NEW YORK — In about 30 years, Kieran Culkin, a great American actor, will make a terrific Shelley “The Machine” Levene, the sad-sack veteran salesman in David Mamet’s masterful “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the 1983 drama about desperate Chicago real estate sharks that surely is the best play ever written about the dehumanizing underbelly of American business, with the honorable exception of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” I hope I am around to see that production.
But here in 2025, Culkin, fresh off “Succession” and his much-deserved Oscar win for “A Real Pain,” has his name on the marquee playing Richard Roma, Mamet’s slick, devious and loquacious super-salesman, a transactional immoralist famously encapsulated by Al Pacino in the brilliant 1992 movie.
Culkin no doubt relished the challenge of playing an alpha dog, rather than the puppy-like sidekicks he most frequently is cast to play. And, of course, he’s now a star of enough wattage to open doors to whatever he wants to do. Fair enough.
But Mamet is a tricky writer, and I speak not of his famously controversial conservative politics, even though “Glengarry” is arguably as anti-capitalist a play as any progressive ever wrote. I refer to his language. The great writer learned his trade at the Chicago sketch comedy theater known as Second City and like most of his plays before this one, “Glengarry” is scripted with short and incisive scenes, masterpieces of brevity, concision and human desperation.
Act 1 is all two-character affairs, conversations in the booths of a Chinese restaurant. Each has an aggressor and a man oppressed. And throughout the whole play, Roma’s words are what drives the action.
Culkin, though, has a staccato delivery, a halting rhythm and an innate sense of vulnerability, all qualities that have made him a much-cherished star. But they don’t easily make a Ricky Roma, and his work in the role, although far from sloppy or embarrassing, throws off the rhythms of the play. He’s been miscast.
That’s a shame because director Patrick Marber’s revival, amusingly designed by Scott Pask, otherwise has some very powerful performances, especially Bill Burr, the stand-up comedian who is perfectly cast as Moss, the salesman who gets mad as hell and, in his determination not to take it anymore, makes victims of his fellow peddlers. Bob Odenkirk, who plays Shelley, is very good, too, although I kept thinking that the show would have been much better if Odenkirk actually was playing George Aaronow, the role performed by Michael McKean. McKean was a far more obvious choice for Shelley, given how well he conveys the masculine panic of being considered over the hill without sufficient reward or self-regard to armor himself against idiots with power telling him what to do. Most of us come to know how that feels.
“Glengarry,” the play, is not the same as “Glengarry,” the movie, something audiences tend to forget. The famously searing “always be closing” monologue about a Cadillac car and a set of steak knives, as brilliantly delivered on film by Alec Baldwin, is not in the play and Mamet has declined any retrofit. All that audiences at the Palace Theatre get is a picture of steak knives on the preshow curtain, then a picture of a Cadillac at intermission and then the text of the truism itself. It’s a pale substitute for the actual monolog. Every time I’ve seen “Glengarry” since the movie, I’ve mourned its absence and this revival was no exception.
Still, “Glengarry Glen Ross” is still a masterful piece of writing in my book and this massively experienced cast, which also includes the caustic Donald Webber Jr. as office manager John Williamson and John Pirruccello as the sad-sack customer James Lingk, has enough tread on its collective tires to make each moment poignant, even in so huge a venue as the Palace Theatre.
The prescient “Glengarry” foresaw the growing panic of lower-middle class American men, tumbling into the chaos of a world changing before their eyes without offering a hand out of the shark-infested waters they thought they knew so well.
