Men betray killer instincts in Glengarry Glen Ross; women bleed in the Actors’ Equity Showcase
The history of men at work goes something like this: hunter, slave, serf, yeoman, line worker — and then what? Salesman? HR rep? In this post-factory, post-farmer, take-your-wife-to-work-at-the-mayor’s-office America, few jobs prize the rough-handed toil required of men throughout the millennia. When you fly to Bentonville for that Wal-Mart interview, fuck-or-kill instincts better be the last thing you brag about.
But fuck or kill still drives us. Listen to the Nixon tapes, the Enron pirates or David Mamet’s real-estate shills. When we hear career men speaking privately, obsessing over power and powerlessness, we hear talk that’s steeped in the metaphors of conquest.
The performers in the pained and exhilarating Glengarry Glen Ross at the Kansas City Actors Theatre seem as liberated as their characters seem trapped. They play desperate salesmen, whom actors understand: Their livelihood depends upon a potency of self.
As the characters bitch and claw at a world that has changed, the actors get to work bellicose variations on fuck you that actually mean something. Scott Cordes, as an unscrupulous salesman, works over an easy mark played by Phil Fiorini, and our sympathies get torn ragged: Having been shaken down by time-share closers and tire-store pricks, we feel for the customer. Yet we’ve also seen Mark Robbins, in the sharply edited video that opens the show, give these salesmen a reaming for the ages, so we appreciate what the sneaky bastard is up to. And holy shit, Cordes is good here. He’s pushy and needy but persuasive — it’s not hard to imagine buying what his salesman is pushing.
Late in the second act, Cordes dresses down Brian Paulette with a fury that’s part Shakespearean and part WWE. Paulette, as the manager of a real-estate office, plays a man who neither fucks nor kills yet commands the destiny of those who do. This manager’s ignorance has cost his salesman a deal, and the salesman unleashes hell upon him. Cordes rages wonderfully, and Paulette’s manager takes it, silent, unmanned, trying to hide how he’s boiling inside. His face betrays him, and we boil, too.
Dominating the show is Victor Raider-Wexler as Shelley Levene, a once-cocksure salesman on a losing streak. Blessed with a sour croak of a voice, Raider-Wexler lifts this sad sack’s wheedling into a desperate poetry. Shelley brags that he can still sell like he did when he was young and vital, though we know otherwise — Shelley can’t sell us, but Raider-Wexler does. A recent arrival in Kansas City, Raider-Wexler is making his first appearance on a local stage. It’s also the only production of 2009 for the Actors Theatre. We could use more of both.
Women get to work, too, in the six short plays in this year’s Actors’ Equity Showcase. But because the mostly local authors are all men, the women’s career options range from oldest profession to first woman. The latter honor falls to Noelia Rothery as a spitfire Eve in Ron Simonian’s How Does Your Garden Grow? Simonian’s comic sketch imagines Eden as just another project from God’s corporate headquarters. After the fall, project manager Eddie (played with amusing exasperation by Matt Rapport) lays out the miseries that Eve will suffer outside the garden: menstruation, excruciating childbirth, always wondering if she’s fat. Eve asks what she gets out of this, and Eddie responds, “You get to keep the vagina.” This satisfies her.
In other plays, Laurie Hamilton, Kathleen Warfel and Heidi Van offer strong work as troubled women. Hamilton mines dark truth from a narrative that, as written, is tough to believe. In another, Warfel plays an Alzheimer’s patient baffled by the contents of her own refrigerator. (The piece, a stream-of-conscious monologue, is no easy sit, but Warfel glows throughout.) Van has scored the most interesting role, partly because she’s a blonde: In Frank Higgins’ Blondes, she plays a U.S. soldier suspected of prostituting herself while deployed. The truth turns out to be stranger and perhaps even sadder. Director Ernest Le Roy guides Van and Antoine Williams into the Showcase’s richest human moment — two soldiers, charged with lust, grope and goad each other into reckless pleasure.
Too often at this year’s Showcase, the actors achieve excellence in spite of the writing. James Wright has a riotous turn as a vulgarian Hollywood exec bastardizing a playwright’s work. He wants the lovers in the script to shoot each other at the end, and then he wants them nude, and then he wants them to be Asian gangster lesbians. I laughed plenty, even though the satire made no sense: A studio suit demands that a film romance be less conventional? That’s as likely as this review being an unqualified rave.
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