The New Yorker:

Or does he?

By Andrew Marantz

When David Mamet was planning to bring his 1983 play “Glengarry Glen Ross” to Broadway for a fourth time, he asked Nathan Lane to star in it. Lane agreed, but he had a condition: “The first person you have to hire is Bill Burr.” Lane later had to drop out—Bob Odenkirk took his place in the revival, now running at the Palace—but his casting advice stuck.

Even if you haven’t seen “Glengarry Glen Ross” in a while, you may remember the logline: a few sad-sack real-estate salesmen in Chicago hang around the office, talking their indignant shit. They air profane and petty grievances, and lightly conspiratorial gossip; they lament their insecure place in the bourgeois status hierarchy, and the indignities they endure at the hands of their unfeeling bosses. In “Death of a Salesman,” the long-suffering salesman’s loyal wife is there to remind us that “attention must be paid.” In “Glengarry Glen Ross,” women don’t exist, life is suffering, and loyalty is for marks. The characters are all working men, and they perform both their work and their masculinity with sweaty desperation—two inseparable competitive sports, neither of which they can afford to lose.

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