Feb 22, 2008

Everything for sale in 'Glengarry'

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

How did the current subprime real estate mess, which is sending the American economy into a tailspin, happen?

The answer may lie in David Mamet's fabulously savage Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play "Glengarry Glen Ross," about conniving American real estate salesmen. The show is currently running at San Jose Stage Company.

In "Glengarry Glen Ross," a salesman and his office manager sit at lunch in a dark Chicago Chinese restaurant, at a table with a bright red tablecloth in a room lit by red lamps. They argue in profane and angry language about whether or not the manager is giving the salesman good customer leads.

This is a sleazy real estate operation that sells Florida swampland to vulnerable clients. As the story widens, we meet a boiler-room full of these salesmen.

Part of the Mamet playwriting magic is that the salesmen, in their brutal language, somehow manage to raise the level of their obscene talk to poetry, and their craft of cheating to an art form.

They are artists at what they do. The play is filled with their own personal dreams and fears in their struggle to achieve the American dream.

The sales guys talk about their years in the business, telling stories of how they pulled off one specific deal or another, or how difficult it was to sell this piece of garbage to that person.

The intelligence and intensity that they bring to their work, and the reverence that they bring to their craft, raises their life journeys to almost biblical significance.

Therein lies much of the power of the play: the powerful contradiction between the injury, depravity and cruelty of their jobs, with their admiration for its artistry.

It's ironic that this very American play saw its first production in London. As the story goes, Mamet sent the unproduced script of "Glengarry" to British playwriting legend Harold Pinter, who sent it to the director of London's National Theater, where it was produced on the small Cottlesloe stage.

I was fortunate to see the astonishing revival of that successful Cottlesloe production in 1984.

In the San Jose production, Stephen Klum has two strong scenes as Shelly "the Machine" Levene. There's a mystical quality to his boast of past and future sales, and in his speculation on the karmic relationship between the two.

Like much of Mamet, you're not sure if this talk is profound or bunk. It could go either way.

Similarly, Michael Ray Wisely is charismatic hatching a heist, and later raging over a theft. Randall King goes biblical in the predatory mission from God of super-salesman Ricky Roma.

A play that should be emotionally seamless, however, has tears in director Matthew Spangler's staging. The characters' relationships don't always come together as a unified fabric.

When Michael C. Storm's pivotal character office manager Williamson turns silently aloof, he can lose his emotional buy-in to a scene. Elsewhere Louis Landman's cop Baylen doesn't sell his threat. Kevin Kennedy's pigeon victim seems too self-conscious.
Sean A. Russell's soulful sound design features jazz of the 1960s - John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and other work.

Russell, set designer Richard C. Ortenblad and lighting designer Michael Walsh have created a striking impression of the Chicago "El" public transit train blasting between scenes, created only with sound and a few squares on the floor of train window light.

The red lamps and red tablecloth of the opening scene's dark Chinese restaurant are effective.

Playwright Mamet says he got his twisted view of people growing up in a broken family with parents and stepparents who hated their children and hated each other. In that world everyone practiced the art of vicious argumentative injury.

In "Glengarry Glen Ross," everything's for sale, even if it doesn't exist. Could that principle lie behind America's subprime mess?

As in "Glengarry Glen Ross," the subprime salesmen did a great job of creating worthless financial instruments with high ratings, in exchange for big commissions. May the crookedest guy win.

Rating: Two and a half stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@dailynewsgroup.com.