To the dogs

Shady brokers get rich selling worthless properties to suckers who can’t really afford to buy them in the first place.

Wait, that sounds really familiar …

There’s a reason the Blue Room Theatre chose to revive Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about real estate agents who will do anything it takes to outmaneuver their cohorts for commissions as they manipulate unwitting clients into buying shaky Florida real estate. Despite the play’s age, one of its underlying concerns—the corruption of unchecked capitalism destroying the imagined American Dream—is still depressingly relevant.

The story concerns a group of real estate brokers who are in the midst of a sales promotion in which the top man will win a Cadillac. The classic character Alec Baldwin played in the 1992 film version isn’t present here (Mamet wrote that part especially for the movie), but the message he so memorably underlined remains the driving force for the action: lose the sales contest, lose your job. The key to success is finding the right candidates to pitch the properties to, but the rub is that the premium leads—the “Glengarry leads” that the company spent big money on—are locked away, and the office manager doles them out to the top sellers only. This leaves the guys at the bottom of the board with the scraps—the “fucking deadbeat magazine subscription leads”—and little hope of moving up.

For this production, director Amber Miller and the Blue Room have assembled a Murderers’ Row of local players to fill the juicy parts of this tight character drama: Joe Hilsee, Shawn Galloway, Roger Montalbano, Sean Green, Rob Wilson, Steve Swim and David Sorensen. Scene-chewing is required for the rapid-fire dialogue of Manet’s professional bullshitters, especially in the iconic roles of alpha dog Richard Roma and washed-up Shelley Levene. And two of Chico’s most skilled players—Galloway and Hilsee, respectively—devoured those parts on opening night (May 3), relishing in the crude, poetic interplay in seamless, naturally magnetic performances.

The opportunity to witness a seasoned cast of committed players thrown into the same room to fight over some of the meatiest dialogue in modern American theater is not to be missed. It was thrilling and entertaining to watch these dogs lie, cheat, steal, flatter, intimidate and fight to survive.

One of the best moments of the production happens just before the play’s big reveal. A pissed-off Roma is dressing down his office manager for bungling a deal with a client. As Galloway goes for the throat of Montalbano’s suddenly passive Williamson (“You fucking shit! Where did you learn your trade? … Who ever told you you could work with men?”), Levene stands silently in the background. Hilsee is doing nothing, just standing there, his emotionless face half in darkness and half in light. But it was mesmerizing, and a clever bit of lighting (kudos to Miller, as well as Wilson, who doubled as lighting designer, and board operator Dani Kay) that catches the character at the moment before everything changes for him. Great stuff.

Once the play is over, however, and one starts to dig deeper and connect the dots between financial schemes of the play’s past, and the mortgage scams and unscrupulous developers-turned-presidents of the real-life present, an uneasy feeling sets in. As it’s soberly spelled out in the program notes: “[Glengarry Glen Ross] makes you realize that once upon a time men without ethics were considered sleazy swindlers. Today, they are respected members, and indeed the leaders, of society.”