For all his success outside of it, David Mamet has done all right by Hollywood. More than all right, in fact: His screenplays for The Verdict and Wag the Dog were nominated for Oscars, and, like Woody Allen, he gets to direct his own scripts just the way he wants to because 1) he’s got such unassailable artistic cred that everybody wants to work with him, and 2) he never spends very much money. Though he published yet another cranky treatise on the movies, Bambi vs. Godzilla, only a few months ago, he’s currently enjoying one of the biggest mainstream successes of his varied and brilliant career in The Unit, a CBS commandos-vs.-terrorists adventure series on which Mamet has a "created by" credit and to which he frequently contributes scrips.

Though he’s probably cashing some decent checks thanks to his fictitious account of the clandestine War on Terror, Mamet and the Taliban surely agree on at least one thing: Hollywood sucks. Mamet has written for the screen, stage, and prose page about how the The Biz is a morally vacant, vacuous confluence of self-serving, sycophantic idiots, but never with more elegance or wit than in Speed the Plow, his 1988 three-hander that’s just been revived in a slick and sharp new production at Theatre J.

Mamet’s acid-tongued script follows 24 or so eventful hours in the life of Bobby Gould, recently promoted to head of production of a movie studio. One fine Southern California morning, his longtime pal Charlie Fox — a guy whose star hasn’t risen as high as Bobby’s, and who is conscious of this fact every waking second of his ladder-climbing life — comes to him with a slam-dunk opportunity: It-boy Dougie Brown has offered to star in a dumb-but-lucrative action picture for Charlie’s studio, if Charlie can persuade his bosses to close the deal by 10 a.m. the next day. Charlie needs Bobby’s clout to keep him from getting fired off the pic without a piece of the pie. But Charlie’s been Bobby’s loyal toady for 11 years — of course his old pal is going to take care of him. Of course. Right?

Image of Peter Birkenhead, Danton Stone, and Meghan Grady in Theatre J's Speed the Plow.

Problem is, there’s a sexy temp filling in for Bobby’s secretary on this particular day. Bobby, seeking to close that deal, tries to impress her by charging her with the pseudo-important task of giving a “courtesy-read” to an impenetrable literary novel his company has optioned but has no intention of turning into a movie. Unintended consequences -- no, make that fully intended consequences ensue, and Bobby finds himself faced with a choice: Does he recommend the action picture his longtime associate has brought him, or does he use his newfound clout to champion the commercially risky but supposedly redemptive novel?

As ever with Mamet, the drama comes not from what will Bobby choose but from how will Bobby rationalize the decision he knows (and we know) he will make. Hollywood is the milieu, but the play’s real subject is self-delusion. After all, the novel, some ponderous doorstop about radiation and the end of the world, sounds at least as unwatchable as the action movie. The sparse, hilarious detail we get about each of the projects competing for Bobby’s endorsement is one of the play’s richest pleasures.

Director Jerry Whiddon was at the helm of Round House’s terrific production of Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow last winter. That imaginative account of a real-life collaboration between Laurence Oliver and Orson Welles saw the entertainment industry as the province of intellectual titans, flawed but supremely gifted. The two men in Speed the Plow are a purer breed, flawed but gifted only at self-preservation. They’re just like Oscar-winning screenwriter and move-biz memoirist William Goldman says most successful Hollywood types are: baffled and a little frightened by their own good fortune, hyper-aware of their own ordinariness, and terrified that someone is going to call them on it.

As Bobby and Charlie, Danton Stone and Peter Birkenhead understand this intuitively. (Indeed, Brikenhead has written with humor and insight about his own experience of “going Hollywood” for Salon and other publications.) Mamet’s pungent, musical dialog is practically its own language, but these guys speak it like natives. And as Karen — a role originated by "Like a Prayer"-era Madonna, incidentally — Meghan Grady gives a persuasive and nuanced performance in what could easily have been a one-note part.

The play’s three acts are punctuated by snippets of early Elvis Costello songs, music that shares with Mamet’s play a bitter verbal brio and a merciless velocity. Like those tunes, Speed the Plow knocks you flat and is over before you know it. How often do you feel that at a play?

Speed the Plow is at Theatre J through November 25. Tickets are available here.