Glengarry Glen Ross (Play)

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares159 Views

    Review: ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ With Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr

    by

    Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk star in a bumpy revival of David Mamet’s play about salesmen with nothing worth selling.Watch out for Richard Roma. Top man among the bottom feeders at a scammy Chicago real estate agency, he has a hypnotic come-on and a dizzying spiel. Identifying your vulnerabilities with forensic accuracy, he’ll lance them with a blunt needle. (“You think you’re queer?” he asks one mark. “I’m going to tell you something: We’re all queer.”) If it’s what you need, he’ll be the brother who thinks big on your behalf, who sees beyond your sad habit of safety to the rewards only risk can offer.Not that there are actually rewards. The lots he’s selling in Florida, in developments ludicrously called Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, are worthless.Back at the office, too, he’s the alpha among losers. On the leaderboard of recent earnings, he stands closest by far to the $100,000 mark that will win him a Cadillac in the agency’s sales contest. (The two lowest earners will be fired.) His colleagues are merely additional marks to be bamboozled. They have schemes; he has juice.No wonder he remains, 41 years after he first hit Broadway in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” one of theater’s greatest characters: the unregulated id of sociopathic capitalism. He makes Willy Loman look like a softy. This salesman will never die.Or so I thought. But in the weirdly limp revival that opened on Monday at the Palace Theater, something has flipped. As played by Kieran Culkin, leading a sales team that also features Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Michael McKean, Roma is no longer the master of everyone else’s neuroses; he’s neurotic himself. Especially in the scene that ends the first act, as he winds up for a pitch into the soul of a schlub, he is so deeply weird and interior that any semblance of a confident exterior evaporates. The man couldn’t sell a dollar for a dime.Bill Burr, left, as the hotheaded Moss and Michael McKean as the strait-laced Aaronow in an Act I scene in a Chinese restaurant.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Bill Burr Is About to Hit Broadway. Broadway Better Duck.

      by

      Inside a spacious room on Manhattan’s West Side, rehearsal for the latest Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” was full of macho bluster and trash talk. And that was before the actors started running their scene.It was a Friday morning, and the show’s British director, Patrick Marber, back after being briefly out sick, approached two of his stars, Bill Burr and Michael McKean. They were sitting inside a makeshift restaurant booth, getting ready to play desperate real estate salesmen entertaining the idea of robbing their office.Then Marber noticed a satchel in front of them that he hadn’t seen before. “You were gone, so the play changed,” Burr responded in his staccato Boston cadence.Marber looked somewhere between annoyed and amused. Getting teased by one of the greatest living stand-up comics is an honor. But there was work to be done. Previews would start in just a few weeks, on March 10, at the Palace Theater. He turned, walked back to his table, picked up a vape and took a puff. Burr pounced. “What’s that?” he asked, a scornful snap in his voice. “Smoke a cigarette like a man!”Burr loves messing with people. There’s a more accurate verb than “messes,” of course, but I’m not going to use it here. It’s so intrinsic to his needling personality that when I asked him minutes before rehearsal why he’s studying French, Burr described a revenge fantasy of sorts: an eventual stand-up set in France meant to irritate Parisians snooty about Americans mangling their language. Only Bill Burr learns French “out of spite.”Ed Harris as Moss and Alec Baldwin as Blake in the 1992 film adaptation of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”New Line CinemaWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway Revival of ‘Glengarry’ to Star Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr

      by

      A revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s classic play about unscrupulous real estate agents, is to open next spring.“Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the world of unscrupulous real estate agents, is returning to Broadway next spring with a starry cast for its seedy offices.Kieran Culkin, boosted to stardom by his role as a scheming son of a media titan in “Succession,” will be featured alongside Bob Odenkirk, the “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” alumnus, and Bill Burr, one of today’s most successful standup comics.The production — which will be the fourth “Glengarry” outing on Broadway — is to be directed by Patrick Marber, a Tony Award winner for Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” Marber was 19 when he saw the first production of “Glengarry” in London in 1983.“Glengarry” is one of the plays that solidified Mamet’s reputation as a great American dramatist. It is an ensemble drama, set in a Chinese restaurant and a real-estate office, about a group of salesmen competing to market real estate developments to unwitting buyers.The play arrived on Broadway in 1984, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama that same year. It was adapted as a film in 1992, with a cast led by Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon.The play was revived on Broadway in 2005, with Alan Alda and Liev Schreiber, and again in 2012, with Pacino and Bobby Cannavale.Culkin, who will play Richard Roma, the alpha dog salesman, has appeared on Broadway once before, in a 2014 production of Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth.” Odenkirk will play Shelly Levene, the sad-sack veteran salesman, and Burr takes on the role of Dave Moss, Roma’s blustery rival; they will both be making their Broadway debuts in “Glengarry.” The rest of the cast and the production’s dates have not yet been announced.The 2025 revival is being produced by Jeffrey Richards, who has worked on every previous Broadway production of “Glengarry” and who often produces Mamet’s work on Broadway, as well as by Rebecca Gold, a frequent Richards collaborator. In 2018, Richards and Gold had plans to stage an all-female production of “Glengarry,” and in 2019, Patti LuPone said she was slated to star, but that production never happened.Mamet has become a polarizing figure in recent decades — his later plays have not been well-received, and his rightward political turn has alienated some onetime fans. But his early plays remain admired; most recently, “American Buffalo” was revived on Broadway in 2022, and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, although critical of Mamet, called the production “electric.” More