‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ still masterful drama despite some casting choices

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 it.

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 where he most frequently is cast. And, of course, he’s now a star of enough earned 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 One 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 Patrick Marber’s revival, amusingly designed by Scott Pask, otherwise has some very powerful performances, especially Bill Burr, the standup 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 Aranow, the role performed by Michael McKean, who was a far more obvious choice for Shelley, given how much he conveys the masculine panic of being deemed over the hill without sufficient reward or sufficient self-regard to have armor against idiots with power telling you 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 as “Blake from downtown,” 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” remains 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 Link, has enough tread on its collective tires to make each moment poignant, even in so huge a venue as the Palace.

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.