Except, ever since seeing this new production of Glengarry, I have found myself thinking a heretical thought. What if we have been wrong about the play all along? What if, instead of offering a ruthless critique of capitalism at its amoral nadir, instead of witheringly depicting a salesman as a con man, Glengarry is instead celebrating the deceit, in fact presenting it as the epitome of manliness? What if Glengarry Glen Ross, quite possibly in ways a younger Mamet himself did not entirely fathom, offers us a joyful ethnography of Donald Trump’s America? How different, after all, is Glengarry’s preening, potty-mouthed alpha dog, Ricky Roma, who dazzles the audience as he peddles worthless tracts of Florida swampland to “dumb Polacks” and “deadbeat wogs,” from the world-class grifter pushing Trump University diplomas and $TRUMP meme bitcoins?
While the current revival has somewhat divided critics, it stood up well for me alongside the versions of the play I’d seen back to the Broadway original. With the exception of one intriguing casting decision, which I’ll get to later, there is nothing revisionist about the production itself. It remains word-to-word faithful to Mamet’s blistering story of a handful of real estate salesmen trying to screw their clients, their boss, and each other on the way to winning the Cadillac that is first prize in a sales contest. No, the only thing that’s different is the political climate in which we now view the cons and the combat. That climate, I would argue, lets Glengarry be the valentine to ruthlessness, deceit, and raw power that it has always been meaning to be.
One very relevant part of the climate change is David Mamet’s own well-documented swing to the far right. He publicly disavowed his previous life as a “brain-dead liberal” in a 2008 essay in The Village Voice. Back then, he was at least aligning himself with a certain conservative intellectual tradition of people like Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Paul Johnson. More recently, Mamet has embraced the pseudo-populism of MAGA. In a 2011 interview with Slate, he declared of Sarah Palin, “I am crazy about her.” Several weeks after last November’s election, Mamet wrote in The Wall Street Journal to congratulate the president-elect for staving off the “decline and fall” of America by slaying both men’s favorite enemies: “the superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists, and the media [who] have colluded to suppress the true and impose the false.”