Glengarry Glen Ross

Opening night: March 31, 2025
Venue: Broadway’s The Palace Theatre
Written by: David Mamet
Directed by: Patrick Marber
Cast: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean, Donald Webber, Jr., Howard W. Overshown, John Pirruccello
Running time: 1 hr 45 min (one intermission)
Deadline’s takeaway: It should strike more than one visitor to Broadway’s latest revival of Glengarry Glen Ross that much – make that very much – of television today owes a massive debt to playwright David Mamet. The TV-heavy cast of this excellent revival directed by the great Patrick Marber (whose 2020 Leopoldstadt remains one of the 21st Century’s great Broadway achievements) seems to have absorbed the Mametspeak dialect once seldom heard outside the walls of the Atlantic Theater Company downtown.

But try to imagine Kieran Culkin’s Roman Roy in Succession or Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul or Bill Burr’s angry stand-up persona without Mamet before them. Actually, don’t bother. Just see these three stars in the new Glengarry Glen Ross, and enjoy.

Culkin, Odenkirk, Burr and castmates Michael McKean, Donald Webber, Jr., Howard W. Overshown and John Pirruccello are so immersed and, yes, expert, in that sleazy, duplicitous and forever captivating world of ’80s Mametian that their combined talents turn the latest revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, opening tonight at the gorgeously renovated The Palace Theatre into something thrilling.

Not that Glengarry is going to be everyone’s cup of Gimlet – the vagaries of its plot will forever keep some at arm’s length, as well all that toxic masculine bluster (oh, how I hope the rumors of an imminent all-female cast are true) – but for those willing to take a dive into this unique theatrical world written by a playwright at the peak of his most-likely bygone prime, well, here’s your chance.

The synopsis, for those who haven’t seen or have been misled by the significantly altered 1992 film version with the newly created “Always Be Closing” Alec Baldwin character, is this: A third-rate Chicago real estate office, usually described as cutthroat or dog-eat-dog or kill-or-be-killed, is staffed by four salesmen – men being the operative word (for now) – who compete to sell mostly worthless properties to an ever decreasing pool of sap customers. (The title of the play takes its name from the two crummy real estate developments the salesmen are most desperate to unload – Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms.) With a running tally of sales on an office chalkboard, the salesman are under constant pressure to see their names climb the board, the winner getting a Cadillac and the loser out on the street.

Mamet staffs the office with some of his most vivid characters: There’s Richard “Ricky” Roma, here played by Culkin with all the boyish smarmy dishonesty he honed on Succession. Culkin, in a fantastic performance, rages, charms, wheedles and lies to get that Caddy, his most pathetic target a mark he meets in a Chinese restaurant. After spinning a cocktail-lounge story that has you believing he and the mark (a bedraggled John Pirruccello) have been lifelong friends, Culkin, in full silver-tongue mode, delivers the first genuine laugh of the play: “My name is Richard Roma, what’s yours?” He makes the sale.

Then there’s Dave Moss, the perfectly cast stand-up comic Bill Burr, the most bullying of the gang of bullies willing to go above and beyond even the unethical tactics his colleagues use to climb the chart. The play’s opening scene is Moss and the somewhat gutless George Aranow (Michael McKean, flawless) in a large (and otherwise empty) red-boothed Chinese restaurant, with a fast-talking, rambling Moss finally getting to the point: He wants Aranow to join him in a robbery scheme wherein one of them – not Moss, of course – will break into the office to steal the most promising sales leads and sell the insider info to a rival agency.

Perhaps the funniest scene in the play, McKean doesn’t miss a beat in the aging Aranow’s slow realization that it’ll be him who takes all the risks in Moss’ scheme, with little of the reward. We won’t know his answer until later in the play.

And finally among the salesmen is Shelley “The Machine” Levene, perhaps Mamet’s greatest creation and here played expertly by Bob Odenkirk. Not even The Simpsons could keep their hands off this character: the nervous, perspiring businessman “Ol’ Gil’ is Shelley by another name). Successful long ago, Shelley is no longer a selling Machine of any sort, and mostly just begs for a break in comically desperate appeals that ping-pong from belligerent to pathetic. The target of his pleading is the office’s recently hired office manager John Williamson, who hands out the all-important sales leads and takes heaps of abuse from the salesmen who don’t consider this “secretary” their equal, a comment on both the misogyny of the office and, in this production anyway, its racism: Williamson is played by Donald Webber, Jr., the lone Black actor in the cast.

Act II of the play moves from the salesmen’s Chinese restaurant hang-out to the office itself, with the curtain rising on a ransacked workspace that was no doubt not much better before the prior night’s burglary. Files overturned, phones stolen, papers everywhere, and the greedy, laser-focused salesmen barely taking notice until they need their own paperwork.

Into this disheveled new world arrives the no-nonsense Det. Baylen (a pitbull-like Howard W. Overshown), who investigates the break-in and spares no feelings in the (offstage) interrogations of each staffer. What the audience knows that Baylen doesn’t is that Moss clearly found the accomplice he was seeking the night before, but who?

And, well, that’s pretty much it for plot. The second half of the play unfolds as a series of arguments and sales pitches and insults and protestations over who did what or who might have done what or who needs what the most. In the right hands, and this production is in nothing if not right hands, Glengarry Glen Ross unfolds brilliantly, as pure and elegant a demonstration of modern theater as has been pieced together in many decades.

Director Marber clearly has a solid understanding of Mamet’s intentions, never favoring one character over the other or shining one in a more sympathetic light. Marber knows that if anything can be said about Glengarry Glen Ross‘ take on toxicity it’s that it comes in all shapes and sizes, whether its the good-buddy approach adopted by Culkin, the sympathetic shark embodied by Odenkirk, McKean’s befuddled butter-wouldn’t-melt take or the brutally honest red-faced manipulations of Burr’s character. Each and everyone deserves their place in the ramshackle capitalistic hellscape captured so effectively by Scott Pask’s production design and Jen Schriever’s unforgiving old-school office lighting.

There certainly are other critiques of Trumpian corruption to be seen on Broadway this season, but few speak so eloquently as Mamet’s vivisection from 1983. So good is this production it leaves us aching for more – like that all-female version that’s been rumored about. Don’t wait for an official decision – get your imaginary head space cast list started. Mine begins with Patti LuPone.