Jeffrey Richards has produced playwright David Mamet’s plays ten times on Broadway over the past twenty years, including the revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross” that is currently running at the Palace Theater…and two previous revivals of the same play. It’s a level of loyalty that the characters in the play would scoff at – cut-throat, conning real estate salesmen, who are portrayed this time around by a starry cast, including Kieran Culkin, in his next gig after his Oscar-winning turn in “A Real Pain’; Comedian Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk (of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul”) are both making their Broadway debuts.
Mamet’s plays are still clearly a draw for actors;, and they may have other loyalists among theater lovers besides Richards,, albeit none so manifestly dedicated. But I no longer share in their enthusiasm, not even for Mamet’s most acclaimed early plays, the two that keep on getting revived: “American Buffalo,” Mamet’s first play on Broadway, opening in 1977, and revived three times since, most recently in 2022 (with Richards producing), and “Glengarry Glen Ross”, which debuted on Broadway in 1984, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (with Richards serving as the show’s publicist) and 21 years later, won a Tony for best revival (the first of Richards’ eight, none of the others for a Mamet play.) “Always be closing,” a phrase that gained prominence only in the 1992 film adaptation, has become the catchphrase for a play that always seems to be opening
The reason why I lost my enthusiasm makes it feel inadequate – and perhaps even misleading – simply to assess the pluses and minuses of this particular production, which in any case I mostly found disappointing: poorly directed, oddly paced, not always acted persuasively, and swallowed up in a theater and set design too massive and incongruously opulent for the cramped and incessantly vulgar and vicious world that the play depicts.
A normal review struck me as almost irrelevant when I saw audience members take obvious delight at the foul-mouthed, hateful, racist invective of Mamet’s characters, laughing at the ugliest lines.
It suddenly made me think of “House of Games,” a film that Mamet wrote a few years after he got his Pulitzer. In it, a psychiatrist named Margaret (Lindsay Crouse, Mamet’s wife at the time) falls prey to a con game, and then becomes fascinated with the art of the con, as practiced by Mike the con artist (Joe Mantegna.) Margaret takes delight in seeing Mike swindle other people. This seemed a crucial if cynical insight about human nature for Mamet – but also perhaps a blueprint for his playwriting.
Both stories are full of elaborate twists. “Glengarry” sets up its twists with its first three scenes, each introducing two of the characters, all in turn taking place in a Chinese restaurant. (Scott Pask’s set here is too elaborate; why fill the stage with so many red leather banquettes, when you’re only going to use one booth?)
In the first scene, Shelly Levene (Odenkirk), desperately down on his luck, begs the office manager John (Donald Webber Jr.) for some “leads” – potential customers (marks, really) that Levene can con into buying worthless Florida property, so that he can possibly win the Cadillac in the contest the bosses are running but at least sell enough so that he won’t be fired. (The title refers to the two real estate developments, “Glengarry Highlands” and “Glen Ross Farms” that the salesmen are trying to pawn off on customers.)
In the next scene, an explosively angry and resentful Dave Moss (Burr) ultimately blackmails a relatively milquetoast colleague George (Michael McKean) to stage a robbery of the office where they work, so that they can steal the leads and sell them to a rival.
In the third scene, top seller Richard Roma (Culkin) seems to be just shooting the bull with James Lingk (John Pirrucello) but is actually roping in this stranger to make a sale.
Each of these scenes look like duets, but they are really largely monologues – or what Mamet fans might consider streetwise arias, employing what long has been called Mamet Speak, expletive-laden, half-finished, repetitive phrases with incomprehensible lingo, usually delivered rat-tat-tat (although not so much so in this production.)
These first three scenes then come together in the fourth and final one, which takes place in the office, which has been ransacked after the burglary, a detective (Howard W. Overshown) interviewing each salesman one by one. And one by one, things turn out not how Mamet has set us up to believe.
The surprises, reversals and betrayals are, in a way, Mamet’s con. Theatergoers are likely to take pleasure in them in the way that Margaret took pleasure in the cleverness of Mike’s cons, even though, in truth, most of them are too implausible or inconsistent to bear much scrutiny.
The standard analysis of “Glengarry Glen Ross” is that Mamet wrote it as a satirical critique of the viciousness of capitalism. But even if that was his original intent, it feels dated to use these low-level connivers to illustrate the point, now that grifting has become official White House policy. Times have changed; tellingly or not, Mamet is now a full-on Trump supporter. How many theatergoers now view the nastiness as satirical, something that Mamet is condemning — and how many of those who laugh are simply reveling in the transgressiveness of it all, feeling a kind of liberation, even (especially?) if they might still feel constrained from expressing such incivility themselves outside the theater? In “House of Games,” it turned out, Mike was actually setting Margaret up to be the target of a larger con. Four decades on, it’s hard for me to avoid seeing Mamet like Mike, setting up the audience to be conned into enjoying what should repulse us
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Palace Theater through June 28
Written by David Mamet
Directed by Patrick Marber.
Production Design by Scott Pask; Lighting Design by Jen Schriever
Cast: Kieran Culkin as Richard Roma, Bob Odenkirk as Shelley Levene, Bill Burr as Dave Moss, Michael McKean as George Aaronow, Donald Webber, Jr. as John Williamson, Howard W. Overshown as Baylen, John Pirruccello as James Lingk
