Glengarry Glen Ross

Wednesday night – their preview night – I got to see Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning play in an excellent production at Mad Cow Theatre. The play, set in the mid-80s, is populated with the seediest, most amoral pieces-o-shit ever to exist – I am being gentle here, truly. These salesmen are unredeemable, power-hungry pricks screwing any and all to close shifty real estate deals. And if they can’t get what they want by being underhanded and back-stabbing, then they resort to thievery and out-and-out lying.

The acting is breath-taking and spot-on, the set is really well designed (the intimate scenes are in your lap, the office scenes played with a smidge of sadistic farce.) However, Glengarry Glen Ross has always enthralled me primarily because it’s completely and unbearably devoid of ethics; it’s like a spiritual vacuum jar where human decency simply does not exist. As an audience member, I always find myself desperately grasping for even one tiny character element from any of these seven fucking human leeches that I could remotely respect; I find nothing. I want to rebuke that unscrupulousness, like a priest would rebuke Satan in an exorcism. And yet, here they are, and here I am, watching it all and wincing through the entire show.

And I just think – like David Almeida says – that there is truly something in America’s corporate setting that is basically pathological. Maybe it’s not totally and completely bereft of human decency – maybe it hasn’t hit the nadir of decency this play exhibits – but the situation is true enough so that this play spoke to me and told me something I don’t want to hear right now.

That was Mamet’s point.

Dahly, my friend who saw it with me and has worked in sales before, says that all sales jobs are like this to some degree. Yeah, that makes me feel good.

The performances are incredible. The dialogue is so sharp, it stings. See the play, by all means, because it is about as well-done as you could imagine. However, warning – it’s built more for morbid fascination, not enjoyment.