Glengarry Glen Ross – 14 May 2025

Theatre artists today often live in a world of interpreting and improving – but really it’s just about making changes and adding to the canon of what has already been said by or about a work. I applaud Broadway‘s current revival of Glengarry Glen Ross for doing the opposite and preserving a production exactly as David Mamet wrote it. Director Patrick Marber is faithful to a fault. He doesn’t ask us to reinterpret this theatrical giant. He just presents it to us, perfectly preserved, so that we’re not examining Glengarry Glen Ross. We’re just enjoying it. And maybe, in a couple of moments, cringing just a little.

The first act is the set up for a crime in a Chinese restaurant (cringingly referred to as “the chink“). We saw three separate conversations establishing the characters and their disparate desperate woes, clearly highlighting, shifting power dynamics, and the resentment associated with them. The vital set-up takes place – an over animated Dave Moss (Bill Burr) pitches the idea of fake breaking into the office, selling the leads, and making significant profit to George Aaronow (Michael McKean), who is a man of few words and who’s not too keen on the idea. We learn in the second act that George actually did decline to do the heist, and Dave picked on Shelley Levine (Bob Odenkirk) instead. The heist is successful, but Levine‘s arrogance and rudeness to John Williamson (Donald Webber, Jr.) ultimately ends with Levine in handcuffs. Along the way, the story has some dated features – financial quantities, racism, homophobia, etc. These elements are left in, whether mandated by Mamet or sadly still an accurate reflection of salesman culture being a specific kind of old boys club, I couldn’t say.

There was one choice made, though – and that was casting. For a play that’s already fraught with racially insensitive content, casting a Black man as John Williamson seemed in poor taste, especially with him as the only cast member of color. The script insinuates that Williamson is a nepotism hite – a very short distance from a diversity hire. He’s implied to be incompetent; undeserving of any job, let alone his job; aloof and insensitive; and incapable of understanding the reality of a salesman‘s job due to low intelligence. This is the role you give your cast’s only Black man? Not only does that seem racially insensitive, it seems like an endorsement of the broader political context in the US right now, where diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are becoming illegal due to the misconception that the people given opportunities by them are somehow less qualified or less able to perform their jobs. I’m not sure what to do with this subtle, hopefully unintentional, insinuation, but I’m putting it out there because I can’t see it.

Despite the culturally insensitive, outdated content, I really enjoyed the experience of seeing Glengarry Glen Ross play out exactly as intended, as if preserved in a time capsule. Mamet’s writing is specific and forceful and deliberate – and it was an absolute joy to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Maybe salesmen really are just the scourge of the earth.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.