GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
Pointe Theatre Company at Big Game Theatre
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But Mamet is not by any stretch of the imagination just the American Pinter. He is, like all good writers, the sum of his influences–and then some. Nor is he just the Arthur Miller of the 80s, or just the American Chekhov, or just the Hemingway of the theater.
As Mamet’s best work (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross) shows, Mamet is his own man. No other American writer has such an acute sense of how sloppy language has become in this postliterate age, as the pressure and pace of life force everyone to think faster and communicate more quickly than words allow. Sentences go half finished as new ones are started and syntax goes to hell as new thoughts crowd out the old ones until meaning spills out more awkwardly than anyone could ever have intended. (“The whole fuckin’ thing . . . The pressure’s just too great. You’re ab– . . . you’re abso- lu– . . . they’re too important. All of them. You go in the door. I . . .”)
Considerably less impressive was Chicago Performance Radio Network’s production of eight monologues by CPRN member Kate McClanaghan, performed in the upstairs bar at the Red Lion Pub.
The two Brits in the cast–Aistrope and Kirk–do considerably better with their material, such as it is, although only Kirk’s monologue about an illegal alien from Britain living in Chicago is worthy of a second listen.
