The purpose of this paper is to analyze an efficient method for the solution of the nonlinear system resulting from the discretization of the elliptic Monge-Ampère equation by a $C^0$ interior penalty method with Lagrange finite elements. We consider the two-grid method for nonlinear equations which consists in solving the discrete nonlinear system on a coarse mesh and using that solution as initial guess for one iteration of Newton's method on a finer mesh. Thus both steps are inexpensive. We give quasi-optimal $W^{1,\infty}$ error estimates for the discretization and estimate the difference between the interior penalty solution and the two-grid numerical solution. Numerical experiments confirm the computational efficiency of the approach compared to Newton's method on the fine mesh.