The safety curtain that welcomes the public that sets up for the third revival of Broadway from GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS Represents a set of steak knives, the infamous famous second prize of a competition for the highest figures of colleagues from a real estate office of Scuzzy Chicago. The knives barely receive a mention in the original text of David Mamet and are in fact better known to adapt to the 1992 screen, in which the Hatshot seller of Alec Baldwin, Blake – an additional character created for the film – breaks him down for brokers in his PEP speech “always at closing” often quoted.
“The first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado … The second prize is a set of steak knives, the third prize is that you are dismissed”, informs them Blake in a warning which is more verbal abuse than motivation speech. This scene has become emblematic, and the steak knives shorten mentorship with maliciousness.
The finalist in this vicious world of Shifty Desperados is only a small step in relation to the loser, the ultimate emasculating death sentence. Not for nothing, the distribution of the film joking it jokingly Death of a fucking sellerA nod to the tenderness of Mamet for blasphemies as well as to the tragedy of everyone from Arthur Miller.
The image of the curtain is an intelligent wink for the public probably more familiar with the film than with the previous scene incarnations. But this striking renewal – made with surgical clarification of Patrick Marber and played by an ideally sunk set firing on all cylinders and stringing each other with a camaraderie that often hides in contempt – does not need nostalgic assistance.
Production makes a strong argument for the room, the best of Mamet, both as a major work of his time and a tangy comment on a type of impressive work which is always with us. There is a reason why the House of the House of Men to everything GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS The renewal is generally semi-pupulated by the finance and the technology of the brothers who skim with pleasure when they repeat the favorite lines. Their hair products and their costumes – net and conservative, if they are rarely elegant – are a dead gift.
Mamet wrote the play as a caustic disassembly of capitalism, of toxic masculinity (before the term was devoted in the popular vernacular language) and disappearing morality in the 80s, a decade roughly defined by the cupidity and the raptor economic growth. It still works in this way more than 40 years later, although for each member of the public who braids the vitriol explosions of the characters, their racist and homophobic epithets, there is probably another person ready to jump on the stage and to raise them after some of the more tasty flows of invective.
In terms of money, it is impossible not to consider that the country is now managed by men who could very easily be Vintage Mamet characters-Even if their mastery of fucking-fuck snark is generally not as poetic. The “in search of number one” philosophy has become so standardized that it now seems more advised than selfish. This credo to present reality TV shows “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to win” could just as easily be the personal motto of strong political men, industry captains and wheels of all bands.
With the rise of the manosphere, it is not surprising that the tragicomic drama landed with a new bite. I admit that I had no desire to burn to revisit the room. I caught the original memorable racing on Broadway in 1984, with Joe Mantegna as the best office seller Ricky Roma and Robert Prosky as Shelly “The Machine” Levene, the formerly unstoppable veteran whose luck seems to have exhausted.
I was overthrown by the superb renewal of 2005, with Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda in these roles. But I was disappointed when he returned to Broadway in 2012, with Al Pacino, who had played Roma in the film, like Levene in a showboating tour which took off the balance of the play and caught the attention, for all the bad reasons, far from the Roma of the Peacock of Bobby Cannavale.
While this production felt expired, a species in charge lacking in electricity, it seems revitalized. This could be due to the times when we live or to the new prospect of Marber, a Briton whose history as an actor, playwright and director pay him the laser to the text and the performance of which the writing of Mamet demanded. (Marber won a Tony Award in 2023 for his complex management of the best game winner Leopoldstadtby Tom Stoppard.)
The success of the renewal to recharge the batteries of the work also comes down to the intelligent cast. From the opening scene – on the Chinese restaurant game on the scale of the Scott Pask scene – it is clear that the Staccato rhythms of the rapid Mamet shooting dialogue are still singing.
