Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, and Bill Burr Sell the American Dream on Broadway
In David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, desperation hits harder, and dignity is the real prize.
We’re no theater experts at The Cure. We’re actually just not experts, period.
So it may be no news to those who know more than us that there’s a deep and interesting thread of American theater (and literature) that relates to… sales.
There’s the old modernist classic, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, about a traveling salesman’s betrayals, disappointments, vicarious living, affairs, sports obsessions, and all the other hallmarks of a crumbling American male psyche.
The traveling salesperson is a kind of commercial Johnny Appleseed—the journeyman cowboy of capitalism—living life out on the road, trying to make a buck in a hard world that may not care for his wares.
In some ways, sales is the quintessential job.
If Western culture is consumerism, and consumerism exists through production and consumption, and the hinge point between production and consumption is sales, then sales are both a literal and metaphorical hinge point for the whole system.
Which— with the rise of personal branding and the total quantification of life from our recreational to romantic to professional spheres—rings truer than ever.
Thus, it’s such a savagely appropriate time for David Mamet’s brilliant play, Glengarry Glen Ross, to catch fresh life on Broadway.
Reinterpreted by director Patrick Marber and some of the fieriest actors of the moment—Bob Odenkirk and Kieran Culkin (plus the crotchety Boston genius of Bill Burr, whose brilliantly acted character is really just Bill Burr in an alternate life)—Glengarry Glen Ross is best known in our cultural imagination via its Alec Baldwin-driven film version from the 1990s.
(Light spoilers incoming, by the way.)
Interestingly, the play does not feature the cinematic version’s most iconic lines: “coffee is for closers” and “Always Be Closing.” It turns out David Mamet substantially rewrote the story when adapting it for film—Baldwin’s iconic character (who, like Burr’s in this new iteration, seems to be the actor playing himself in another timeline) was added specifically for the movie.
The play, like all great theater—and like the world—continues evolving.
Glengarry Glen Ross is a timeless, living prism whose shifting faces cast new light on whatever contemporary moment it finds itself in.
Which is also why this iteration feels so scintillatingly on point.
It’s a meditation on powerlessness and precarity, steeped in a toxic brew of American masculinity.
The characters don’t come across as greedy so much as desperate.
And not even desperate for money:
There’s the old man, mourning his glory days of sales.
There’s Burr’s character, proposing a vindictive robbery of their office.
There’s Kieran Culkin’s character, who cares less about the prized Cadillac he could win for closing deals than he does about feeling like a loser.
All of these men are flailing for stability, yes, but even more so for dignity.
Through their bickering, scheming, and cunning, they transmit a burning, if unspoken, desire for a sense of purpose and importance in the small world they inhabit.
They fuck one another over, sure.
But somehow, it’s the market itself, the faceless overlords at corporate HQ, that loom far more sinister than any individual flaws or betrayals.
Which, in our humble opinion, is exactly the kind of fundamentally compassionate and wise take the world needs more of.
Because life in a tough world makes people hard.
Things are rough and precarious out there.
Our social and communal bonds are caving left, right, and sideways.
Our political and financial future is uncertain as actual hell.
We’re encouraged to always be closing, to derive our drive and worth from the numbers we put up on whatever algorithmic board we work with.
Which is a tough way to carve out the self-worth every human needs to thrive.
Glengarry Glen Ross, in its depiction of dickishness born from desperation, reminds us that the heavy burden laid upon everyone by the modern world can warp the soul by forcing us into isolation and competition.
And that opens a powerful backdoor into one of the oldest truths of all:
The more we connect with others—rather than try to beat them on the sales floor—the less lonely we become, and the more meaning we find in life.
That by alleviating others’ burdens through camaraderie and compassion, we relieve our own suffering.
We soothe our own souls.
That’s the great tragedy of Glengarry Glen Ross—so painfully clear to the audience, yet brilliantly opaque to the characters:
That backstabbing your way to the top is a path to deeper isolation, not fulfillment.
And thus, it quietly suggests that, hidden in the spaces between lines and the blank spaces between notes, lies a deeper truth: seeing the flaws of our fellows as human responses to hard situations—not as sociopathic expressions of bad character—might be the real path to the dignity these characters, and all of us, so desperately crave.
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