At the climax of David Mamet’s masterpiece “Glengarry Glen Ross”—now at the Palace, in its fourth Broadway production since 1984—a motormouthed salesman in a shady real-estate office in Chicago lambastes his office manager for fouling a deal. As a gullible buyer starts to get nervous, the manager accidentally reveals that the salesman has been lying, torpedoing thousands of dollars in commission. “You stupid fucking cunt,” the salesman snarls at him. “Whoever told you you could work with men?”
A man’s work—in the swift, grim, aurally intoxicating “Glengarry”—is never done. First, there’s the machine-gun patter required to sell even an acre of what we gather is utterly worthless land. Then, there’s the fact that every slimeball in the office fancies himself a tiger, and any conversation can become a tar pit. The top operator, Ricky Roma (played here by Kieran Culkin), remains friends with his fading mentor, Shelley Levene (Bob Odenkirk), though he’s always looking for a way to siphon business away from the older man. And a simple chat at a Chinese restaurant, like the one between the dyspeptic Dave Moss (Bill Burr) and the weary George Aaronow (Michael McKean), might turn out to have been criminal entrapment. The minute you listen, you’re sunk. “We’re just talking,” Moss says, the play’s code for “You’re cooked.”
Life operates like the leaderboard in the office sales competition—everyone can always see who’s ahead. Of course, that Darwinian kill-or-be-killed ethic works for “Glengarry” revivals, too, especially when they’re held up against the movie, which was released in 1992: if you play Roma, you’re going mano a mano with Al Pacino at his reptilian peak; if you’re Levene, you’re battling memories of Jack Lemmon and Pacino, who played Levene on Broadway in 2012. I don’t personally think that theatre should be a competition, but these are the rules of the Mametian game. The “Glengarry” script is as dynamically notated as a musical score, and it offers little room for interpretation; an actor has to drill deep to make an impression.
In this handsome production—directed by Patrick Marber as an entertaining showcase rather than as a backhanded tragedy—McKean manages to sidle up to the part of Aaronow, infusing him with a lovely, understated air of collapse. The erstwhile standup comedian Burr, as Moss, takes a thrillingly berserk approach to Mamet’s syncopated cadences; his high, angry voice carries amazing momentum, and it hits like a glass in a bar fight. But the dynamic between the rising Ricky and the falling Shelley sits at the heart of the drama, and although Culkin and Odenkirk are strong, they’re never astonishing. Odenkirk’s portrait of failure is sad but not, as it needs to be, pathetic, and Culkin’s shifty insouciance couldn’t trick a baby out of a lollipop, let alone sell his character’s grandiloquent flights of quasi philosophy.
Why so many revivals of “Glengarry”? The answer usually seems obvious: it offers male stars wonderful parts full of stunning, serrated language. But I couldn’t help noticing, in the thickening air of 2025, that it’s the only piece on Broadway by an explicitly pro-MAGA playwright. As this “Glengarry” was heading into previews, Mamet, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, wrote that Donald Trump is “returning the American government to decency, the rule of law and common sense.” I don’t get the feeling that the producers would like us to think about their writer’s politics too much, and it may be a mug’s game to draw a direct line from his imaginative work of forty years ago to his beliefs today. But, while watching the show, I did wonder what the young men sitting around me were absorbing from the play’s non-stop verbal aggression, which I’ve always believed was a razor-edged critique of blustery American masculinity. Could all this jocular, misogynistic vulgarity influence anybody? Surely not. All these guys onstage—they’re just talking.
Meanwhile, up at the Winter Garden, George Clooney is actually hoping that a male role model can make a lasting impression on his public. The Broadway adaptation of his superb 2005 film, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” stakes the superstar’s reputation on his ability to transfer his silver-screen magnetism to live theatre, and from there, I think, to real-world efficacy. “Good Night,” adapted by Clooney and Grant Heslov from their own screenplay and directed for the stage by David Cromer, takes place back when men were men, cigarette smoke made ’em all squint like cowboys, and the little ladies (mostly) didn’t come to the office. More important, it takes place in and around 1954, when Edward R. Murrow (Clooney), on his CBS news program, “See It Now,” took a stand against Senator Joe McCarthy, the Red Scare demagogue who used accusations of Communist subversion as a bullwhip against his enemies.
In the movie, which Clooney directed, the actor played the “See It Now” co-creator Fred Friendly, and David Strathairn gave an extraordinary (and Oscar-nominated) performance as Murrow. As Friendly, Clooney was charmingly diffident, throwing his lines away; as a director, he combined beautifully composed black-and-white glamour with an insistently voyeuristic camera, which peered through windows to discover characters in unguarded moments. Archival footage of the real McCarthy—sweaty and shouting on a subcommittee dais, say—gave the whole thing the feel of a documentary, as if it were an artifact from Hollywood’s golden age.
Stepping into Murrow’s shoes on Broadway, Clooney is certainly graceful. He looks just right in the elegant swing of nineteen-fifties trousers—Brenda Abbandandolo designed the costumes—and he excels, as he has for more than thirty years, at communicating a winning kind of weary resolve. But theatrical acoustics can be unforgiving, especially with an actor who tends to swallow his lines, however slyly. Accordingly, to capture Clooney’s charisma, the production relies on closeups, shot live onstage by a bulky CBS camera and projected onto a large screen near the audience. It’s a strategy with diminishing returns, though it does allow us to see the strain in Clooney’s eyes when Murrow feels the pressure.
Clooney and Heslov, movie creatures in their bones, are too accustomed to telling half their story through visuals, and some scenes needed more of an overhaul for such a different dramatic form. One entire story line, a secret marriage between two CBS employees, played by Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson, comes off as downright foolish when we see the couple awkwardly snuggled up against the proscenium, and, despite many cross-stage entrances, Cromer fails to bring the film’s sense of bustling movement to the stage.
And so a finely made blade has become a blunter object. But we are in a time when a hammer may be more useful than a knife. Clooney and Heslov have chosen to change very little of their twenty-year-old script, which sounds as though it’s a deliberate allegory for everything that is happening now. When Murrow inveighs against convictions using sealed evidence, we think of immigrants being deported to El Salvador without due process. When employees consider signing a “loyalty oath,” we think of the government’s current screening of federal workers.
It’s been a season when the relative inaccessibility of tickets has been very much on my mind. The cost of a pair to “Good Night, and Good Luck” most likely means that the majority of folks watching it are executives, media types, or well-heeled business owners, some of whom might be thinking about if and when courage will be required. These, probably, are the very folks Clooney is trying to reach.
Near the end of the play, we see the famous footage of the lawyer Joseph Welch asking McCarthy, in 1954, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”—the inflection point for a country growing tired of McCarthy’s rough disregard for the Constitution. (I’m sure it’s a coincidence that Welch worked at Hale & Dorr, a firm now known as WilmerHale. Last month, WilmerHale sued the Trump Administration for its “plainly unlawful attack on the bedrock principles of our nation’s legal system.”) Look, Clooney seems to be saying. We did this before. We can do it again. ♦
