Glengarry Glen Ross

After College, Mamet held several unglamorous jobs one being a Manager for a real estate sales office. This position was the idea behind Williamson’s job in Glengarry Glen Ross and the other salesman in the office would later serve as the basis for the other characters in the play. Glengarry Glen Ross premiered in London in 1983, followed by the American premier in Chicago in 1984. It was a tremendous success and remains Mamet’s most celebrated play, winning him the Tony Award in 1984 for Best Play and 1984 Pulitzer for Drama.

Glengarry Glen Ross has been compared to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, where Millers' work describes the death of the American dream, Mamet’s work takes this death and uses it as a starting point for deeper social criticism.Glengarry Glen Ross is a story about four salesman in Chicago - Levene, Roma, Moss & Aaronow, and their Supervisor Williamson who all work together selling undesirable real estate at high prices. The story takes place at the end of the month where the Boss’s Mitch and Murray have developed a “sales contest” where the highest seller gets a Cadillac and the lowest seller gets fired. With a chalkboard used to emphasize the winner (Roma) and highlight the losers the other three are getting extremely worried.Which is where Moss comes up with the idea of robbing the office to get the better leads and sale them off to a competitor, but since Moss is a coward he tries to “talk” Aaronow into doing the dirty work for him. This story is full of corrupt, selfishness and untrustworthiness…all of Mamet’s favorite adjectives.

Mamet is famous for his attention to detail in dialogue. All characters in Glengarry Glen Ross have very specific speech patterns. Words often left out of sequences and the grammar rarely proper always makes sense. Mamet believes that the way people speak influence the way they behave, rather than vice versa. For example, throughout the play, different characters use the word “talk” to imply idle chatter that is not supported by action. The best example is the conversation between Moss and Aaronow when Moss cleverly suggests that he himself is just “talking" about the break in until he feels that he has “talked” Aaronow into committing the robbery; Moss reveals that he has been “talking” about the break in. The word is the same but his tone switches the work “talk” itself from meaningless to meaningful.

This example typifies the way Mamet’s characters do and don’t communicate. The drama critic John Lahr referred to what he called the “hilarious brutal sludge “ of Mamet’s characters speech and in this outrageous attempt by Moss and Aaronow to distinguish between talking and speaking we see the playwright expertly deploying such sludge (Klinkowitz,Wallace pg 3041) or as many has dubbed it “Mamet Speak.”

Sources:

http://spark notes.com/drama/glengarry/context.html

Klinkowitz,Wallace, David Mamet, The Norton Anthology American Literature Vol E, New York 2007, pg 3041

Picture Source:

http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/glengarry-glen-ross_108544/pictures/