Mamet's masterpiece lights up Merrimack

David Adkins, Todd Licea and Joel Colodner in Glengarry Glen Ross.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

The Merrimack Rep is perhaps our leading example of a great theatre constrained by its budget. They consistently operate in the black, and enjoy a great deal of support from their community (indeed, up in Merrimack you feel an extraordinary bond between the theatre and its audience, closer and more trusting than just about anywhere else).  But you can also feel in their season, which is typically devoted to small-cast plays, a sense of financial (and hence to some degree artistic) limits. This perception is particularly acute given the fact that their "big" play each season is so reliably terrific. One guesses that with only a little more funding, Merrimack could mount seasons that would consistently rival, and possibly eclipse, the best being done on the regional landscape.

Certainly Glengarry Glen Ross (through this weekend only) is the most powerful show currently on the local boards.  It's true I've never seen David Mamet's balls-out potboiler fail; given a competent cast, its nasty mix of coiled masculine anxiety, frustration, and aggression always grips.  After all, it's practically an X-ray of the power dynamics of the locker room, where the stakes are always high, and the men always naked (at least metaphorically).

What's more, alas, the script also makes one reminisce for the days before Mamet lost his mind to the sort of political and sexual paranoias one would associate with a denizen of one of his shark tanks. For Glengarry is not only perhaps this playwright's greatest play, it's also his last great play; in his next major effort, Speed-the-Plow, he crossed over from sympathy with his bad boys to literal identification with them. Women became the Enemy, and thus the ironic finale of Glengarry, which dashes any hope of honor among his masculine thieves, would prove the last of its kind in the playwright's oeuvre.

But at least we have director Charles Towers, and the cast at Merrimack (which is far better than competent), to remind us how electrifying the playwright once was. You could argue, I suppose, that this Glengarry plays everything by the book - but to my mind that only underlines the fact that, as the culture really moves so slowly these days, the play's constructs still feel up-to-the-minute. Mamet's men are stripped of any connection to society at large, much less the other sex. They seem to exist in a vacuum, and even their sales prowess is somehow evanescent; it's a skill - or a potency - that has no physical basis (it can evaporate at a customer's whim). Thus these men are only men when they believe they're men, and so their emotional predicament in a way feels timeless (even if the sums of money in play clearly date the script).

David Adkins and Will Lebow make a deal.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

They are, of course, not only near-tragic figures but snakes-in-the-swampgrass as well. As mentioned earlier, part of what makes Glengarry so much more bracing than later Mamet is that it's so unsentimental about the dishonesty and back-stabbing moving behind the solemn cult of masculinity. Mamet's real estate gods - so seemingly concerned with admiration and trust - are constantly cheating on the down low; their very livelihood, in fact, is based on proverbial Florida swampland. (Which may be why the play was at first misinterpreted as a critique of capitalism.)

Fortunately the cast at Merrimack is all but expert at floating between these opposed identities and moral poles - and their command of the famously staccato "Mamet-speak" (here at its hilarious height) is virtuosic.  As cocky top salesdog Ricky Roma, Todd Licea exudes a more open sense of predatory Las-Vegas charisma than usual, but he so smoothly manipulates each and every social transaction that his sales success is utterly convincing.  Ditto for Will LeBow's desperate Shelly Levene, a kind of lizard on his last legs who alternates between claims of prowess (he was once known as "The Machine") and pathetically low compromises, deals - and even thefts.

These two superb actors supply the engine of Mamet's own machine, but there are several remarkable performances elsewhere in the production. Merrimack mainstay David Adkins gives his Williamson (the shop boss, in effect) a stronger shot of alienation than callow slime, but he's intriguing all the same. Meanwhile Jeremiah Wiggins is just about perfect as the shop's latest mark, and Jim Ortlieb makes the aging, bumbling Aaronow a figure of true pathos.  I was only dissatisfied with Charlie Kevin's Moss, who had less of a hidden edge than I think the character demands - but after the play's opening gambit, his is a minor role.

In its look and feel, the physical production is likewise just right - from the blood-red backdrop of the Chinese restaurant to the cheap, off-white gypsum board of the burgled office (thank you, designer Bill Clarke).  All in all, Towers and company have practically built a time machine on the Merrimack stage (even the salesmen's 80's-era ethnic slurs have been preserved, along with the c-word, and a deluge of other profanity).  It all brings us back to the days when Mamet was a playwright of promise, and still had the talent (and self-awareness) to grip you by the lapels - and not let go.

Death of the salesman

Craig Houk grills Michael Pevzner in Glengarry Glen Ross.

The Independent Drama Society first popped up on our theatrical radar screen with an able production of Proof last summer; now the intrepid troupe has decided to tackle a more ambitious text, David Mamet's biggest Broadway success, Glengarry Glen Ross, at the BCA's Black Box through this weekend.

And the good news is that, like Proof, the production is surprisingly strong - although Mamet's famous savaging of a corrupt real estate office is here never quite as savage as I think its author intended. Director Brett Marks has inculcated in his cast the rhythms of Mametspeak, and the spoken performances flow along admirably. This, of course, is all a production can aspire to, according to this particular author's own claims. But other observers might note the character work behind the well-rendered speeches is a bit more variable, I'm afraid - although never so variable as to pull us out of the spell of one of Mamet's tightest dramatic constructions.

The best performance probably belongs to Phil Thompson, as Shelly "The Machine" Levene, a down-on-his-luck salesman who stumbles into what seems to be a big score. Levene may have not seemed quite pathetic enough in his opening scene, but Thompson spread his wings beautifully once back on top of the sleazy office heap, and his gulling of a particularly clueless mark was as ruthlessly hilarious as it should be. Perhaps only a small step behind was Michael Fisher as Roma, the role that won Joe Mantegna his Tony; oddly, Fisher is perhaps the more magnetic actor, and he certainly had Roma's smooth-talking surface down pat. But Fisher has only partly mined the wealth of emotional material in this character's soliloquies, which in their nihilist bravado - and sad groping after some sort of honor among thieves - rank among Mamet's best. Elsewhere there was nicely detailed work from Bob Mussett as that gullible mark, and thoughtful touches, if not full arcs, from Craig Houk and Michael Pevzner. Only Jeremy Browne disappointed, I'm afraid, as the seemingly spineless corporate suit in the corner office - largely because he has yet to tap into his character's surprisingly cold core.

As with Proof, the physical production was stylish and assured.  Designer Sean A. Cote pulled off convincing evocations of both a Chinese restaurant and the wrecked real estate office within the tiny confines of the BCA's Black Box; and the lighting and costumes were never less than apt. Glengarry Glen Ross counts as another feather in this young company's cap; and you've only got this weekend to catch it, if you want to be able to say you knew them before they hit it big.