GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

Background Notes

by Soulpepper Associate Artist Paula Wing 

David Mamet believes that the way men speak, how they speak, each word they say, each word they repeat, reveals everything about their character. People don't always say what they mean, according to Mamet, but they mean what they mean. He's a verbal pointillist and through his use of repetition and rhythm Glengarry Glen Ross builds a remarkable portrait of a group of men fighting quite literally for their lives. For this writer, the word is paramount. He's even said that the test of a good play is to read it on the radio. If it can be understood without any of the annointments of staging, then, he says it's good. If it can't, then the words are not strong enough, the writer has not done his job. 

Glengarry Glen Ross could pass the radio test. It has almost no stage directions. Mamet is not perfectly clear about who is on stage when. But each word, each half syllable, each repetition, each dot, dash, comma and exclamation point, have been chosen with infinite skill and care and every actor on stage has to play each one differently. Mamet demands a lot of his actors, but as Albert Schultz said in his interview earlier this year, they relish the challenge. They love mastering the complex rhythms and verbal challenges of this text. 

Observations about men drive the action. The feverish propulsive conversations reveal these men's unceasing competition with each other, their longing for each other's respect as well as their need for each other. Half the men in this office are in their forties and half in their fifties. The top dog in the former group is Richard Roma, a man at the peak of his persuasive powers, a man who gets what he wants and doesn't care how he gets it or who is crushed in the process. The characters in their fifties are clinging, barely, to their jobs, some, like Shelly Levene, fueled by the memory of their glory days, when they could “close”, when they could sell any piece of real estate to anyone - if you believe their version of events. (They are salesmen, after all.) In this cutthroat world yesterday is long gone and there is no mercy for yesterday's man.   

An early sequence between (fifty-year-old) Levene and (forty-year-old) Williamson, who runs the office, brilliantly expresses the two points of view as well as  revealing the depth and precision of Mamet's writing. In this scene Shelly begs Williamson for a break, a leg up. He wants the coveted “good leads” - the  names and numbers of real possible, potential clients (as opposed to names and phone numbers taken out of the phone book, which rarely yield results). Over the course of the scene we watch Shelly try absolutely every gambit he knows to get what he wants but Williamson is adamant:  

W: I can't do it, Shel. (pause)
L: I'll give you ten percent. (pause)
W: Of what?
L: Of my end what I close.
W: And what if you don't close.
L: I will close.
W: What if you don't close ... ?
L: I will close.
W: What if you don't? ... Then it's my job. That's what I'm telling you. 

Both of the pauses in the first two lines mean something. The first one gives Levene a moment to consider his next move: will he give up his argument or will he sink to the point of buying a lead. He sinks. The second pause gives Williamson a moment to consider taking the money. It's that pause that gives Levene a glimmer of hope, a lifeline. Finally he has Williamson's interest, he teeters on the brink of success. But Williamson doesn't quite sink. He says: "And what if you don't close." Though it is phrased like a question Mamet makes it clear that this line is not a question. It is punctuated by a period. It's a statement. Williamson doesn't think Shelly can close.   

The word "close" is repeated five times and every repetition builds tension and cements the power dynamic between the two men. Levene seems more desperate at first but in the last line we see that Williamson is desperate too. Nobody in this world can afford to give anybody else a break, even if they might benefit financially from it. As this segment reaches its climax, every time Levene says the line he emphasizes the word will and every time Williamson replies he emphasizes the word don't. The words are simple, the situation is anything but, the stakes are as high as they can possibly be. In stage time this part of the scene takes less than half a minute to play. It is Mamet's skill as a writer, his remarkable grasp of rhythm and repetition, character and desire that make every moment in Glengarry Glen Ross as rich with information and as loaded with urgency as this nine-line exerpt. The result is an exhilarating, energized theatrical experience that, as Roger Ebert put it, "allows people to arrive in triumph at the ends of sentences we could not possibly have imagined."

Tidbits

• David Mamet's adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross went before the cameras in 1992. No major studio would finance it so it was independently produced. 
• Major A-list actors vied hard to be involved. The cast included Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin and Alec Baldwin in a role created especially for him. They all took major pay cuts, apparently happily. 
• Pacino was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for this film and Lemmon won a Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. 
• An obscenity count on the internet claims that the Moss character has the most expletives in the film, topping out at a healthy sixty-nine instances. 
• In 2008 David Mamet wrote a play about the political process called November. That year he wrote an essay for The Village Voice about how it had affected him. It was titled: Why I am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.

Peter Donaldson: It was time to do something different for a change. I had been at Stratford for a long time running and you can only do that for so many years before you start hitting a wall. And I was starting to hit a wall there. The change in leadership at the festival also was an opportunity for me to leave and not feel as though I was undoing any loyalties that I had there. You know I had a good season last year with Des McAnuff in two of his shows but I felt as though I needed to make a change for a bit. 

