Gender Blind Glengarry Glen Ross at redtwist
This is such a fine play and a good production – and on top of it redtwist manages to make an innovative, truthful statement about what women are. I liked it, I was cheering them on. Too bad David Mamet himself had to reach out from his parapet and slap the only real blemish on it.
Even though it was a unique experience to hear a woman utter the line “my balls feel like concrete,” I was sorry that certain impossible lines distracted from Jacqueline Grandt’s complete and genuine Ricky Roma. I don’t mean the sentiments of the lines were impossible for a woman to feel or say. That’s exactly the refreshing statement that this production makes, that a hardboiled and supposedly male character such as Ricky Roma is thoroughly convincing and recognizable as a woman. The distracting lines are more a problem of… mechanics. Certain lines took you out of the play, only because of, well, anatomy.
redtwist was smart enough to publish the statement Mamet’s agent, through his publisher, made giving them permission to cast women in the play. Okay, cool, he said. Just so long as you don’t change a single word. (I wondered if this wasn’t his way stopping them from doing it.)
As a playwright, I agree in principal with David Mamet’s position. In fact, I would have been altogether skeptical of their motives if the company had felt it necessary to rewrite major portions of the play just to have women play the roles. But the fact of that matter is, it would have only come down to about seven words, perhaps, that needed to be changed. “Balls” would have become “clit.” In about two places, when Ricky was describing a personal memory of a love scene, “woman” would have become “man.” That’s practically it. (It is obvious to me that this Ricky is not gay; saying “woman” in this context simply did not make sense.) What would I ask the playwright to do in this case? Well, I wish he could have somehow authorized simple gender-switching of the language. Not wholesale revisions, just the innocent pronoun-switching that closeted gays do. That is a kind of white lie that is harmless to meaning.
On the other hand, I didn’t have a problem at all with the women constantly calling each other “man,” or with Roma’s fine, despairing line, “It’s not a world of men” being spoken by Grandt. I didn’t have a problem with any number of other male-talk examples. These fit under the flexible umbrella of artistic interpretation; they were metaphor. They were expressive of the characters. They were also a wonderful way of talking about the workplace today, and the strange transformations society has gone through; and about stereotypes as opposed to truth – in addition to what the play always says about human nature.
The second act was wonderful; I loved Grandt’s performance; and Brian Parry, that portrayer of business losers par excellance, was great as Shelley Levene. It’s a Glengarry Glen Ross worth seeing… David Mamet notwithstanding.