PLAUDITS FOR GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Ross Valley Players (RVP) is embarking on its 79th year as a community playhouse.
The Players assembled in 1930 as a way to escape the psychological, if not financial, hardships of the Great Depression.
And now, thanks to real estate bubbles bursting, a plummeting Dow, defaults, bank failures, energy prices, trade deficits, voodoo accounting practices, protracted wars and bungling at every strata of government, the Ross Valley Players have proudly recaptured their original raison d'etre.
The RVP, at the Marin Art and Garden Center, are currently staging David Mamet's noir comedy GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS directed by the venerable James Dunn.
As a play, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS won both a Pulitzer Prize (1984) and a Tony Award; and as a movie, its actors (Al Pacino, Jack Lemon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Jonathan Pryce and Kevin Spacey) were showered with numerous awards and nominations at the Venice Film Festival, the Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards.
While you may not be a fan of Dunn, you must admire him as a director: he has not—unlike many directors, including film directors—missed neither the original intent nor the spirit of Mamet's play: IT IS COMEDY.
The late great NYT film and theatre critic Vincent Canby once observed, "The reason GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS prompts laughter, and finally elation, is not because it's jolly or has any feel-good words to live by. It's because of the utterly demonic skill with which these foulmouthed characters carve one another up in futile attempts to stave off disaster."
Hmmm . . . "Futile attempts to stave off disaster."
Yipers, do we hear echoes of this sentiment as Washington blithely writes one bad check after another, ever ratcheting up the national debt, under the rubric of economic stimulus?
Jack Llemon, who played Shelly Levene in the 1992 film, said of his character, "Shelly's actions question where the morals and ethics are in America and how they have eroded in the quest for success."
Ah yes, "the quest for success" or as Hunter S Thompson described it: "still humping the American Dream."
As the Roman Comedy writer Plautus Asinaria once warned us, "Lupus est homo homini" (Man is a wolf to man).
And so Mamet pits his sales personnel against each other.
Eric Burke plays a very lupine Richard Roma, the man at the top of the sales ladder, hawking swampland to rubes and widows.
Stephen Dietz, if you'll pardon my Yiddish, is the perfect schlemiel or schlimazel: his halting speech, shuffled uncertain steps, cowardly conchoidal posture and wincing expression create a rube of epic, indeed biblical, proportions.
MR Dietz and Dunn deserve an Off-Off-Broadway Tony for creating this pathetic James Lingk: the hen-pecked husband who wants Richard Roma to return his down payment and who inadvertently brings down Shelly Levene.
Norman Hall, a thirty-five year veteran to bay area stages, is astonishing as Shelly Levene.
Resting on laurels, airbrushed personal history and misplaced chutzpah, Hall's Shelly stands tall, attempting to cut deals with the devil, when he should be looking into term life insurance and possible scenarios for accidental deaths.
The show is a riot: it will take your mind off your troubles and the problems of the world.
Things could be worse: you could be Shelly headed into interrogation with Detective Baylen, for breaking in to your own place of business; or James Lingk trudging home, having to explain to a wife of Wagnerian proportions why you did not retrieve the down payment check for a piece of the Everglades.
Oh well, as the Stoic Seneca once said and as we say at my house, "Diligentia maximum etiam mediocris ingeni subsidium" (Diligence is a very great help even to a mediocre intelligence).
For tickets surf to RVP at www.rossvalleyplayers.com or call 415-456-9555.
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