‘Speed-the-Plow’ Will Have West Coast Premiere at SCR

David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” is to have its West Coast premiere next season at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. The three-character play originated at New York’s Lincoln Center and ran on Broadway last year with Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver as a couple of sleazy movie producers and Madonna in her stage debut as an office temp.

“Since it’s set in Hollywood, I’m a little surprised that we’re the first theater on the West Coast to get the play,” SCR artistic director Martin Benson said Thursday. “If I were running a theater in Los Angeles, I would have been all over it. It’s delicious, delightful and bitchy--everything that makes good, trenchant theater.”

“Speed-the-Plow” will run June 8 to July 15 as the sixth and closing play of SCR’s 1989-90 season on the Mainstage. Benson and producing artistic director David Emmes announced its inclusion Wednesday at the theater’s annual dinner.

Benson said Thursday that although the production stands as the West Coast premiere as of now, it is conceivable that another theater beyond the greater Los Angeles area, where South Coast has exclusive rights, could get permission to stage the play before June 8.

Emmes told the more than 200 guests attending the dinner at the theater that South Coast has met its decade-long $12-million fund-raising goal a year earlier than anticipated. The “Challenge of Excellence,” the official title of the campaign, began in 1981 and provides funds for the theater’s endowment as well as its capital and annual operating budgets.

Arden Flamson was named the new president of South Coast’s board of trustees, taking over from Ronald L. Merriman. New members also named to the board of directors are James Henwood, general manager of South Coast Plaza; Janice Johnson; Donald Kennedy, president of First American Financial Corp., and Jerold Miles, president of Restrec Properties Inc.