Here it comes, almost like clockwork: Another “Glengarry Glen Ross” opens on Broadway with a new set of actors trying their luck with David Mamet’s cutthroat look at business, like a “Hunger Games” for real estate.
“Succession” breakout Kieran Culkin joins “Better Call Saul” star Bob Odenkirk and comedian Bill Burr in a crackling, non-showy and well-balanced production that opened Monday at the Palace Theatre.
The trio will likely get a standing ovation every night, but it’s the casting that really sings. None of the leads are outside their comfort zones.
Culkin is really just playing a more spikey, foul-mouthed version of Roman Roy, portraying the smug, big dog salesman with his trademark off-kilter sarcasm, a natural with Mamet’s angular psycho-babble.
Other Richard Roma portrayers have been snarling, muscle-and-bone heavies, but not the slight Culkin, here preening from a desk or mocking others by childishly mimicking their movements. He went from Roman to Roma.
Odenkirk also retains some of Saul’s small-time con artist as Shelly “The Machine” Levene, the once-winning-but-now-struggling salesman. Odenkirk wrestles with the desperation in the first act but struts about marvelously after he’s gotten a boost in the second, like an injection of B12. He channels a little Lewis Black, with fluttering hand gestures and a tendency to go unhinged.
Burr — perhaps the least expected to shine on theater’s biggest stage — almost steals the show, perfect for the volcanic Dave Moss, a twitchy ball of fury unleashing f-bombs at a machine-gun rate, which seems in synch with Burr’s diatribes about modern culture. He turns out to be the most comfortable with Mamet’s tricky dialogue.
The cast also includes a wonderfully sad sack salesman, Michael McKean as George Aaronow — a little slow on the uptake in Act One and utterly flustered in Act Two — and a superbly slow-building Donald Webber Jr. as the manager.
This is the third revival of the play on Broadway, having previously attracted the likes of Al Pacino, Bobby Cannavale, David Harbour, Alan Alda, Liev Schreiber and Joe Mantegna. A movie version starred Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin.
The rhythm for this verbal joust-fest — filled with pauses, italicized words, cross-talk and repetition — has to be fast and furious, and director Patrick Marber nails it with military precision. The lighting team has this down to the millisecond, hitting the blackout trigger perfectly.
A slack “Glengarry Glen Ross” is deadly, and Marber keeps everything tight right until the end, when McKean speaks the famous “Oh, God, I hate this job” and Roma launches the play’s last line simultaneous with the word “job.”
The play is set in a seedy Chicago real estate firm whose business consists mostly in trying to con old folks into buying dubious Florida properties with picturesque names like “Glengarry Highlands.” The other setting is a Chinese restaurant, this time rendered a little more elegant than expected.
The salesmen are loathsome, with no moral center other than winning. Each scene has someone trying to sell someone else — on a property, an idea or a scam, even if they’ll commit a robbery at the office. They think they’re swashbuckling pirates, of course.
“It’s not a world of men, Machine,” Roma tells Levene. “It’s a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders … there’s no adventure to it.”
The dialogue is filled with casual racism and sexism, a reminder of where we were in the early 1980s in testosterone-filled offices. What’s fascinating today is that the play opens just as the U.S. president — from Florida who got his start in real estate and brags he knows how to close a deal — blusters his way through a second term, promising to eliminate progressivism.
A new “Glengarry Glen Ross” arriving just as we turn back the clock seems appropriate.
