On the evening of March 25, 1984, David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross premiered on Broadway. His scabrous portrait of a tribe of sleazy real estate salesmen immediately earned the rave reviews that anticipated its Pulitzer Prize for drama. Frank Rich of The New York Times, unquestionably the most influential critic in America at the time, extolled Glengarry as “the most accomplished play the author has given us,” praising Mamet’s “command of dialogue” and “mastery of theatrical form.”
Just four days after Glengarry debuted, a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman featuring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman raised the curtain for its opening. The timing was purely coincidental, with Salesman having been postponed for several weeks, and yet the near-congruence of two masterpieces about American capitalism provided an irresistible basis of comparison.
In his review, Rich had singled out the character of Shelley “The Machine” Levene in Glengarry—once a star salesman, now aging and faltering and desperate—as having “an anguished personal history almost as complex as Willy Loman’s.” Over the decades between that first domestic production of Glengarry (it had originally been staged, in 1983, at the National Theater in London) and the Broadway revival that opened last month, innumerable critics, actors, and theatergoers have invoked the same parallel.
Writing an essay several weeks into the 1984 production’s run, and slyly riffing on some famous lines from Salesman, Allan Wallach wrote in Newsday that Levene is “still out there riding on a smile and a shoeshine, still feeling the ground shake when they start not smiling back.” The British critic Benedict Nightingale posited in the Cambridge Companion to David Mamet, “Here is Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman at work in the 1980s: just as vulnerable but even more driven, even more compromised and distorted by the pressures of commerce and the harshness of American society.” The cast of the 1992 film adaptation (Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, and more), paying homage to the script’s operatic profanity, referred to the show as “Death of a Fuckin’ Salesman.”
At several levels, likening Glengarry to Salesman and the broken Levene to the shattered Loman makes obvious sense. Though Mamet was decades younger than Arthur Miller, whose socialist views had been forged in the Great Depression, the Chicagoan was the son of a labor lawyer. Glengarry opened in the wake of the devastating recession of the early 1980s, when American unemployment hit double figures for the first time since the Depression, and in the run-up to the mergers and acquisitions craze of the late 1980s. If you wanted to put Glengarry in the context of companion works that cast their own harsh light on then-President Ronald Reagan’s free-market economy, it would fit neatly with Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities, and the investigative books The Predators’ Ball by Connie Bruck and Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart.
Except, ever since seeing this new production of Glengarry, I have found myself thinking a heretical thought. What if we have been wrong about the play all along? What if, instead of offering a ruthless critique of capitalism at its amoral nadir, instead of witheringly depicting a salesman as a con man, Glengarry is instead celebrating the deceit, in fact presenting it as the epitome of manliness? What if Glengarry Glen Ross, quite possibly in ways a younger Mamet himself did not entirely fathom, offers us a joyful ethnography of Donald Trump’s America? How different, after all, is Glengarry’s preening, potty-mouthed alpha dog, Ricky Roma, who dazzles the audience as he peddles worthless tracts of Florida swampland to “dumb Polacks” and “deadbeat wogs,” from the world-class grifter pushing Trump University diplomas and $TRUMP meme bitcoins?
While the current revival has somewhat divided critics, it stood up well for me alongside the versions of the play I’d seen back to the Broadway original. With the exception of one intriguing casting decision, which I’ll get to later, there is nothing revisionist about the production itself. It remains word-to-word faithful to Mamet’s blistering story of a handful of real estate salesmen trying to screw their clients, their boss, and each other on the way to winning the Cadillac that is first prize in a sales contest. No, the only thing that’s different is the political climate in which we now view the cons and the combat. That climate, I would argue, lets Glengarry be the valentine to ruthlessness, deceit, and raw power that it has always been meaning to be.
One very relevant part of the climate change is David Mamet’s own well-documented swing to the far right. He publicly disavowed his previous life as a “brain-dead liberal” in a 2008 essay in The Village Voice. Back then, he was at least aligning himself with a certain conservative intellectual tradition of people like Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Paul Johnson. More recently, Mamet has embraced the pseudo-populism of MAGA. In a 2011 interview with Slate, he declared of Sarah Palin, “I am crazy about her.” Several weeks after last November’s election, Mamet wrote in The Wall Street Journal to congratulate the president-elect for staving off the “decline and fall” of America by slaying both men’s favorite enemies: “the superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists, and the media [who] have colluded to suppress the true and impose the false.”
