Bob Odenkirk has, in recent years, been best-known for the role of Jimmy McGill, a desperate lawyer constantly attempting to find an advantage — ethics be damned — on TV’s “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” Little wonder, then, that he is among the actors doing excellent work in Broadway’s new revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” playing, once again, an amoral creature searching for his next big score.
And, as he’s done before on TV, Odenkirk finds a small measure of pathos in his grifter, too. David Mamet’s pitch-dark story of a real-estate boiler room churns with egos and with desire to foist unappealing parcels of land on naive and easily fooled buyers, and yet Levene, who is certain he can reverse a streak of bad luck if only he is given names of better potential clients, hasn’t entirely lost his humanity. Odenkirk treats his character’s pain with a gentle touch, showing us a man who’s a loser, but whose desperate attempts to push past obsolescence represent moving attempts to grasp for a win.
In the main, this is a surprisingly humane “Glengarry” — and that’s no criticism, but it does mean this production is a bit of a surprise. Yes, the plot centers around employees relentlessly trying to get over on one another and the characters kick furniture and dodge the cop investigating them all. (The show’s second act, the longer of the two, concerns the aftermath of an office robbery that had been set up in the first, as various characters gather in a Chinese restaurant a couple of floors below the real-estate firm.) But a piece of theater that can easily be overplayed, one that’s likely best-remembered for a film adaptation that sizzles with intensity and volume, feels almost pointillist in the hands of director Patrick Marber.
Marber, the author of the sex-farce-as-tragedy “Closer,” among other works, understands that dialogue can work better as a shiv than as an all-out aerial assault. And, under his direction, the firebrand salesman Ricky Roma (Kieran Culkin) is more insinuating than intimidating. The prospective winner of a Cadillac as bonus for being the office’s top salesman, Roma wears success like his birthright. And, at moments when the floor seems apt to slip from under Roma, Culkin doesn’t, first, explode; we see in his performance the ways in which being a salesman means, first, convincing oneself of the righteousness of one’s path, before peddling snake-oil to the wider world. So certain of his destiny that he doesn’t need to stoop to shouting, this Roma is his own best customer.
As with Odenkirk once more finding the soul in the scoundrel, this production cuts intriguingly against Culkin’s public profile. The actor, a stage mainstay, returns to Broadway having won an Oscar and an Emmy in the time since he last trod the boards. Both of those prizes came from playing lovable, roguish messes who don’t try to contain their humanity; here, the polarity is flipped. Ricky is — by the standards of his office — buttoned-up, professional, together. He’s fast on his feet (and Culkin, even among fellow great stage talents, has a particular acuity with Mamet’s dialogue). But, though we may thrill to his salesmanship, including and especially in scenes where he works a mark (John Pirruccello), the fact of his hiding his vulnerability, of putting everything within him into trying to find the win, generates in the audience, well, a real pain.
There’s a spontaneity to the company and to the production that was sorely missing in the 2022 Broadway production of Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” so self-serious it couldn’t, quite, get out of its own way. Culkin’s take on Ricky Roma is nimble, but also means that the play’s ending is now somewhat more downbeat and muted than might best serve the material; already a notably short work, this “Glengarry” ends on a Culkin muttering, when it might have worked better even incrementally closer to a roar.
But roaring is not what this production does, and it’s largely better for it. Bill Burr’s Dave Moss, a schemer whose manipulations set the plot in motion, puts forward his plans in light and unaffected I-was-just-wondering patter, perhaps drawn from Burr’s own professional background as a comedian. Michael McKean’s umbrage and nerves upon being interrogated provides real emotional ballast to the work without going overboard. And as office manager John Williamson — the man who distributes the all-important “leads” — Donald Webber, Jr., has a grace and lightness of touch that belies the fact of his controlling the destinies of all other parties in the room. That’s the case even as the room, in the second act, has been cast to a frustrating sort of ruin: Just disheveled enough to drive an organized man crazy, with endless little slips of paper for Webber to find and attempt to put away. (The set design, excellent, is by Scott Pask.)
As noted in the first New York Times review of the show, in 1984, this play is written with a mad love of language; “one whole scene turns on the colloquial distinction the characters draw between the phrases ‘speaking about’ and ‘talking about.’” (It is worth noting that, among the many clever turns of phrase in the play, long-controversial language about people from India remains intact here, and is at once an evocation of who these characters are and a small but visible stain on the work.) Dialed to a slightly lower register, the delicacy and intricacy of the language here lands with a punch whose impact comes on the subway ride home. “Glengarry Glen Ross” is a part, now, of our shared canon; a production that sheds light by emitting slightly less noise allows its performers to probe all its contours, and to make it fresh for a new audience.
