as an ambitious secretary-temp.

Sossi, a former television executive who quit the business in disgust several years ago, thinks that Mamet's blunt, slangy, monosyllabically urgent dialogue is especially well-suited to a piece about movers, shakers, posers and knife-twisters.

``It doesn't fit all worlds, but it certainly fits the world of gangsters, the world of salesmen and the world of Hollywood.''

But he's not sure that, even in Los Angeles, everyone's sure to get the joke.

``I have a feeling that certain Hollywood people coming to see this might not see it as a scathing attack.''