The way they kill them off in the American theater, you’d think salesmen would be an endangered species. But just as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman dukes it out with The Crucible as his most potent work, David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer-winning Glengarry Glen Ross, a corrosive Darwinian study of lowlife purveyors of dubious real estate, remains, with American Buffalo, the author’s finest hour. As in Buffalo and the Hollywood-set Speed-the-Plow, Mamet is concerned with power trumping principle in American business — which is here a jungle inhabited by men who talk a truncated toilet poetry and see their sleazy transactions as matters of life and death.
One could question the necessity of reviving Glengarry, which has been made into a successful film with Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, and Al Pacino. But there is something tersely ferocious and a bit perverse about the theater piece, which Mamet feared was so disjointed that he sent it to Harold Pinter for advice. (Pinter’s pronouncement: put it on, which Britain’s Royal National Theatre promptly did, several months before the play’s American premiere.) And to revisit the seedy Chinese restaurant and ransacked real-estate office of Glengarry, in the Lyric Stage Company’s bristling if slightly sentimental production, is to realize how cracklingly primal Mamet could be before he stylized himself (at least in his stage works) into the æther.
Glengarry is no more seamless than its title, which is cobbled together from the names of a couple of the lyrically dubbed Florida developments being marketed by the realtors of the play. Act one comprises a triptych of one-on-one conversations in a Chinese restaurant (presided over here by a large, suspended, red-eyed dragon) near the grubby office from which the realtors work. Business is slow, and a merciless weeding-out contest has been devised by which a top salesman will win a Cadillac and a couple of his less productive colleagues will get fired. Over-the-hill huckster Shelly Levene (the Willy Loman of the piece) is trying to wangle some decent " leads, " or sales prospects, from the weasly office manager, Williamson. Next up, resentful salesman Moss tries to trick flunky Aaronow into complicity in his plot to steal the leads and sell them to a rival realtor. (This exchange contains one of my favorite bits of Mametiana, in which the two men, to determine whether the robbery under discussion is real or hypothetical, split hairs over whether they are " talking about it " or " speaking about it. " ) Finally, slick salesman Ricky Roma spins a web of sentence fragments, sexual bravado, and wisps of possibility to trap the shlub in the next booth, a guy named Lingk, into acquiring some Florida swampland.
The ensemble act two takes place the following morning at the office, which has indeed been burgled in the night. As a detective strong-arms the salesmen suspects in a back office, small-time power does its big-time dance as things go wrong amid the mussed-up desks and scattered files that make up the disparate, desperate sales force’s working environment.
This is director Spiro Veloudos’s third Mamet effort for the Lyric. Although he acknowledges Glengarry’s stylization, he does not entirely give in to it, favoring the staccato bounce of realistic, if explosive, overlapping conversation over the very specific, exaggerated rhythms dictated by the playwright. In Chronicle reporter Ted Reinstein’s silky delivery, even Roma’s fragmented first-act paean to acquisition as self-actualization and a strike against fate almost makes sense. And as Reinstein’s cocksure Roma, discoursing like some soldier of non sequitur, slides down the red-vinyl banquette to within striking distance of Lingk, then puts his arm around him as he spreads his map of Glengarry Highlands, you know the poor mark hasn’t got a chance.
But on top of nailing and poeticizing the vulgar, colloquial language of the street and exposing the skewed morality of American business, Mamet spins a brutal, poignant tale in Glengarry Glen Ross. At the center is not Roma, with his showy hustle, but the alternately crowing and groveling Shelly, who’s eventually brought bewildered to his Waterloo. At the Lyric, he’s played by the too young and too hangdog but aptly compulsive and then shattered Ken Baltin. Neil A. Casey brings shrill menace to bureaucrat Williamson, who’s regarded by the adventuring salesmen as an insulated wuss. The supporting performances are competent but a bit bloodless.
" Always be closing, " is the mantra of Mamet’s brave if not admirable warriors as they try to survive by completing their shyster property deals in a grimy, duplicitous, quaint 1980s world that predates cell phones and the Internet. Not that the play is dated — if these guys were in business today, they’d wear better suits and be crashing Enron.
