By Michael Kuchwara, Drama Critic

NEW YORK (AP) --

The bilious business of moviemaking remains as hilariously nasty as ever in David Mamet’s “Speed-The-Plow,” now two decades old but still packing heat in a sizzling revival which opened Thursday at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

If anything, the play seems more pertinent than ever as the stakes have risen financially — not to mention psychologically — in the battle of art vs. commerce. And in Mamet’s deliciously jaded world view, there is no doubt what will win out.

We are in the Hollywood playpen of a pair of rapacious movie producers, Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox, cutthroat entrepreneurs who jabber with the intensity of sharks feasting on raw meat. They are helped, of course, by Mamet’s incredibly punchy and profane dialogue, rat-tat-tat obscenities that explode with assembly-line regularity thanks to Neil Pepe’s taut direction and a terrific trio of actors.

The threesome, Jeremy Piven, Elisabeth Moss and especially Raul Esparza, handle the language with ease. Esparza plays Charlie, a more-than-desperate wannabe, who has won the interest of a big star for a crass, commercial prison buddy picture he wants to produce. Now he and Bobby (Piven), the head of production, have to sell their surefire idea to the studio chief in the next 24 hours.

The two men, old friends who came up through the ranks together, are giddy as they fantasize about all the money they plan to make. Yet Bobby reminds his overeager producing partner that making movies is about more than riches.

“It’s a people business,” says Bobby, even while he stomps all over them.

That sense of obligation gets him involved with a “courtesy read” of a novel and a possible film project with the unlikely and distinctly noncommercial title of “The Bridge or Radiation and the Half Life of Society. A Study of Decay.” It’s written, Bobby sneers, by one of those “eastern sissy” writers.

He fobs off the read to a woman he wants to bed, a temporary secretary named Karen (Moss). This seemingly inept woman can barely make coffee or snag a reservation at a trendy L.A. restaurant, but she finds the book worthwhile, and, in a moment of what passes for moral clarity in Hollywood, Bobby decides to green-light it.

Therein lies the conflict of “Speed-The-Plow,” and some surprising turns are taken in the play’s three short acts, which together run less than 90 minutes. But make no mistake. This is a full evening of theater.

The original 1988 production was skewered by the awkward celebrity casting of Madonna as the secretary. Moss is deceptively low-key, a nice contrast to all the screaming going on around her. She’s a standout in the play’s second act, set in Bobby’s apartment, when Karen persuasively makes the case for filming the seemingly unfilmable novel.

Piven’s Bobby is the play’s moral center, or at least, the one person on stage who has qualms about what is happening and doesn’t quite know what to do about it. The actor has perfected the persona of bad-little-boy-lost and wears the snarling bewilderment here with considerable expertise.

There’s no such indecision in Charlie. The man is a ferocious wheeler-dealer, capable of glad-handing and back-stabbing at the same time. Wearing a fierce glint and a sly smile, Esparza is one of those kinetic actors who doesn’t hold anything back. He’s full-tilt ahead — tailor-made for the pugnacious Charlie.

To really explode, “Speed-The-Plow” must star actors of equal intensity. With Piven and Esparza, this revival has found the perfect theatrically combustible pair.

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