“When Kent Thompson chose this play back in January, I don’t think he had any idea the bottom would fall out from under the mortgage industry, but it makes Mamet’s tough, unrelenting, dislikable characters seem even more so,” spokesman Chris Wiger says of the DCTC artistic director’s timely choice. “The setting is kept in the 1980s, exactly as Mamet wrote it. The director, Marco Barricelli, is a real fan. He’s very interested in the rhythm and cadence of Mamet’s language, and he hasn’t changed a word or a comma in this production.”
That said, Wiger warns, many of those words aren’t pretty (according to the Internet Movie Database, “the word ‘fuck’ and its derivatives are uttered 138 times” in James Foley’s 1992 film version, with its brilliant cast of stud stars led by Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon), so you might want to leave the kids and prigs at home. But the filthy, machine-gun dialogue and the setting — a time when a landline was still your lifeline in a brutal business reigned over by backstabbing and the cold call — continue to make this play go ’round.
Glengarry Glen Ross runs daily except Sundays through November 22 in the Ricketson Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex; for tickets, $34 to $51, visit www.denvercenter.org or call 303-893-4100.
Oct. 10-Nov. 22, 2008