So it’s reasonable to wonder if even during the liberal manqué phase when Mamet wrote Glengarry, the inner culture warrior may have been viscerally at the artistic controls. All of us who saw in Shelley Levene a modern-day reincarnation of Willy Loman got things entirely wrong. Willy was a moral failure, but not a criminal. His tragic fall, most especially in the eyes of his adoring son Biff, comes because of Willy’s infidelity to his wife, Linda. In a literally heartbreaking way, Willy keeps trying and failing to make sales amid a kind of corruption that is systemic, not personal. Hence you have Miller, admittedly at his most tendentious, bringing Linda center stage to lecture the audience in a famous soliloquy:
I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.
Shelley Levene, in contrast, delights in fooling his victims into buying eight lots of Florida land they cannot possibly afford. So sweet is the flimflam that Levene narrates it back in the office for Ricky Roma’s amusement. “They, I swear to God, they both kind of imperceptibly slumped,” Levene says of his marks, almost swooning himself at the memory. “And he reaches and takes the pen and signs, he passes it to her, she signs. It was so fucking solemn.”
There is no Biff in Levene’s life to disappoint; there are only a couple of passing references to a daughter, leaving the impression that this child might well be a fabrication that The Machine conjures into being when needed to win some sympathy points from a potential buyer. Alas, the couple who sign up for those eight lots turn out to be notorious with Levene’s boss for being mentally unbalanced and pretending to buy anything offered to them. The Machine’s windfall, his big comeback, vanishes in an instant. As for Ricky Roma, his pursuit of the Cadillac sputters when the wife of a naïve buyer scuttles the deal under the protection of a state consumer-protection law.
Who cannot but hear echoes of MAGA and its calumnies about the “deep state”—such as, for example, the Consumer Financial Protection Board—when Roma launches into this combination of jeremiad and rhapsody: “I swear, it’s not a world of men. It’s not a world of men, Machine, it’s a world of clock-watchers, bureaucrats, office-holders. What it is, it’s a fucked-up world. There’s no adventure to it. Dying breed. We are members of a dying breed.” In other words, we need to Make America Great Again.
In assessing the current Broadway production, a fair amount of critical commentary and audience interest had adhered to the star actors playing Ricky Roma (Kieran Culkin) and Shelley Levene (Bob Odenkirk). And, for what it’s worth, I appreciated them both, especially the subtle, supple Culkin for not trying to imitate the dialed-up-to-11 energy that Joe Mantegna enduringly imprinted on the role back in 1984. Yet far less attention has been spent on the most revealing casting decision: having the salesmen’s despised boss, John Williamson, played by a Black actor (Donald Webber Jr.).
After Williamson lets a detail drop that will lead to Roma’s big sale being invalidated by the state attorney general’s office, Roma rakes him in a way that can fairly be called Trumpian: “You fucking shit. Where’d you learn your trade? You stupid fucking cunt. You idiot. Who ever told you you could work with men?” (Italics in the published playscript.) Then Roma goes on to add, “I don’t care whose nephew you are, who you know, whose dick you’re sucking on.”
In the first Broadway production, with Williamson played by J.T. Walsh, as with the other actors who have followed in the role, the scene came off as a hilariously vulgar attack on inherited position, on what we’d now call a “nepo baby.” But with a Black man cast as Williamson, the implication inevitably shifts, and the unqualified boss is coded as, to put it in MAGA-speak, a “DEI hire.”
So for anyone who sees the current production, and there are purely theatrical reasons why you should, don’t think about Willy Loman and Death of a Salesman. Think of a different Arthur Miller character in a different play: Joe Keller in All My Sons. Keller owns an aircraft company that is making planes for the military during World War II, and he knowingly supplies 120 defective bombers, costing the lives of 21 airmen. In Miller’s moralistic world, Keller receives the requisite denunciation from his war-veteran son Chris: “Don’t you have a country? Don’t you live in the world? What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?”
A playwright need not have the preachy side of Arthur Miller to have an overarching sense of right and wrong. I’ve seen and admired the work of many such dramatists, from David Hare to August Wilson to Amy Herzog. Strikingly, and in a way I’d overlooked in all the previous versions of Glengarry that I’d seen, there is no ethical sensibility present in it or around it. You win or you lose. You dominate or you are dominated. Pulling a con on a trusting victim is worth a million laughs. Shelley Levene is a kind of bargain-basement Joe Keller—with one big exception. In Donald Trump’s dystopian America, as in Glengarry Glen Ross, the only mistake you can possibly make, the mistake that Shelley Levene makes near the play’s end, is getting caught.
The post What If David Mamet Was Always a MAGA Fanboy? appeared first on New Republic.
