Pitchmen Caught in the Act

By RICHARD CORLISS

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS by David Mamet

"Listen to me, like me, buy me"; the salesman's top-of-the-line product is always himself. This was one message in Death of a Salesman, which was more interested in romanticizing failure than in demonstrating whether Willy Loman was ever very good at his trade. David Mamet is no romantic. In his monstrously entertaining Glengarry Glen Ross, which opened on Broadway last week after earlier spins at the National Theater in London and the Goodman in Chicago, he shows his peddlers caught in the entrepreneurial act. One pitchman recounts a conquest he made by sitting, silent and motionless, for 22 minutes in his customers' kitchen. Another salesman flimflams his client with a hilarious spiel about life, existentialism and the pleasure principle; the monologue has all the narrative logic of Dadaist graffiti, but it whets the appetite, clinches the sale, sets the sucker up for the kill.

In the Chicago real estate office that is the principal setting for Glengarry Glen Ross, the real cutthroat swordsmanship is for the most promising "leads" (lists of hot prospects); from these come "sits" (in-person meetings with the customer) and the hallowed "closing" of the deal. This month the agency is holding a contest among its four salesmen: Roma (Joe Mantegna), the slick master of sympathetic patter; Aaronow (Mike Nussbaum), an aging nebbish trudging on the treadmill of anxiety; Moss (James Tolkan), bullet-headed and bull-tempered; and Levene (Robert Prosky), a salesman on a long losing streak, who can beam like a bishop at good news and just as quickly turn to wheedling for his job. Running herd on these macho individualists is the consummate organization man, Williamson (J.T. Walsh). What is this, an MTM sitcom gone bilious? No, more like The Front Page staged in the lower depths.

The penny-ante gangsters in Mamet's American Buffalo talked of themselves as businessmen; the businessmen of Glengarry talk like gangsters. But gangsters with a weird, Damon Runyon twist. Out of the mouths of these middle-class lowlifes comes the odd flowery word used for screwball effect: "inured," "imperceptibly," "supercilious." The rest of their rhetoric is a litany of abuse, invective and those four-letter words that describe things people do every day in the privacy of their bedrooms and bathrooms. It may be that no salesman, not even these salesmen, would traffic so doggedly in obscenity. But to say this is to assume that Mamet's ear-to-the-gutter dialogue is naturalistic. It is not. This is street slang refined and extended into the surreal, the baroque, the abrasive, the lyrical. And as spoken in blazing ricochet rhythms by his energized septet of actors--especially Mantegna, Prosky and Lane Smith as a harried customer who comes close to emotional collapse--Mamet's absurdist riffs almost make sense.

"Two actors, some lines ... and an audience." This recipe for drama (from A Life in the Theater) is one that Mamet has followed closely, until now. The small-time fantasts from American Buffalo and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, who practically imploded on their aggressions, have given way in Glengarry to more expansive characters who all fight by the same rules: dirty. And though these salesmen may never win a contest or close a deal on a Florida tract, they still keep hustling and bustling. So, admirably, does Gregory Mosher's production. At a trim 80 minutes, this is a comedy that moves with the cyclone pace of farce and lingers with the bite of despair. --By Richard Corliss