What's Timeless in the Arts

A review of the new Glenngarry Glenn Ross and a whole lot of other things...

I had an excellent experience studying theatre, and really every subject I took to, at the University of New Mexico during the 1990s. I think often about things my professors told me and there are special moments I remember. One of those moments was when Professor David Jones, who taught in both the theatre and English departments, lamented that young novelists had a tough break with Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike all refusing to get out of the way. He needn’t have worried. We were all reading Infinite Jest when he said it. Another moment I remember was that I had told Denise Schulz, who taught directing and was head of the department, that I wanted one of my plays to be produced in a Brechtian way and she told me, “It won’t move people, you know. Brecht’s techniques are now widely accepted. They are common. They are used at every rock concert where the lights are used to blind the audience. You have to get beyond that.”

Two weeks ago, we saw the ongoing Broadway production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr, Bob Odenkirk and Michael McKean. I loved it. I was always going to love it. Audiences are attracted to both the story and the cast. The run was extended before if even got going. Now the reviews are in and they are lukewarm and even questioning the relevance of the play, first commercially produced in 1983 and then turned into a movie in 1992.

This is one of those plays that has effectively permeated popular culture so that even people who are not theater people know it. Mamet’s dialogue, which is clipped, crass, aggressive, rhythmic and foul, created a standard that has been imitated in other plays and that permeated independent cinema, especially in the 1990s.

It’s a story about men cold calling people to sell worthless real estate out of a dingy Chicago office, which was a common scam in the latter part of the 20th century. The owners of the firm, Mitch and Murray (who are absent the entire play) set up a sales contest where the winner will get a Cadillac El Dorado, the runner up gets a set of steak knives and the rest are fired. There is a batch of hot leads being held back by the office. The losers in the contest conspire to steal those leads. The first act is the struggle to make sales. The second act, after the heist, is about an investigation that will send one of these desperate men to jail. It’s heart wrenching because nobody on stage has any other options.

As we were leaving the play, I overheard somebody in the lobby complaining that it’s “just about men whining about work.” The comment is not, I think, an indictment of the story, but a bad sign about who we have become as people. It’s why nobody lifts a finger or raises a voice when the electric car billionaire fires entire government agencies, sending individuals and families into complete turmoil, without due cause or process. If anything, Mamet gave us a warning back in the 1970s and we collectively ignored him.

Getting back to the art of it — I gather most people have encountered this story through the film, which is excellent. The film has some differences, though. Shelley “The Machine” Levine, the once great sales guy now down on his luck (he’s parodied by a recurring character in The Simpson’s) gets more backstory, for example, and Williamson, the office manager, really hates Levine on a gut personal level that doesn’t come through as much in the stage version.

The big change, though, is the “Always be closing” monologue, delivered by Blake, who Mitch and Murray send to motivate the salesforce. Alec Baldwin delivers an iconic performance, berating the entire office while explaining the rules of the sales contest and declaring that success in selling real estate requires:

Delivering this monologue became Baldwin’s personality for awhile. When he tried to parody it as an elf sent to motivate Santa’s workers on Saturday Night Live he flubbed it by delivering the correct line, “always be closing” instead of “always be cobbling.” He named his film production company after the Cadillac El Dorado.

So I did wonder, going into the Broadway production, if Mamet would do some fan service by writing the character and speech into the script. Had Mamet done that, though, he would have destroyed the unity of the play. Though the movie is cramped and uses very few sets compared to other films, the play is meant to take place in only two locations: a Chinese restaurant, where the guys kibbutz and strong-arm clients in act one and the office, for the investigation, revelation and punishments, in act two. The Blake monologue has to happen near the beginning, as it explains the situation and motivates the heist. That would mean switching scenes frequently, which is certainly doable in a Broadway production but unity of place is very important to Mamet. American Buffalo takes place entirely in a shop where two men fence stolen goods. Oleanna takes place entirely in a professor’s office. Speed the Plow takes place mostly in a movie producer’s office. A lot of Mamet’s storytelling is about the cramped spaces we share together and the pressures that emerge from our conflicting needs and desires.

In that sense, I do accept the criticism that the Palace Theater is too large for the production and, of course, this story is best told in an intimate black box where 100 or so people gather. But with this cast, if you try to produce the show that way, you’ll get Denzel Washington in Othello magnitude ticket prices.

I think it’s an essential play from 20th century theatre and very timely. It is, ultimately, about how work in a capitalist society dehumanizes us and things are about to get so much worse. For another project, I have been reading a lot about artificial intelligence and yesterday I spent time with the manifesto Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the mostly likely rival AI company to OpenAI. Look at what Amodei sees in a future that he describes as populated by a society of artificial geniuses (bold mine):

“I can think of hundreds of scientific or even social problems where a large group of really smart people would drastically speed up progress, especially if they aren’t limited to analysis and can make things happen in the real world (which our postulated country of geniuses can, including by directing or assisting teams of humans).”

This guy has us following directions given by the tools he is creating. We work for them. In a recent Wired article about Anthropic, we get this nugget about working there, with and for “Claude,” the supreme intelligence of the organization (again, bold mine):

“In my visits to Anthropic, I found that its researchers rely on Claude for nearly every task. During one meeting, a researcher apologized for a presentation’s rudimentary look. “Never do a slide,” the product manager told her. “Ask Claude to do it.” Naturally, Claude writes a sizable chunk of Anthropic’s code. “Claude is very much an integrated colleague, across all teams,” says Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark, who leads policy. “If you’d put me in a time machine, I wouldn’t have expected that.”

At least when Williamson insults you or condescends to you, there’s a chance you might punch him in the face. What do we do when the computers are kicking us around the office, demanding that we close deals faster, take this meeting, not that one, or scrutinize our expense reports?

I can’t think of a better play for the moment than Glengarry Glenn Ross. Except maybe a revival of The Firebugs by Max Frisch, where the arsonists go after Teslas instead of people’s homes.