Kieran Culkin, Michael McKean, Donald Webber Jr., John Pirruccello, Howard W. Overshown, Bob Odenkirk, and Bill Burr in Glengarry Glen Ross. Photo: Emilio Madrid
When David Mamet’s Glengarry Glenn Ross stormed onto the American stage in 1984, its savage attack on American business ethics caused a sensation. Equally arresting were the play’s unorthodox structure, the aggressive profanity in its language, and the desperation of its characters in crisis.
Now, forty-one years later, with a powerful Broadway revival, the themes of this Pulitzer-Prize-winning play resonate even more deeply and acutely, buttressed by Mamet’s masterful dramatic language.
In a seedy real estate office in Chicago, four desperate salesmen struggle to sell worthless Florida resort properties, in a brutal competition to keep their jobs and self-worth. The stakes are sky-high, displayed on a blackboard designed to humiliate whoever doesn’t make it to the top of the sales chart. First prize, a Cadillac—second prize, a set of steak knives. The person at the bottom gets fired.
In Act I, set in a Chinese restaurant, we meet the salesmen in a series of taut two-character scenes. In the first, veteran salesman Shelley “The Machine” Levene (Bob Odenkirk) attempts to bribe office manager John Williamson (a stony Donald Webber, Jr.) to give Levene the treasure for which they’re all competing: the best “leads” of potential customers. But the game is already rigged, since John is instructed to give certain competitors the weakest leads. Those perverse orders come from the unseen villains, Mitch and Murray, who run the office from “downtown.”
In the second duet, the stakes are heightened. Dave Moss (Bill Burr), another salesman, has come up with the idea to break into the office, steal the new list of “hot leads,” and sell them to a competitor of Mitch and Murray. He pitches this idea to another salesman, George (a passive Michael McKean), framing him by saying that since he’s listened to the plan, George is now an accomplice.
Having set the scene for the cutthroat dynamic between these desperate men, the third scene focuses on the salesman who is currently top on the list: Ricky Roma (Kieran Culkin), reputed to be the most ruthless of them all. In this scene, we see Ricky “in action,” preying upon James Lingk, aka “Jim” (John Pirruccello), a gullible potential buyer.
Mamet has masterfully set the scene for Act II: the aftermath of the robbery in the trashed office. As police question each of the four salesmen, the atmosphere is like an emergency room, with people running in and out, doors slamming, and voices shouting. As the salesmen are called in one by one, another drama takes place. The customer Jim has come to the office to tell Ricky that his wife insists he cancel the sale, which provokes Ricky, with the help of Shelley, into full con artist mode to try to dissuade Jim from canceling through a series of blatant lies and manipulations.
The drama of Act II is heightened through a series of shocking twists and turns, culminating in the solving of the crime (no spoiler alert). Mamet’s dramatic language is dazzling in its precision, intensifying the action. The repetitions and the rhythms of the profane dialogue are overpowering. We hear them in the very first scene (“John, John, John, John, John”; “wait, wait, wait”), reflecting Shelly’s desperation. Words like “leads,” “losers,” “closers,” “a sit” introduce a new vocabulary into the American theatre, reflecting the brutal culture in which the play is set. Above all, the “f” word dominates. And who can forget the names of Bruce and Harriett Nyborg, pathetic offstage characters to whom Shelly believes he has made a big sale (spoiler: he hasn’t…). Though they never appear, they are virtually part of the cast, as we hear their names over and over. The notorious Nyborgs represent the worst of the ”leads”—lonely folks who love to listen to salesmen but whose checks never clear.
In this all-male cast, the crisis of masculinity in American culture is clearly articulated. “You don’t know how to work with men,” Ricky accuses John, and later: “This is not the world of men.” In the culture of American business, it’s not dog-eat-dog, but “man-eat-man.” We wept at the fate of another (earlier) salesman, Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). But in Mamet’s play, we’re too shocked for tears as we witness man’s capacity for cruelty.
Patrick Marber directs a terrific, tight ensemble of seven, with memorable performances by Bob Odenkirk as the desperate Shelley Levene, Bill Burr as the double-talking Dave Moss, and Kieran Culkin as the volatile Ricky Roma.
“We’re members of a dying breed,” says Shelley toward the play’s devastating end. But are they a dying breed, really? That’s the epiphany of this revival—that America’s corrupt business ethics are even sicker than before. Just this past week, a major New York law firm buckled under the outrageous, punishing demands of the new administration. The reason for their capitulation: once the news got out of the government’s threat, other lawyers in New York allegedly contacted clients of the besieged law firm to offer their services instead.
“God, I hate this job,” says George, in the play’s last line. Shouldn’t this be what we’re saying today, doing jobs that hurt our fellow Americans?