Glengarry Glen Ross

Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

If one was asked to describe the contents of the play Glengarry Glen Ross in four words , these would be : it is about talking . It is not about `talking ' as a `talking over issues ' or `talking about relationships but talking as a weapon , as a survival means . This play is about salesmen , told as a nasty and brutish short story

We meet four aggressive salesmen at various stages of their careers everyone of them employed by the same real-estate office in Chicago They all , Levene , Roma

, Williamson , Moss , seem to have already sold their souls for the power of the dollar , for the careers that they willingly place before their lives and families , and for the chance to be greater than the next guy and to cut that son of a bitch down to size . Each one of them has his own significance , his own sense of life Somebody is really successful another one is a true looser . These men do not have time to think and to worry about being liked ' or well liked ' by somebody , their eyes are on the wonder-`board ' all the time - Who 's on top ? Who 's not making any sales ? Who 's going to win the prize This is a story which seems as important nowadays as it was in 1984 , the time it was written . The USA is moving towards an economic `depression with Americans forced to work harder and harder , take less and less vacation , fight every day trying to beat out co-workers and avoid the dreaded downsizing epidemic . In this environment , Glengarry Glen Ross can be viewed as a warning and advisory tale , a blistering look at the pursuit of the all-powerful dollar as national pastime

We perceive the characters through their words , conversations . The characters of the play speak with heavy slang and colloquial grammar Many critics consider Mamet to be a "sound poet " bringing an ear-pleasing musical sensibility to the street lingo of his characters No one writes dialogs like David Mamet does . His ability and creativity has led to the creation of a whole new adjective - Mamet-esque . This play won itself a Pulitzer Prize for its hard-bitten portrayal of morally bankrupt characters lying , cheating , and stabbing each other in the back . Moreover , it won for Mamet 's ingenious reinvention of character dialogue . Mamet is a writer whose plays , spoken in a modern tongue , are harder to perform than Shakespeare . Every stutter , every pause , every single "ah "oh , or "umm " is carefully chosen to flow like a piece of music , to be a part of a whole creating this special atmosphere . This is the case when actor improvisation is strictly forbidden

All of Mamet 's plays are about the malfunction of language to actually communicate , the way a person can pronounce one thing but mean quite another , or speak volumes but say really nothing at all . Glengarry Glen Ross pushes that concept to its limit with characters whose very living is built on...