Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)

Glengarry Glen Ross premiered at the National Theatre in London in 1983, and within two years was the subject of a critical analysis by C. W. E. Bigsby that established the main lines followed by most subsequent commentators.1 Bigsby places Glengarry within a history of American plays and novels about salesmen and confidence men, but in a major departure from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946), and from Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller (1915–2005), Mamet shows the salesmen only at work: the putative distinction between their private lives and their occupations disappears, and the focus shifts to the language of selling. Bigsby captures the ambivalence whereby the apparent denunciation of American capitalism is balanced by admiration for the exuberance of the salesmen’s dialogue and the creativity of their deceptions, so that there is potentially something even transcendent about the salesman’s world that is analogous to artistic creation itself. Finally, Bigsby notes that the play is formally a hybrid, with an episodic first act but a second that has many of the qualities of the well-made play. He is puzzled by Mamet’s interest in conventional forms, since the demand for plot proposes what Bigsby elsewhere in his study of the playwright sees as a false distinction between character and environment, while offering at the level of dramatic action the very illusions that the characters present to themselves in desperate attempts to evade the realities of their existence.