Glengarry Glen Ross

Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

**

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“This season has not been kind to one of America’s greatest living playwrights,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. David Mamet did himself no favors with The Anarchist, a new play so drearily cerebral that it was forced to close last week just 14 days after it opened to blistering reviews. And now, after a suspiciously long stretch of previews, comes a revival of his 1983 masterwork that’s so distorted by slow pacing and hammy performances that it resembles a tired old sitcom. Glengarry Glen Ross, a tale about a fight-to-the-death sales contest in a small Chicago real estate office, was “built for speed.” In Daniel Sullivan’s down-spirited production, the endless pitching of these hucksters doesn’t come across as their life’s fuel. Their lies and self-deceptions simply ring hollow.

The bigger mistake was in letting the play be “twisted from an ensemble piece into a platform for Al Pacino,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. In the 1992 film adaptation, Pacino played smooth-talking alpha male Ricky Roma; here, he’s Shelly Levene, an old-timer on a losing streak. At first, Pacino “more or less hits the right mark”; his Shelly is a “shameless weasel” made sympathetic by his desperation to support a daughter who’s ill. But in the second act, which opens with a rejuvenated Shelly crowing about a big but dubious new sale, Pacino “piles on the physical and vocal tics to such a degree that almost all traces of Shelly’s vulnerability are erased.” The performance undermines Mamet’s clever ending, robbing it of its “doleful sting.”

But while Pacino has been bringing audiences in, it’s Bobby Cannavale who’s thrilling them, said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. “Hair all slicked back and strutting around in flash suits,” Cannavale’s Ricky Roma “blows through Mamet’s brilliantly filthy language like a gale-force wind.” In any case, “a hit show doesn’t need to be all that good if it has the right marquee draw,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Pacino gives ticket buyers the star turn they’re paying for—even when his performance “seems like a rough draft, as though he’s testing out ideas, daring himself to be bolder.” At times, though, he’s “like a jazz improviser not even his fellow musicians can follow.”