Broadway review by Adam Feldman
The scene most closely associated with David Mamet’s electric 1983 drama Glengarry Glen Ross is probably the “Always Be Closing” tirade delivered by Alec Baldwin in the 1992 film adaptation: a brutal dressing-down of the salesmen in his scammy real-estate operation, including some veteran sellers who may have forgotten their ABCs. The ongoing resonance of that movie is surely one reason that Mamet’s play keeps returning to the stage in major productions. Glengarry is now being mounted on Broadway for the third time in 20 years; only Macbeth, another brief play about cutthroat ambition, has been revived on Broadway more often in this century. (The most revived musical, Gypsy, is also about strivers.) And it will keep coming back as long as there’s money to be made on it. Glengarry Glen Ross: Always be opening.
Funnily enough, Baldwin’s corporate-taskmaster character and his famous speech do not appear in the stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross; Mamet added them for his screenplay. If that’s a bit of a bait-and-switch for fans of the movie, well, that’s what Glengarry is about: Everyone in the real-estate office is peddling the unreal—trying to pull a fast one, sometimes more than one at once. I’ve occasionally wondered why Mamet hasn’t added the lecture scene to the play, which is not exactly too long as it stands; even including an intermission after the 35-minute first act, it’s still not much more than an hour and a half. But why mess with success? Mamet’s vivisection of every-man-for-himself capitalism and masculinity is appropriately nasty, brutish and short.
Glengarry Glen Ross | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
In one more important respect, however, this production does provide less than it promises. Mamet’s spiked-punchy dialogue, percussive and profane, is a magnet for actors, and the current revival, directed by Patrick Marber (Closer), boasts three big names above its title. Kieran Culkin plays Ricky Roma, the office hotshot and hothead and by far its canniest salesman. Bob Odenkirk is Shelley Levene, once nicknamed “the Machine” but now rusted to a standstill. (“It's a streak and I'm going to turn it around,” he insists.) And Bill Burr is the snaky Dave Moss, who has illicit designs on acquiring the office’s most desirable asset: the premium leads that are most likely to yield results. Odenkirk and Burr come through; the top-billed Culkin, who should be the closer, does not.
That throws off the balance of the play in damaging ways. Mamet’s first act is a tightly constructed suite of three two-person scenes at the same Chinese restaurants, in each of which one person does nearly all of the talking. But their spiels come from very different places, and the juxtaposition illustrates their different weights on the see-saw of power, which are inversely related to their pushiness. First up is Levene. He has no leverage, so his efforts to wheedle concessions from his office supervisor, John (Donald Webber Jr., playing close to the vest), register as pathetic; even his bragging is abject, the bluff of a man whose cards are exposed. (Jack Lemmon’s film Levene was the prototype for The Simpsons‘s perpetually pleading Gil Gunderson.) Odenkirk nails both Levene’s desperate fronting and the crafted scattershot of Mamet’s heightened language. The teeter-totter moves closer to equilibrium in the second scene, in which Moss—embodied by Burr with disgusted verve and cold-eyed drive—pitches schemes to his worn-out colleague George (a wittily understated Michael McKean, sipping from a snifter).
Glengarry Glen Ross | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
These two roads are meant to lead to Roma’s triumph in Scene Three. Flush with satiety, with nothing to lose, he is free to play his confidence games with total confidence. He doesn’t have to hunt for marks; he has bread in his pocket, so the pigeons come to him. This time, the client to be duped is one James Lingk (John Pirruccello, every iota the beta schlub), who happens to be sitting a booth away and who can’t resist the pull of Roma’s charisma as he expounds on questions seemingly unrelated to sales. (”What is it that we're afraid of? Loss. What else?”) At least, that’s how the scene is meant to play. But the qualities that made Culkin so compelling as Roman on Succession and Benji in A Real Pain—the neediness and vulnerability that shone through even his most obnoxious behavior—are ill-suited to this role. Sarah Snook disappears into two dozen parts in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but Culkin shakes Succession with less success. His Roma is Roman in a tackier suit: squirmy, vague and unserious. The audience needs to believe that Lingk is thinking, “Who is this fascinating stranger, and how can I learn about life from his words?” Instead, your mind wanders even in a very short scene. Who is this weirdo, and why won’t he stop talking?
Glengarry Glen Ross | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
After intermission, the play moves from the Chinese restaurant to the salesmen’s shabby office: plywood in part of the window, rust from a pipe bleeding down an upper wall. (Scott Pask's sets for both acts are unimprovable, as are his costumes; the pale green shirt under Burr’s brown suit is a miniature triumph.) Culkin’s performance improves in this brighter environment, with greater mobility and action to play, but he’s still all wrong for Roma. When he loses control, there’s no menace to his anger; it’s just a peevish tantrum. To the extent that Marber’s job as a director here is, like John’s, to ”marshal the leads,” it is only partly accomplished. And although much of Marber's scene work is solid, his staging of the show’s big reveal is a letdown; the Closer auteur can’t quite close either act. Because it is so tautly and distinctively written, and since most of the actors are good, Glengarry Glen Ross still basically works; it still hooks you in. But it doesn’t seal the deal.
Glengarry Glen Ross. Palace Theatre (Broadway). By David Mamet. Directed by Patrick Marber. With Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean, Donald Webber Jr., John Pirruccello, Howard W. Overshown Running time: 1hr 40mins. One intermission.
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Glengarry Glen Ross | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
