Mamet Can’t Buffalo Her : Mary B. Robinson might seem a strange choice to direct the gritty ‘Speed-the-Plow’ at the South Coast Rep, but only at first glance

It hardly seems an obvious match. “Speed-the-Plow” is David Mamet’s gritty take on the movie business--a rough, tough show that in 1988 threw Madonna on a Broadway stage with Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver. And who did David Emmes, South Coast Repertory’s producing artistic director, choose to direct this week’s Southern California premiere?

Mary B. Robinson.

Mary B. Robinson? Yes, as odd as the choice appears on the surface, Emmes chose a 36-year-old Main Line Philadelphian whose latest star turn was directing the long-running Off-Broadway production of Barbara Lebow’s “A Shayna Maidel,” and who was recently named artistic director of the Philadelphia Drama Guild.

The seeming incongruity of the match is underlined further when you get into details. “Speed-the-Plow” is a searing play about deal-making, personal and professional, where within the first half hour, the two producers are making a $500 “gentlemen’s bet” on whether the temporary secretary will bed her temporary boss. Their language is loaded with the male street talk and candor that characterize Mamet’s plays and that often denigrate women--if women are mentioned at all.

Even Robinson admits she was surprised when the call first came. “Not having read it, I thought, ‘That doesn’t sound like anything I’d be right for,’ ” says the director. “I just couldn’t picture it. . . . And I did think initially, ‘Isn’t it strange for a woman, particularly an East Coast woman, to be directing this play about two male Hollywood producers?’ ”

It wasn’t strange to Emmes, who first brought Robinson here in 1984 to direct Lanford Wilson’s “Angels Fall” and had been trying to bring her back ever since. Nor to actor Joe Spano, who is playing “Speed-the-Plow” producer Charlie Fox: “I’d never worked with her before, and the obvious question that came up was, ‘Who is this director, and what will she be like to work with?’ rather than should a woman be directing David Mamet’s work. . . . To the extent he is a great writer, which I think he is, his plays express a human condition, not solely a male condition.”

Actually, after that initial surprise regarding the assignment, it wasn’t really so strange to Robinson, either. “The question of what a woman director brings to a play that might be different from what a male director brings is a question I don’t know the answer to and have always somewhat resented,” Robinson says. “But, after directing this particular play, I find some of those questions make more sense.”

Robinson began by steeping herself in Mamet’s world. She reviewed Mamet’s other plays, most of which she’d read or seen before, and his books of essays on such topics as men and women, Hollywood and the playwright’s experiences writing and directing films. It was there that Robinson says she found “real clues as to what his intentions are with this play. For instance, in his book ‘Some Freaks,’ Mamet talks about his deep belief that all relationships between men and women are basically negotiations. I don’t agree with that at all, but it’s very helpful to know he believes that.”

The director brought both these insights and her own feelings to rehearsals, talking with her three actors and encouraging them to express their own sentiments. Spano, now working on his third Mamet play, says he appreciates the chance “to talk about the text and discuss what we think is going on inside the characters, what David intends and what the through-line is. I think she is less embarrassed than most directors about talking about ideas.”

People who’ve worked with Robinson credit this openness to actors’ input as one of her greatest strengths. Two weeks into rehearsals, Robinson still continues to talk out character with her actors, reading rehearsal notes more as discussion points than marching orders. “She gives you rein to try and experiment, which is so imperative with a script like this,” says Gregg Henry, the actor who plays producer Bobby Gould. “The text is quite open to interpretation.”

It certainly is. In his script of “Speed-the-Plow,” Mamet doesn’t describe his characters or what they’re wearing. He doesn’t say how or where they move or what the rooms look like. About the most specific he gets is to say, in Act I, that there are “boxes and painting materials all around” in Gould’s new office and that Gould is sitting behind his desk when Fox walks in.

“It isn’t a paint-by-numbers thing,” says Spano, who won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award last year for his work in Mamet’s “American Buffalo” at the Gnu Theatre. “He doesn’t write stage directions--he feels if you can’t tell what a person is by what he says and does, you’re not writing true.”

And what about the woman in “Speed-the-Plow”--the secretary Karen, played by Kamella Tate?

Robinson feels that Mamet’s intentions in “Speed-the-Plow” are much clearer with his men characters than with his woman character, saying it was almost a matter of “casting two great actors and turning them loose.” Her former boss, Hartford Stage Co. artistic director Mark Lamos, thinks the play is a “great choice” for her in part because he feels “the (two) Broadway productions would have benefited from a better understanding of the female role in the play.”

