Theater: Glengarry Glen Ross

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Shelly, Dave (Rocco Sperazzo) and George (Jerry Kaplan) are the old-guard here, with war-stories from front lines ten and twenty years back. Each one complains, each one has a different solution for the salesman's predicament, but all they ask for is a list of leads they can sell sleazy real estate plots to --- good leads, not deadbeats.

Their adversary is John Williamson (Jason Myatt) their office-manager, who can bend rules but expects his pound of flesh if he does. There are incredible subterranean conflicts playing out here. The salesmen are self-taught not college-trained. They're older. They each wear an ethnic stamp and the background of their class. They are fiercely independent, cutthroat competitors, but what unites them all against the living symbol of the company's indifference is their love of the game As Game. They stick together, but only in the face of a common adversary.

Steven Mullahoo is the quarry in the game: a cautious, curious, innocent Polock with a little money in savings. In the third scene, John G. Carozza as Richard Roma sees him eating alone, mesmerizes him as easily as a viper does its prey, and reveals to the audience what all that talk of selling in the first two scenes is really all about. When Roma gets to the pen and brochure point in the conversation, the pigeon has become a squab without even realizing it.

Roma is the star salesman for the company. Younger than the rest, he is the ultimate salesman. He seems to do it all instinctively, but he is also conscious that his colleagues have experience he can learn from. He plays as fair as possible, he's as willing to praise a success as he is to assassinate anyone who upsets The Game from lack of understanding. If these are tarnished knights of the round table, he is their Lancelot.

Lenny Megliola plays a dogged, suspicious detective investigating crime in act two. Emerging from his offstage sanctum to call the salesmen one by one for questioning, he is The Angel of Death waiting to pounce. He may not be able to find --- well, the mildest metaphor is "a couch in the living-room" but he smells something, he's determined, and at his own metier he is as dedicated to The Game as the men he questions.

One thing that runs as a deep undercurrent through this play is anger --- blindly unfocused unrelenting rage at everything that makes The Game so hard. It hovers like a dangerous electrical charge in a thundercloud, lashing out at now a colleague, now the bosses, now a relapsing prospect. It's that rage that comes with the territory that separates Mamet's salesmen from Miller's Willy Loman. Perhaps they, like he, have lives and families and self-delusions, but those are not Mamet's subject. The Game and its players, and their rage to get only a slightly unfair tilt of the playing-field in their favor, are what's centerstage here. And so, of course, the blue language of continual rage erupts from every mouth. This is after all the office, not some Hunkie pigeon's kitchen. And a man's gotta say what a man's gotta say, doesn't he?