TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84gle48

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 3.7 KB | 71 lines

                                                                                April 9, 1984

THEATER

Pitchmen Caught in the Act


GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS by David Mamet

"Listen to me, like me, buy me"; the salesman's top-of-the-line
product is always himself. This was one message in Death of a
Salesman, which was more interested in romanticizing failure
than in demonstrating whether Willy Loman was ever very good at
his trade. David Mamet is no romantic. In his monstrously
entertaining Glengarry Glen Ross, which opened on Broadway last
week after earlier spins at the National Theater in London and
the Goodman in Chicago, he shows his peddlers caught in the
entrepreneurial act. One pitchman recounts a conquest he made
by sitting, silent and motionless, for 22 minutes in his
customers' kitchen. Another salesman flimflams his client with
a hilarious spiel about life, existentialism and the pleasure
principle; the monologue has all the narrative logic of Dadaist
graffiti, but it whets the appetite, clinches the sale, sets the
sucker up for the kill.

In the Chicago real estate office that is the principal setting
for Glengarry Glen Ross, the real cutthroat swordsmanship is for
the most promising "leads" (lists of hot prospects); from these
come "sits" (in-person meetings with the customer) and the
hallowed "closing" of the deal. This month the agency is
holding a contest among its four salesmen:  Roma (Joe Mantegna),
the slick master of sympathetic patter; Aaronow (Mike Nussbaum),
an aging nebbish trudging on the treadmill of anxiety; Moss
(James Tolkan), bullet-headed and bull- tempered; and Levene
(Robert Prosky), a salesman on a long losing streak, who can
beam like a bishop at good news and just as quickly turn to
wheedling for his job. Running herd on these macho
individualists is the consummate organization man, Williamson
(J.T. Walsh). What is this, an MTM sitcom gone bilious?  No,
more like The Front Page staged in the lower depths.

The penny-ante gangsters in Mamet's American Buffalo talked of
themselves as businessmen; the businessmen of Glengarry talk
like gangsters. But gangsters with a weird, Damon Runyon twist.
Out of the mouths of these middle-class lowlifes comes the odd
flowery word used for screwball effect:  "inured,"
"imperceptibly," "supercilious."  The rest of their rhetoric is
a litany of abuse, invective and those four-letter words that
describe things people do every day in the privacy of their
bedrooms and bathrooms. It may be that no salesman, not even
these salesmen, would traffic so doggedly in obscenity. But to
say this is to assume that Mamet's ear-to-the- gutter dialogue
is naturalistic. It is not. This is street slang refined and
extended into the surreal, the baroque, the abrasive, the
lyrical. And as spoken in blazing ricochet rhythms by his
energized septet of actors -- especially Mantegna, Prosky and
Lane Smith as a harried customer who comes close to emotional
collapse -- Mamet's absurdist riffs almost make sense.

"Two actors, some lines ... and an audience."  This recipe for
drama (from A Life in the Theater) is one that Mamet has
followed closely, until now. The small-time fantasts from
American Buffalo and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, who
practically imploded on their aggressions, have given way in
Glengarry to more expansive characters who all fight by the same
rules:  dirty. And though these salesmen may never win a
contest or close a deal on a Florida tract, they still keep
hustling and bustling. So, admirably, does Gregory Mosher's
production. At a trim 80 minutes, this is a comedy that moves
with the cyclone pace of farce and lingers with the bite of
despair.

--By Richard Corliss