MM: At its core Glengarry Glen Ross is about the disintegration of the American Dream. How do you think this might be received by Canadian audiences? 

PD: I don't think that's an issue really. I mean it probably is an issue, but I think it's an issue that we as Canadians deal with on a regular basis. We're always viewing our particular circumstances through an American lens an awful lot of the time. I also think that a writer like David Mamet is more global than he is American in some sense – that his plays and the way he writes is universal. I think that given the circumstances that we're living in at the moment, this play speaks to a much broader audience than it probably did when it was first written. 

MM: Both Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and David Mamet' Glengarry Glen Ross, arguably each playwright's best known work, are about salesmen. Any thoughts on how they connect or overlap thematically? 

PD: I suppose they do in a way. I think they both reflect their particular times. Death of a Salesman even though it is a crushing emotional experience watching or reading that play, there is a kind of melancholic feel to some of that play that Glengarry Glen Ross doesn't have. This play is much harder nosed and harder edged than Death of a Salesman – I'm not trying to put down Death of a Salesman in the least because I think it's a spectacular play – but Glengarry Glen Ross really reflects the hard times in which it was written. Economically it was a very tough period.  

MM: Which has come full circle. 

PD: Exactly. I think Death of a Salesman was written under different circumstances that weren't quite as nasty. 

MM: The play's title refers to two land developments: the Glengarry Highlands (which is the hot property at the time of the play's action) and Glen Ross Farms (which was popular fifteen years before that). Do you think it's meant to represent a passing of the torch from the old guard like your character Dave Moss to the young hotshot up and comers? 

PD: My character actually has that discussion, "Remember when we were at Platt? Glen Ross Farms. Didn't we sell a bunch of that?" All of us have talked in rehearsals about how those were the good times, those were the heydays when you actually could sell land to people over the phone. That was Glen Ross farms, so in a way we're actually looking at the progression for all of these guys to the Glengarry Highlands point in their lives when they're obviously much more desperate than they were back then. And things have not worked out well for them over the years. 

MM: I've heard some of the actors saying they've found the rhythms of Mamet's writing creeping into their own speech patterns. Have you had that happen as well? 

PD: Not so much the rhythms, but I have to be careful what I say around home because I don't think my foul mouth would go over very well around the children. But it's another one of the reasons I wanted to leave Stratford for a while, because there I never get to say stuff like this. I'm always saying brilliant wonderful text, but not brilliant wonderful modern text like this. 

MM: It's a long way off from Atticus Finch [which Peter played in To Kill a Mockingbird in 2007 at Stratford]. 

PD: That's right. It's a real joy to get your mouth around this kind of play and be foul mouthed for a change.

Michael Murphy: How did it come about that you would be directing Glengarry Glen Ross for Soulpepper?

David Storch: Well, Albert asked me is the short answer. I've been working on and off with the company as an actor since School for Wives. And this seemed to be a good opportunity for me to direct for Soulpepper. 

MM: What drew you to the play initially? 

DS: I think actors and directors are drawn to this play, and there's a broad appeal here, because the objectives of the characters in the play are so obvious that there's very little going on except the raw contest of wills that is very often more a matter of subtext than it is in this play. We know what people want and watch them go after it in a real blood-fight sort of way. 

MM: How did the casting fall into place, did you bring your own suggestions to Albert or vice versa? 

DS: Casting for a repertory company like Soulpepper has a variety of challenges, all of which end up on Albert's desk. Finding the right people to serve the roles, and the right roles to serve the actors is key—he kept me up to date on everything. 

MM: In light of the current economic downturn, how do the play's themes become even more timely and relevant? 

DS: Well things couldn’t be more perfectly timed.  I know that Soulpepper’s been wanting to do this play for a while and has tried to program it in a couple of previous seasons—I think it’s worked out perfectly. So perfect, because Mamet mined all the issues of that terrible recession in the early eighties and the desperation and frustration of that era has come full circle.

MM: What are some of the challenges and rewards that come with working on a Mamet text? 

DS: The challenges—if we do this right—the challenges are really hard—allowing the actors to really tuck into their objectives.  What’s great about it is that once you find the music as a group (there’s a lot of teamwork involved) it can be really beautiful in a gritty sort of way. 

MM: Have you found it difficult at all switching your mental focus back and forth between James Joyce in Travesties and Glengarry?
 
DS: It’s a great question, but it hasn’t been too difficult because those worlds are so different. In fact after a day of rehearsals, it's really nice to be able to switch my mind over to Stoppard's world to escape for a few hours, and then I'll find myself reading over the Glengarry script on the way home prepping for the next day.

Playwright Biography: David Mamet