The Rep's Glengarry Glen Ross: Better Than the Movie

Seattle Rep lets Mamet rip

When David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, the second-best American play about salesmen, he couldn't get it staged. Until Harold Pinter got it produced in London.

I loved the 1984 hit Broadway production, and lobbied for Jack Lemmon to win the 1992 Oscar for the movie's antihero, Shelly "The Machine" Levene. But the Rep's all-star production is news — a fresh take that rocks like the day it was born. Only differently.

Poster art for the 1992 film version

At the dawn of prosperity, it was about shady Chicago fringe dwellers selling worthless Florida swampland, desperately scamming each other, losers all. In 2010, the desperate fringe is the center. It wasn't a play, it was a prophecy. "Let's face it," Rep star John Aylward told KUOW, "America — we're all salesmen....You're only as good as your last performance." 

Aylward, playing the part of Levene, is as good as Robert Prosky on Broadway and Lemmon on camera. But instead of sweaty terror, he's powered by peevishness, a bit like his immortal boss doc on TV's ER. 

For a tragedy, this show is startlingly funny. Maybe it's our times. Wall Street is hawking scams quite like swamps, things are so bad you have to laugh. It's like when Kubrick tried to make a sober nuclear thriller and got so horrified he made the comedy Dr. Strangelove instead.

And Aylward's not the only genius on hand. Exuberantly oily R. Hamilton Wright aces his sales-pitch aria to a land-scam victim (Ian Bell). Charles Leggett abusively snakecharms meek fellow salesman Russell Hodgkinson into the crime that propels the plot. Seattle-bred international star director Wilson Milam orchestrates it all like a maestro. Design titan Eugene Lee (of SNL and Wicked fame) crafts a jaw-dropping scuzzy Chicago set whose first scene change takes your breath away.

Most of all, I was knocked out anew by Mamet's operatic obscenities, 187 expletives deployed as punctiliously as Pulitzer Prizewinning poetry (though it won for Drama). The actors interrupt and chime in with timing as precise as a Karlheinz Stockhausen composition. This play is fiendishly difficult, and at the Rep it plays effortlessly. It's one long magic moment that passes faster than a dream. The American Dream.