The one Ticket Master story that sticks most in my head, however, is the call he fielded for front row seats to that "new play by David Mamet" called "Glengarry Glenn Close". Picture Glenn Close dressed in a cheap suit, smoking a cigarette, saying something like "Fuck you. Eighty-two grand for the whole eight units. Cocksuckers want to fuck with me?" My friend said he dropped the phone.
Tomorrow I have an audition for Glengarry Glen Ross which is being produced at the Dallas Theater Center this fall. I'm happy to have the audition, but honestly I have to say - what is the meaning of this? Do we really care about the machinations of a couple of sleazy real estate agents with no morals or scruples whatsoever? Where is the poetry? Where is the language? And how, I ask you, how do we draw the line from Beckett to Pinter to...Mamet?? When did cynicism become the order of the day?
Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer Prize when it was first produced back in 1984. Maybe it was groundbreaking at the time, but somehow to me it seems that there's no there there. I've practiced the scene I have to prepare - between Williamson (my character, the manager of the office), and Shelly Levene (played with astonishing detail by Jack Lemmon in the movie version) - every which way from Sunday, and somehow it doesn't really make any difference! And I understand how to prepare Mamet, having studied with his protegees William H. Macy, Stephen Schachter and Gregory Mosher back in the day.
Mamet himself suggested that the lines of any play are "gibberish" and what matters is the moments that occur between the actors. If only that were really the case.
David Mamet, in addition to being a playwright, is a great theorist on the methods of acting. He is rooted in the technique of Sanford Meisner, particularly Meisner's exercise of "repetition". It's a fascinating method and has great validity as part of an actor's training. But Mamet seems to have created Glengarry Glen Ross as a 65-page repetition exercise. Attach any action to the scenes such as "show an inferior who's boss" or "get him to rue the day" or "win an adversary to my side" and while it changes the moment to moment playing, it doesn't really change the play. It all seems a bit too arbitrary. Great plays enter the subconscious, awakening us to language, and allowing the words to illicit a new response in the speaker and audience alike. Glengarry Glen Ross leaves me feeling cold at the very least and gives me a headache when I think about it for any length of time. Still, it's my job to get behind it, at least for tomorrow, and see if I can make it play.
I remember one day when I was a student at Lincoln Center Theater. We walked into class and Gregory Mosher announced that Lincoln Center would be premiering a new play by "America's greatest living playwright." Without skipping a beat I said "What happened? Did Sam Shepard die?" Mosher was not amused. That play was Speed The Plow. Quick...what do you remember
about Speed The Plow?