‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ Theater Review: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr Bristle With Cutthroat Rivalry in Punchy David Mamet Revival

The safety curtain that greets audiences filing in for the third Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross depicts a set of steak knives, the infamous second prize in a contest for the highest sales figures among colleagues at a scuzzy Chicago real estate office. The knives barely get a mention in David Mamet’s original text and in fact are better known from the 1992 screen adaptation, in which Alec Baldwin’s hotshot salesman, Blake — an additional character created for the movie — breaks it down for the brokers in his oft-quoted “Always be closing” pep talk.

“First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado … second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you’re fired,” Blake informs them in a warning that’s more verbal abuse than motivational speech. That scene has become iconic, and the steak knives shorthand for mentorship with malice.

Runner-up in this vicious world of shifty desperados is just a tiny step up from loser, the ultimate emasculating death sentence. Not for nothing did the film’s cast jokingly refer to it as Death of a Fuckin’ Salesman, a nod to Mamet’s fondness for profanity as well as Arthur Miller’s everyman tragedy.

The curtain image is a clever wink to audiences likely more familiar with the movie than with previous stage incarnations. But this punchy revival — directed with surgical precision by Patrick Marber and played by an ideally cast ensemble firing on all cylinders and pinging off one another with camaraderie that often curdles into contempt — doesn’t need the nostalgic assist.

The production makes a strong case for the play, Mamet’s best, as both a major work of its time and a tart commentary on a type of workplace ruthlessness that’s still very much with us. There’s a reason the men’s room line at any Glengarry Glen Ross revival is usually semi-populated by finance and tech bros all whooping with delight as they repeat favorite lines. Their hair product and suits — crisp and conservative if seldom stylish — are a dead giveaway.

Mamet wrote the play as a caustic takedown of capitalism, toxic masculinity (before the term was enshrined in the popular vernacular) and vanishing morality in the ‘80s, a decade pretty much defined by greed and rapacious economic growth. It still functions that way more than 40 years later, though for every audience member who flinches at the characters’ vitriolic outbursts, their racist and homophobic epithets, there’s probably another person ready to leap up on the stage and high-five them after some of the tastier streams of invective.

In terms of currency, it’s impossible not to consider that the country is now run by men who could very easily be vintage Mamet characters — even if their fluency with fuckity-fuck-fuck snark generally isn’t as poetic. The “looking out for number one” ethos has become so normalized it now seems more savvy than selfish. That go-to reality show-contestant credo of “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to win” might as well be the personal motto of political strongmen, captains of industry and wheeler-dealers of all stripes.

With the rise of the manosphere, it’s not surprising that the tragicomic drama lands with a new sting. I’ll confess I had no burning urge to revisit the play. I caught the memorable original run on Broadway in 1984, with Joe Mantegna as top office salesman Ricky Roma and Robert Prosky as Shelly “The Machine” Levene, the once unstoppable veteran whose luck appears to have run out.

I was bowled over by the superb 2005 revival, with Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda in those roles. But I was underwhelmed when it returned to Broadway in 2012, with Al Pacino, who had played Roma in the film, as Levene in a showboating turn that threw off the play’s balance and drew attention, for all the wrong reasons, away from Bobby Cannavale’s peacocking Roma.

While that production felt stale, a cash grab lacking in electricity, this one seems revitalized. That could be due to the times in which we’re living or to the fresh perspective of Marber, a Brit whose background as a comedian, playwright and director gives him the laser-focused attention to both text and performance that Mamet’s precision-tooled writing requires. (Marber won a Tony Award in 2023 for his intricate direction of best play winner Leopoldstadt, by Tom Stoppard.)

The revival’s success at recharging the work’s batteries also comes down to smart casting. From the opening scene — on designer Scott Pask’s stage-wide Chinese restaurant set — it’s clear that the staccato rhythms of Mamet’s rapid-fire dialogue still sing.

