‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ Broadway Review: Bob Odenkirk Dazzles, Kieran Culkin Surprises in Uneven Revival
Is Kieran Culkin giving the same performance on stage that recently won him an Emmy and an Oscar? His Roman Roy in “Succession” and his David Kaplan in “A Real Pain” may have very different bank accounts, but basically, they are the same guy: a loopy, unscrupulous and extremely beguiling schemer.
A new revival of David Mamet’s 1983 play, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” opened Monday at the Palace Theatre, and Culkin could have played real-estate agent Richard Roma as a loopy, unscrupulous and very beguiling schemer. Roma, as well as all the other Realtors here, is a real shyster. To his credit, Culkin delivers something new – for him. He never looks to charm with his off-centered delivery, and he actually embraces to great success the smallness of his character. It’s an approach Al Pacino does not take in the 1992 film version of “Glengarry,” where Roma emerges as something of a super-force in the real-estate biz.
“Glengarry,” as well as “The American Buffalo,” has now been revived three times on Broadway despite Mamet’s newer works (“China Doll” and “The Anarchist,” among them) taking a drubbing there. Why the continuing interest in these two earlier all-male dramas by Mamet? To digress a moment, Stephen Sondheim, no lover of opera, once opined that potboilers like “Tosca” continue to be performed because famous divas wanted to sing them, and so the audiences follow. A similar dynamic takes place with “Glengarry” and “Buffalo.” They offer actors a bunch of showy roles. Famous divos are attracted to that kind of high-profile material, and so the audiences follow.
“Glengarry” begins with three vignettes set in a Chinese restaurant. Each two-man episode has been performed ad nauseam in acting classes everywhere. Thanks to Scott Pask’s detailed set design, we can almost smell the Peking duck, if not the MSG. (Considering the seedy circumstances, maybe it should be the other way around.) In his scene, Culkin is easily the most understated of the Realtors in his pitch to a potential client (John Pirruccello, also nicely underperforming his role of a bumpkin). Playing real-estate salesman in the two other vignettes, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr take a very different approach. Like Pacino in the movie version, their acting dazzles. They play Mamet’s purposefully repetitious dialogue as if it were a solo concerto by Vivaldi. The technique on display is impressive, and it also misses the pettiness Culkin brings to his Realtor.
Odenkirk and Burr’s showiness is further emphasized by their respective low-key acting partners in the first act of “Glengarry.” Odenkirk’s Shelley Levene is trying to weasel some good leads out of the office’s manager (Donald Webber Jr.), and Burr’s Dave Moss is trying to weasel fellow salesman George Aaronow (Michael McKean) into stealing those leads from the office. Webber and McKean play the punching bags here. Mamet gives them a lot of downtime while their respective acting partner gets to hog the spotlight, and both Webber and McKean use their silences to enormous comic effect.
McKean, the oldest member of the ensemble, maintains his stoicism in the second act when the real estate office has been vandalized. He’s the sorry victim of an economy that forgets the connection between the salesman and what the salesman sells. He is what the other Realtors will be in a decade or two or three. McKean delivers a magnificent performance.
Act two features a lot of verbal showdowns between the Realtors and a law officer (Howard W. Overshown) who’s there to investigate the robbery. In one respect, the language is so brutal it throws into relief a past and disgraceful period in American office life where such macho behavior was not only tolerated but encouraged before the arbiters of political correctness came to the rescue.
At times, however, Patrick Marber’s direction doesn’t trust Mamet’s extreme language to do the job and he lets his actors go way over the top in their attacks on each other. Some of this overacting may be the result of playing the Palace Theatre, a 1,600-plus-seat venue that’s too large for such an intimate play. Then again, the audience loves these big performances, and several of these acting outbursts are rewarded with applause, which only further acts to dissipate the real drama.
Those wars of words become especially uncomfortable, if not downright anachronistic, now that the white Realtors tongue-lash on an office manager of color. Due to its pre-inflation dollar amounts for real estate, “Glengarry” remains locked in the year 1983, and no industry in America was more racist than the business of Fred and Donald Trump.
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