The audience laughed at the many lines degrading Indian Americans, like “Don’t ever to try to sell an Indian… You get those names come up, you ever get ‘em, ‘Patel’?... Never bought a f---ing thing… A supercilious race…”
They laughed when “fairy” was lobbed as another insult, and at the mention of “Polacks.” The laughter was of the simplest kind—it was at that insult or slur, those people (including a later mention of “wog”).
It was not nervous or derisive laughter. It was literal laughter, a mirror response to how the words were originally written and intended for the characters who said them, and how they are being faithfully spoken by the actors in the all-star Broadway production of David Mamet’s Pulitzer-winning 1984 play, Glengarry Glen Ross (Palace Theatre, booking to June 28).
Beamed into 2025—via the enduring cultural imprint of the 1992 movie starring Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin—this revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean, lands with a puzzling, bitter thud. The production, directed by Patrick Marber, feels both dated and absolutely of the political and cultural moment of now.
This is where Mamet imagined his all-male team of foul-mouthed real estate brokers were back then—rats-in-a-sack with jagged incisors, fighting over homes to sell, and over the ever-diminishing financial and spiritual returns from their jobs. Forty-plus years later, this is where the winds are blowing us back to.
In a Broadway theater in 2025, the laughter sounds darker because the Trump administration’s animus to the LGBTQ community, and trans people in particular, is playing out in real-time alongside its multi-pronged war on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and all that DEI stands for. The rights and identities of minorities and the marginalized are under sustained attack.
In the play, the characters that say these words aren’t cautioned or castigated or proven wrong. Mamet simply has them say them; the response of the audience in 2025—laughing at them merrily saying the words—is its own telling-on-itself. A similar response was elicited when Mamet’s American Buffalo played on Broadway in 2022.
Well, you might also say: This is Mamet, and so all this comes with the territory. Revive Glengarry and revive it untouched and this is what you have. (The anti-Indian language was removed in a 2004 San Francisco revival, but not in this production.) The cast and crew make their creative choices, and the audience pays its money to watch some high-class actors knock each other around with unrestrained verbal battery.
The play may feel dusty and even boring, but Culkin, Odenkirk, McKean, and Burr are individually excellent as they throw expletives around like grenades, and work themselves up into whirlwinds of vindictive fury and snark over sales targets, frustrated ambition, and what it all f---ing means.
The f-word is used so much in invective-packed speeches and diatribes it almost feels like a pleasantry. Any Succession fans will recall how it and other swear-words were brilliantly threaded into so many of the characters’ lines—including Culkin’s Roman Roy. Mamet makes similarly impressive arias out of the characters’ profanity and insults. (Burr’s exit from the stage is so swaggering in this regard it gets a deserved round of applause.)
However, even without its hate-it-or-embrace-it circus of unreconstructed-boys-being-unreconstructed-boys white collar warfare, the play is a trudge. The first act is a drearily staged trio of scenes, each featuring two characters, set in a Chinese restaurant (“the Chinks”), where Levene (Odenkirk) is badgering the office administrator Williamson (Donald Webber, Jr.) into passing more clients his way: “I need the leads…I’m the man to sell.”
Then it’s Moss (Burr) and Aaronow’s (McKean) turn, with the anti-Indian bile, a lot of anti-boss hate, and an idea to rob the office. In the third scene, Culkin as Roma holds forth on everything from why all train compartments “smell vaguely of s--t,” to food, to the “great f---s we’ve had,” to the meaning of life. “There is no measure. Only greed,” he concludes.
Culkin delivers this speech as more pondering stream of consciousness than bug-eyed monologue to a person we wrongly assume he knows as it’s such a personal, intimate shower of words. But James Lingk—played extremely well by John Pirruccello, an audience-surrogate looking on askance—is until that moment a stranger, who Roma will try (inevitably ill-fatedly) to sell a property to.
The muted applause—a kind of is-that-it? response—says it all when it comes to the energy-suck of the first act. The second act, when Scott Pask’s excellent, ransacked office set reveals itself, is livelier.
The swearing and drama ratchet up—Culkin and Odenkirk on vividly explosive form, McKean just as scene-stealing, though more quietly—as the hunt for whoever ransacked the office is conducted by a detective (Howard W. Overshown) against the backdrop of the men’s viperish competition and desperation to prove themselves, undermine each other, and save their jobs.
While Williamson isn’t specified as a Black character, Webber, Jr. is Black and in the second act as in the first, the insults leveled against him—until he solves the ransacked-office mystery and finally has his say—are the most vicious. It is a small crumb of rhetorical comfort to see him expose the thief.
As I type this, news has broken that the Republican-controlled Kentucky legislature has overruled a veto by its Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, paving the way for the legalization of conversion therapy in that state. Tweak the script, and that would likely get a huge laugh in Glengarry Glen Ross.
