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The masculinity of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’
David Mamet’s Pulitzer-winning play is a bleak vision of sad, angry men
It is my limited experience that the words one writes and releases into the wild immediately take on their own lives, and if that is true for hacks, then it must be true for novelists, poets, and playwrights.
David Mamet’s Pulitzer-winning 1983 drama Glengarry Glen Ross — a play about cannibalistic Willy Lomans — is enjoying its third Broadway revival this century. Over the decades, it has grown from a long, uncomfortable peek at bottom-feeding real estate salesmen wrestling in the muck to an in-your-face portrait of mainstream American masculinity.
Glengarry Glen Ross is short but brutal, mordantly funny, and depressing. The play is not a full meal, more like a turkey leg—meat and bone.
I’m curious if Mamet knew he was writing something prophetic at the time. That in the 2020s, the President of the United States himself would be a bullshit artist in an ill-fitting suit insulting anyone who dares pipe up. Was he telling us something? Did we listen or chuckle?
As I rewatched the star-studded revival of Glengarry Glen Ross the other night, I wondered if Mamet ever truly understood his…
