Glengarry Glen Ross
Updated: Aug 8
James Foley's film of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (also scripted by Mamet) is one of my top-three all-time movies (along with All the President's Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), so it should come as no surprise that I've seen the movie dozens of times. Thanks to a pair of tickets from my wife, I also—finally—got to see a production of the play, staged by the Kansas City Actors Theatre in 2009. And, perhaps foolishly so, I nearly booked a same-day trip for the two of us to New York City to catch one of the final performances of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater's 2013 production starring Al Pacino, Bobby Cannavale, and John C. McGinley. The cost would have been astounding, and, to this day, I regret not going.
It's safe to say I'm a fan (perhaps fanatic is more appropriate). So: Was there any chance that my review here would earn anything less than five stars? Perhaps. Perhaps not. As it happens, the question is moot. Reading Mamet's play is every bit as visceral, hard-hitting, gut-wrenching, and immediate as Foley's film or KCAT's staging, and has done nothing but deepen my affection for the story and endear me to its characters, however reprehensible they may be. And, just like the movie, this is a book I'll come back to again and again, not only to lose myself in a desperate world of desperate characters, but to reacquaint myself with Mamet's original words, his original draft of the story—one that spawned one of my favorite movies of all time.
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