Difficult, compelling "Ross" updates '80s greed

Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, unveils the nightmare interior landscape of men in pursuit of the American dream. It concerns a pack of feral real estate salesman eager to sell their souls for profit. Unfortunately, each lacks a soul to sell.

Written 12 years ago,Glengarry Glen Ross poses some prickly problems for both director and cast. It smacks distinctly of the Reagan years and all the money-grubbing, insider-trading, Donald-Trump-as-national-icon, pre-recession economics suggested by the era. This environment proves both immediate and dated, because the methods and means have changed. Greed remains high-priority, but it has adopted a lower profile. Reviving the play at this point in time strands it in a no-man's land of period atmospherics and topical currency.

As if this did not provide challenge enough, Mamet offers neither hero to cheer, villain to loathe, nor sexy anti-hero with whom to conspire. The characters bluster and bully with silver-tongued bravado, but beneath each veneer cowers a scared, grasping little boy. Mamet has rendered a topsy-turvy amoral universe of naked self-interest.

It's a brave playwright who creates a work without protagonists or ethics, and it's a brave director who brings this script to the stage. This production of Glengarry Glen Ross proves arduous, brutal, even painful to watch, and in the skillful hands of director Pat Jacobi, SY '98, it proves very, very good. Jacobi has selected a cast replete with several of Yale's finest actors. Together, they negotiate this difficult text with remarkable insight, specificity, courage, and élan. Though theirs is not a perfect production (and a prize to the person who can show me one that is), they handily navigate Mamet's choppy, fervent prose style and manage to show something of the terrified, fallen men who struggle just beneath this surface of slick suits, sharp words, and sly smiles.

The first act eavesdrops on three conversations in a chintzy Chinese restaurant. At one table, a washed-up salesman, Shelley "The Machine" Levene (Thomas Shaw, CC '99), tries to convince office manager John Williamson (Michael Gottlieb, TC '00) to slip him a few of the premium "leads," or lists of likely customers. Meanwhile, the bullying Dave Moss (Patrick Egan, SY '98) tries to convince panicky George Aronow (Boomie Aglietti, DC '99) to break into the office and steal the leads. At a third table, ace salesman Richard Roma (Mike Pastor, TC '98) expounds an existentialist worldview to subtly lure potential customer James Lingk (Andrew Grusetskie, TD '98).

Each of these conversations opens at a redoubtable pace with little or no exposition, but the viewer soon apprises the situations, the relationships, the needs and the stakes. A set more realistic than the red drapings and Chinese silk might have helped to ground the audience even sooner. But Jacobi, responsible for set and lighting design, obviously concentrated more on the acting than the trappings, a choice evinced by the actors' sure command of the rapid-fire dialogue and near-seamless pacing.

This commendable attention to rhythm continues into the second act, which occurs the following morning at the ransacked office. A police inspector (Ryan Karels, BR '00) calls each salesman in for questioning, but the play's thrust is not the whodunit. It is rather the careful breakdown of each character's self-created myths. As the identities and fictions crumble, some men rage and attack, others cower and panic.

Pastor, Egan, and Shaw all excel at letting anger and excitement build to fever pitch, but the most effective moments occur when the actors stop screaming and go quiet, when the ire lapses and loss pervades. In Grusetskie's emasculated acquiescence and Shaw's utter defeat lie the sadness and power of the play. When all the facades and veneers slip away and the character stands defenseless, it's heartwrenching, horrible and, somehow, very human and very true. When an audience is offered something so universal, the lack of a protagonist doesn't matter a jot.

That principle holds for the entirety of the play. While one could quibble indefinitely about lights, sets, costumes, an error in blocking, or a misjudgement in calibration, these criticisms aren't so important in the long run.

Though they can't maintain it consistently, Jacobi and his cast sometimes reach a level of theater that is truly fine. While Glengarry Glen Ross may never be an easy play to watch, it can be quite a rewarding one--it's a tough sell, but the investment pays off marvelously.