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Of all the West Coast avant-gardiana that has made its way to
New York (Soon 3, Laura Farabough, Antenna Theater, Adele
Shank's Winterplay, The Way of How), the one
that's travelled best is John O'Keefe's All Night Long,
which has been brilliantly directed by Andre Gregory at the
Second Stage. It's a sort of suburban Dream Play that
turns the nuclear family inside out so all their dreams,
fears, and ghosts are showing. The mother and father are Jack
and Jill, and the three kids (one of which was hatched from
some leftovers NASA sent over) have names from kitschy '60s
pop: Eddy, Tammy, and Terry. All Night Long is
definitely the work of someone who grew up on The Jetsons,
The Addams Family, and Father Knows Best rather
than Death of a Salesman.
The play is a bizarre and funny mixture of direct-address
monologues, sitcom spoof, and fantastic theatrical images (a
hall of doors that gives way to heaven, a clock stuck at two
minutes to midnight -- too much plutonium in the Pringles?).
There's no plot to speak of; you're basically looking at life
on another planet and trying to figure out how things work.
I'm sure it would be a boring overextended joke if badly
played but Gregory has coaxed lucid and daring performances
out of a terrific bunch of actors -- Gerry Bamann as the jowly
workadaddy and Yuk-Yuk, the clown who cohabits his body, that
good actress Mary McDonnell in a surprise comic turn,
Catherine Coray, Michael Riney, and eleven-year-old
scene-stealer Alyssa Jayne Milano. Adrianne Lobel's set has a
mind of its own, and Susan Hilferty's costumes -- a panic of
stripes -- is especially witty. If you're up for seeing
something you've never seen before in the theater, this is it.
A comedy about the real estate business would have to be about
getting screwed, so it's no wonder that practically every
other word in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (at the
Golden Theater) is fuck. Fuck this, fuck that, fuck him, fuck
you. And in macho America -- the milieu for almost all Mamet's
plays, whether they're specifically set in a Chicago pawnshop,
a Merchant Marines ship on Lake Superior, or a New York subway
-- getting fucked means losing your manhood. Glengarry Glen
Ross is a wicked comedy about emasculation.
The play begins with three scenes in a Chinese restaurant. A
senior salesman is getting screwed by the mild-mannered office
manager who's giving him shitty "leads" -- names of
prospective real estate buyers, or rather suckers for the
clearly less than first-rate plots in Florida being peddled
out of this storefront office. A pissed-off salesman tries to
talk a nebbishy colleague into screwing the bosses by
burglarizing the office, stealing their list of leads, and
selling them t a competitor. The star salesman, passing
himself off as just another loud-mouthed stranger at the next
table, greases up the orifice of his next prospective
customer.
These intertwined tales play themselves out the next morning
in the grimy, concrete-lined real estate office itself, which
has indeed been broken into. (The opening of the second act is
a wonderful sight joke. This inside job was no discreet
maneuver -- the plate glass window has been smashed, file
folders are strewn everywhere, and even the phones have been
stolen!) The beleaguered old salesman arrives triumphant from
a big sale, which he describes in terms approaching religious
conversion if not group sex, and announces, "I've got my
balls back." The customer who'd been railroaded into a
sale at the Chinese restaurant comes crawling in on his wife's
orders to cancel the deal, whimpering with all the guilt of an
unsuccessful consumer (and deballed husband), "I don't
have the power...to negotiate." The big-mouthed salesman
tries to flimflam the schmuck into thinking he has time before
his check clears the bank, but the office manager, trying to
be helpful (or is he?), steps in and blows the scam. "You
fucking cunt," screams the humiliated salesman after the
would-be victim has slithered away. The final act of
emasculation occurs when the office manager informs the
reballed old man that the people he'd closed the deal with
were known wackos whose checks had been rubber for years.
If some of this plot sounds awfully familiar, the only
surprise is that it's taken Mamet so long to rewrite American
Buffalo, his first major play and still his finest.
Probably the best thing about both plays is that they depict
not high finance but a grubbier, more common, less
well-examined workaday world, where the stakes of power and
corruption are often absurdly low; the office manager is
willing to sell good leads for a paltry $50, and the wild man
is willing to knock off his own office for a mere $5000.
Probably the best thing about Greg Mosher's production of Glengarry
Glen Ross (which began at Chicago's Goodman Theater before
going to Broadway) is that while the events and behavior are
scrupulously detailed and realistic, there are Pinteresque
moments of menacing stillness in the second act where almost
anything could happen, letting the play -- and the audience --
breathe a different air, a gust of theatrical mystery.
The play is superbly performed by seven grizzled, unpolished
American men, but when it's all over Mamet's points about
business and American manhood seem strong, sensible, and
terribly obvious. Even the plot twist is logical in its
unexpected emergence. I much preferred Mamet's Edmond
(see Off-Broadway last year) in which a modern-day Woyzeck
goes to hell, literally gets fucked by a black man and finds
God -- in other words, a play that transcended realistic drama
altogether.
As for the other salesman play running, well, it's not so much
a performance as a stunt by Dustin Hoffman, Little Big Man as
an old Jew with eyeglasses for "character." It gets
pretty dull pretty quickly and makes the play less than an
esteemed American classic than a dreary trip to the kitchen
sink. A star is born in this Death of a Salesman,
though, in John Malkovich -- already a culture hero to those
who caught his dementia in True West Off-Broadway but
now giving a beautiful, highly original, impossibly poetic
performance in his Broadway debut.
New York Beat, April 25, 1984
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