"Speed the Plow" is not a drama in the socialist realism genre, about heroic collective farmers struggling to meet Uncle Joe's Five Year Plan. No, it's a tale of cultural degradation under capitalism, by American playwright David Mamet.

On January 3, the Theatre Guild of Ancon put on a staged reading of the play, a presentation form somewhere between that of a first reading and a dress rehearsal, for one night only. Originally scheduled for last August but postponed by a work schedule conflict, Speed the Plow concluded the guild's 2002 three-play Great American Playwrights' Staged Reading Series.

Basically Tod Robberson plays Gould, the jaded and mercenary Hollywood producer and Domingo de Obaldia plays Fox, Gould's assistant. Fox has scored a coup, by way of a personal request by a hot screen star to do a marketable tale of prison bonding with predictable sex and violence angles, and brings it in to his boss. Karen the clerical temp (Lara Petrosky) almost ruins it all by going down on the front office version of the casting couch with Gould.

That is, if you want to view sexual harassment from the male power broker's point of view.

But let me not get all indignant and self-righteous and call this a sexist play. It's a play about sexism, petty office politics and the degradation of American popular culture. It doesn't glorify these things, except possibly from the point of view of ultra-shallow minds.

Domingo de Obaldia, who crosses back and forth between Panama's English-speaking and Spanish-speaking stages, was the star of this show. Robberson and Petrosky are Guild regulars and turned in solid enough performances, but the younger de Obaldia is the one who gives those of us concerned about the future of English-language theater in Panama the most reason for hope.

The Guild's next production, "The Tender Trap," will take to the stage in March and April.