Review: Deftly staged 'Glengarry' resonates with our times

Theater review |

"Economic life in America is a lottery," David Mamet has stated."One can only succeed at the cost of, the failure of another, which is what a lot of my plays ... are about."

Mamet was specifically pointing to "Glengarry Glen Ross," his justly acclaimed 1980s drama of trench warfare among shady Chicago real-estate dealers.

In Wilson Milam's crackling staging of "Glengarry" at Seattle Repertory Theatre, the stakes of success for Ricky Roma, Dave Moss, Shelley Levene and the other hawkers of worthless Florida lots with fancy names may seem paltry today: a few thousand bucks' commission on a hard-won sale. A new Cadillac as top sales prize.

How far we've come! In more recent corporate scams, billions were lost and pocketed, and legions ruined by Madoff-style Ponzi scams, inflated home mortgages, perilous stock trades.

But listen to Mamet's staccato, profane, urgent dialogue — spoken by "average" guys for whom cheating, lying and treachery are job requirements — and you may as well be reading the e-mails of Enron execs before brutal greed destroyed that firm. By dramatizing corporate ruthlessness at the level of a few guys vying to sell arid plots, Mamet brings it right down to Main Street.

In masterful Act 1, three revealing conversations (emphasis on "con") unfold in the scarlet booths of a Chinese eatery (part of Eugene Lee's splendid set design).

John Aylward's desperate elder salesman, Shelley, works every shtick in the book to squeeze good sales leads from his cold, younger superior, John (MJ Siebert).

The wily, bullying Dave (Charles Leggett) tries to woo, and entrap, a nervous co-worker George (Russell Hodgkinson) for his own designs.

And, in a bravura monologue, R. Hamilton Wright's smooth huckster Roma tracks and circles new prey, then buzzes in for the kill.

Mamet picked up the gab and tactics of this racket by working in it briefly. But the chatter in "Glengarry," and its whodunit twist, are his own shrewd inventions.

In a hilarious and appalling spray of expletives, interruptions, racial epithets, pitches and threats, the dialogue is a dark, dazzling fugue for male voices.

And apart from a few slack spots, Milam and his top-notch Rep ensemble (with Ian Bell as Roma's mark, and Shawn Belyea as an impatient cop), make the score's every stutter, pause and F-bomb ring out.

In the right mouths, these mouths, the mannered artifice of Mamet's dialogue cannily reveals true thought and speech patterns. Most impressive at this are Aylward, as a puffed-up but pathetic descendant of Willy Loman; Wright as an alpha dog who flaunts his prowess with a devious sales pitch steeped in faux existentialism; and Leggett, who provides sarcastic comedy (if not relief), and whose office-trashing exit is a fine touch.

While Leggett's match in verbal ping-pong, Hodgkinson needs to better define the passive, ambivalent George.

Further kudos for Lee's huge warehouse office set, with its banks of grimy windows, which does not (amazingly) dwarf the actors. And if the odd roar of a Chicago "El" train is an obvious metaphor for free-market capitalism sans brakes, it's a sound and (sadly) a timely one.

NOTE: Fans of the film of "Glengarry Glen Ross" will recall a sales-meeting scene with Alec Baldwin as a smooth and lethal corporate gun from the real-estate firm's head office. David Mamet wrote the scene specifically for the movie; it is not in his play.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com