Levene (Bob Odenkirk, making a thrilling Broadway debut) shifts in agitation back and forth on a red leatherette booth. With hilarious insistence, he maintains a motormouth energy designed to keep office manager John Williamson (Donald Webber Jr.) from getting a word in while he begs and cajoles in the hope of being given some of the promising new sales leads coming in, to end his streak of bad luck. But behind the dead-eyed stare, Williamson is no pushover, holding out even when Shelly bribes him by promising a significant chunk of his commissions.

Having established the sales leads as the play’s golden chalice, Scene Two introduces the scam, a favorite Mamet motif. The action shifts to the adjacent booth, where Dave Moss (Bill Burr, another knockout debut) sits spewing bile to his less voluble colleague George Aaranow (Michael McKean). Moss is enraged over the unrealistic pressure placed on them by the unseen but detested management from head office, Mitch and Murray, whose names come up so often they are almost as a vivid a presence as the characters onstage.  

If Shelly seems determined to mask the sinking feeling that his glory days are over, McKean suggests with a hangdog face that Aaranow is resigned to his obsolescence. Looking as rumpled as his cheap suit, he has particularly affecting moments in the second act.

Still, the unscrupulous Moss uses his wiles and his belligerent way with words to try selling Aaronow on the idea of breaking into the office. He wants to steal the leads and sell them to a rival agency, to which they would both jump ship. That would give them a fresh financial start while also sticking it to Mitch and Murray.

In the third scene, Ricky Roma (Kieran Culkin) sits alone at a booth making idle chit-chat with James Lingk (John Pirruccello), the restaurant customer trying to read a book at the next table. Roma’s subject is an intrinsically male dissertation on refusing to live with timidity, embracing adventure and opportunity instead. That of course is just a slick preamble before he starts reeling Lingk in on a Florida land deal of dubious value, in a development called Glengarry Highlands.

Act Two relocates to the offices, looking ransacked after being burgled the night before. There’s no fan, but the shit has clearly hit something. Even the phones have been stolen, a reminder that we’re in the pre-cellphone age. Ricky sails in riding high from the previous night’s sale, insisting that they owe him a Cadillac, and Shelly also arrives crowing after having broken his losing streak. But the mood sours as deals fall apart and a gruff detective (Howard W. Overshown) ushers the employees one by one into an inner office to be questioned.

On the surface Ricky Roma might seem not much of a stretch for Culkin after playing the similarly brash, fast-talking Roman Roy on Succession and filter-free Benji Kaplan in A Real Pain, the role that just bagged him an Oscar. But Roma has a different kind of volatility. “Ah, Christ … what a day, what a day … I haven’t even had a cup of coffee,” he says while bouncing off the office walls in anger, probably still wired from whatever he was on the night before.

Culkin is as adept with a sly, sardonic jab as he is with an explosive tirade and his live-wire physicality is mesmerizing. Almost every time Ricky spits out another infuriated “Fuck!” he tosses back his head in anger, his gelled hair standing up like a cockatoo’s crest. That amusing image is the icing on the cake of this tightly structured play’s collision of pitch-dark humor with desperation, disloyalty and encroaching impotence.

Culkin, Odenkirk and Burr more than earn their marquee billing — the latter two, along with the always wonderful McKean, holding a mini Vince Gilligan alumni reunion. (That extended on the first press night into the audience, where Bryan Cranston led the standing ovation.)

Culkin makes Roma a tightly wound ball of energy, puffed up with dick-swinging over-confidence; Odenkirk finds pathos in Shelly’s increasingly futile attempts to keep up a front while his career crumbles beneath him; and Burr bristles with resentment, making uproarious music out of Moss’ strings of expletives. It’s no surprise that the seasoned comic has flawless timing.

Prime Mamet — from the good years before he became a hectoring right-wing ideologue — has always been catnip to first-rate actors. These guys get high off it, and the high is infectious.

Venue: Palace Theatre, New York
Cast: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean, Donald Webber Jr., John Pirruccello, Howard W. Overshown
Director: Patrick Marber
Playwright: David Mamet
Set and costume designer: Scott Pask
Lighting designer: Jen Schriever
Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Rebecca Gold, Caiola Productions, Roy Furman