She didn’t see the Broadway production, although she did speak briefly with its director, Gregory Mosher. Based on her own reading and study, says Robinson, “I tend to find (Karen) potentially sympathetic and understand her, but I wanted to make sure that it was not simply because I am a woman. I wanted to find out what Mamet made of her, which isn’t always apparent from the play. You know exactly what he thinks of those guys.”

Defining Karen is no easy task, and well into rehearsals it is clear that Robinson and Tate are still finding new dimensions to this upwardly mobile secretary. For example, there is a whole chunk of the second act where Karen reads extensively from a pretentious novel call “The Bridge: or Radiation and the Half Life of Society. A Study of Decay.” by “an Eastern sissy writer.” She even seems to get slick producer Gould seriously considering the film possibilities of what should have been just a “courtesy read.”

“When I read the play the first time, I didn’t quite buy that,” Robinson says. “Then the second time I read it, I saw a lot of latitude as to how the scene worked. (But) I found the woman enigmatic when I first read the play and know that no matter how specific we get--and I hope we get very specific--there will still be audience members who don’t know what Karen’s up to and will probably walk out arguing about her. And I think that’s Mamet’s intention. We would be wrong to tip it so far that everybody in the audience had the same response to who this woman is and what she is doing.”

An imposing figure at 5 feet 10, Robinson seems confident--but not arrogant--as she talks about her career, women in the theater, plans for this play and her plans as artistic director of the Philadelphia Drama Guild.

A 1975 Smith College graduate, she interned--for free--at two New England regional theaters, then moved to New York where she did some minor directing--also for free--and supported herself with clerical work. After also reading scripts without pay, she eventually started making a living at it by reading about 35 plays a week for five theaters. (She enjoyed the clerical work more, she says.) Soon she was a literary associate at Circle Rep, where she also began directing workshops.

It wasn’t long before she moved on again. In 1980, she began working as the Hartford Stage’s associate artistic director. She did more directing there, and in 1984 took on her first regional theater assignment outside Hartford--directing “Angels Fall” at South Coast.

She left Hartford in 1985 to free-lance, and since then has directed at such regional theaters as Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. In 1987, she won the first Alan Schneider Award for directing, an award given by the Theater Communications Group in New York, and she has frequently appeared on lists around the country of sought-after women directors.

Named artistic director of the Philadelphia Drama Guild in January, Robinson both contributes to and profits from the attention finally being paid women stage directors. Along with such women as Emily Mann at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, Robinson is also among the next generation of artistic directors who happen to be women. “A great many women started out at the same time,” says Robinson. “We’re all in our mid-to-late 30s and a number of us got jobs in regional theater at the same time. It looks like it’s happening suddenly, but it’s simply that we’ve all been plugging away for 15 years and are at the age where we could be serious contenders for running theaters.”

She is, however, also aware of luck and timing. “When I got out of college in 1975, the times were good for women in general . . . people were aware that women were breaking into new roles.”

But there are still not so many women directing at major theaters and certainly not on Broadway, and Robinson is asked if she thinks women will hire more women.

“Women tend to have close friends who are women, and you tend to pick people who will be on the same wave length with you and whose work you know,” she replies. “The first person I called when I got the Philadelphia job was Gloria Muzio (director of the long-running Off-Broadway hit “Other People’s Money”). And one reason I called Gloria is that while I began to follow her career because she’s a friend, I became very impressed by her work.”

Robinson leaves Costa Mesa for Seattle a few days after “Speed-the-Plow’s” opening Friday to rehearse and direct her husband Erik Brogger’s new play “A Normal Life” at A Contemporary Theatre there. She met him in 1982 at a playwriting conference where she was working as his dramaturge, and a few years ago directed another of his plays at New York’s WPA Theatre.

The director will be in Philadelphia full time after Aug. 1, and says one of the things that she’s looking forward to there is the opportunity to take on large-scale classics by such playwrights as Shakespeare, Moliere and Chekhov.

“I’ve done a lot of naturalistic plays the past 10 years, which I love, but now I’m particularly excited by new things which can stretch me. I feel quite comfortable in naturalistic plays, and I want to do more projects that keep me a little more off-balance and scare me a little more.”

But she also wants to continue working on new plays as well. “Each offers a different challenge. On a classic, in some ways you’re out on a limb by yourself as a director, because it is up to you to interpret it in a fresh, vivid way. While it’s always a risk to do a new play, you feel more as if you’re not taking the risk alone--the playwright has much more at stake than the director and I’m always aware of that.”

She’s also aware that she couldn’t have directed “Speed-the-Plow” if she hadn’t been drawn to Mamet’s themes. “It doesn’t make sense to direct a play you don’t have a real connection to because you’ll just go crazy. I also love getting to direct something that on the surface doesn’t appear to intersect with my own life, but on a deeper level, I do connect with what the play’s about.”