Levene (Bob Odenkirk, making an exciting beginnings on Broadway) moves in the agitation in a red leather stand. With a hilarious insistence, he maintains Motormouth energy designed to prevent office director John Williamson (Donald Webber Jr.) from making a word while he begs and Cajoles in the hope of having some of the new promising avenues for putting an end to his bad luck. But behind the eye with dead eyes, Williamson is not a boost, even when Shelly was welded by promising an important part of his commissions.
Having established the avenues of sale as a chalice Golden of the play, Scene Two presents the scam, a favorite mamet motif. The action moves to the adjacent stand, where Dave Moss (Bill Burr, another beginning of KO) is to spit bile to his less voluminous colleague George Aaranow (Michael McKean). Moss is enraged on the unrealistic pressure exerted on them by the invisible but hated direction of the head office, Mitch and Murray, whose names appear so often that they are almost as lively as the characters on stage.
If Shelly seems determined to hide the feeling of sinking that her glory days are over, McKean suggests with a Hangdog face that Aranow is resigned to his obsolescence. By looking as crumpled as his cheap costume, he particularly affected the moments of the second act.
However, the unscrupulous foam uses its tricks and its belligerent way with words to try to sell Aaronow on the idea of entering the office. He wants to steal the slopes and sell them to a rival agency, to which they would both jump. This would give them a new financial start while tighting it in Mitch and Murray.
In the third scene, Ricky Roma (Kieran Culkin) sits alone in a stand making an inactive chatter with James Lingk (John Pirruccello), the customer of the restaurant trying to read a book at the next table. The subject of Roma is an intrinsically male thesis on the refusal to live with shyness, the embrace of adventure and the opportunity instead. It is of course only a smooth preamble before starting to subscribe to Lingk in a land property of Florida of dubious value, in a development called Glengarry Highlands.
Act two moves to the offices, looking ransacked after being robbed the previous night. There is no fan, but shit has clearly struck something. Even phones have been stolen, a reminder that we are in the pre-cellular era. Ricky sails at the top of the sale of the previous night, insisting that they owe him a Cadillac, and Shelly also manages to sing after having broken his sequence of defeats. But the atmosphere that opens as transactions collapsing and a gruff detective (Howard W. exceeds) inaugurates the employees one by one in an inner office to be questioned.
On the surface, Ricky Roma might not seem very stretched for Culkin after playing the novel Roy Roman Roman, just as impregnated and fast Succession and Benji Kaplan without filter in A real painThe role that has just put it in bag an Oscar. But Roma has a different type of volatility. “Ah, Christ … what a day, what a day … I didn’t even have a cup of coffee“, He said, bouncing on the walls of the angry office, probably still wired of everything he was the previous night.
Culkin is also a follower of a sneaky and sardonic blow as with an explosive tirade and his physique of living wire is fascinating. Almost every time, Ricky spits another “fuck!” He backs up his angry head, his gelified hair standing like a breeding crest. This fun image is the icing on the cake of the collision of this narrowly structured piece of humor of pitch-dark with despair, disloyalty and invasive helplessness.
Culkin, Odenkirk and Burr gain more than winning their billing of marquee – these last two, as well as the always wonderful Méquean, holding a meeting of the elders of Vince Gilligan. (This extended during the first press evening in the audience, where Bryan Cranston led the standing ovation.)
Culkin makes Roma a closely coiled energy ball, swollen with an excess of confidence of the cock; Odenkirk finds the pathos in the increasingly vain attempts of Shelly to maintain a front while his career collapses under him; And Burr bristles with resentment, making a clever music from the strings of explanatives of Moss. It is not surprising that the experienced comic has a flawless timing.
Prime Mamet – For good years before becoming a right -wing ideologist – has always been catnip for first -rate actors. These guys get out of it and the top is contagious.
Location: Palace Theater, New York
Interpreters: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean, Donald Webber Jr., John Pirruccello, Howard W.
Director: Patrick Marber
Dramaturge: David Mamet
Set and costume tree: Scott Pask
Lighting: Jen Schriever
Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Rebecca Gold, Caiola Productions, Roy Furman
