Recent Stories with tag david mamet

Russell Hodgkinson and Charles Leggett. Photo by Chris Bennion.

"First prize is a Cadillac. Second prize is steak knives. Third prize? You're fired." That iconic line from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the most easily recalled by those of us who've seen the all-star film version. This line is completely absent from the play, of course, as it belongs to Blake, a character written into the film by Mamet for Alec Baldwin. For those who've only seen the film, it is at first difficult to imagine it without Baldwin's character. Blake is a brusque, dominating figure whose jarring speech to the salesmen at the beginning of the film startles first-time viewers into understanding they're in for something a little different.

Happily, my little worry about no Blake was for naught. Moments after the curtain is drawn, Blake never existed.

For the uninitiated, Glengarry Glen Ross (Seattle Repertory Theatre; runs through the 28th; tickets $15-$59) is the story of four inglorious Chicago real estate agents driven to desperate acts in an attempt to keep their jobs.

As the audience moves about, finding their seats or standing in the aisle chatting, the curtain is wide open, an impressive set visible to all. It's a slightly run-down office mere feet from the El train. File cabinets, cardboard boxes, and four nondescript desks make up the main floor, and metal stairs lead up to a private office where a man in a necktie and suspenders pokes around, sifting through papers and smoking a cigarette. He's a mere curiosity at first, until the house lights begin to slowly come down and people rush to take their seats. Our man walks down the stairs, casually flipping lights off as he moves through the office. The audience finally becomes silent. He dons his jacket and puffs on his cigarette a few more times before opening the front door, hitting the final light switch, and walking out of sight. And with the thud of the door closing behind him, the theatre goes black. ... (more)

Russell Hodgkinson, John Aylward, MJ Sieber, R. Hamilton Wright, Charles Leggett, the cast of Seattle Rep's "Glengarry Glen Ross." Photo by Derek Sparks

Six and a half feet tall, with long hair, rough-hewn features, and a penchant for black leather jackets, Wilson Milam manages at once to stand out and to disappear in plain sight. Have him pointed out to you in a crowd and you can't help but notice him towering over the rest; pass him on the street and you probably wouldn't look up. It's an effect that's well suited to his personality: friendly but somewhat taciturn, in an interview he would sometimes stop mid-sentence to ponder something, an odd flicker of a happy memory crossing his face, only to ultimately defer the question.

Milam's also one of the most successful theatre directors you've likely never heard of, and certainly one of the most successful theatre artists to emerge from Seattle in last few decades. His career began in collaboration with playwright and actor Tracy Letts in Chicago in the early Nineties, with Milam directing Letts' first two plays, years before the he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. From Chicago, Milam made his way to London where he's been based for more than a decade, making a name for himself as a director of new plays, perhaps most notoriously with the premiere Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a darkly comic bloodbath of infamous proportions that's being staged at ACT Theatre in October.

Last year, Milam made his Seattle debut as a director with a widely praised production of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer at the Rep (itself a bit of bloodbath of booze), and now, he's returned to direct one of the plays that's been a life-long dream of his: Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's 1982 masterpiece about an office of desperate real estate salesman, starring a who's who cast of Seattle's best actors, including R. Hamilton Wright, MJ Sieber, and Charles Leggett. The show opens tonight, Feb. 10, and runs through the 28th; tickets $15-$59.

I met with Milam a couple weeks ago to discuss the play and his career over coffee at Caffe Zingaro in Lower Queen Anne, near the theatre. Asked what part of town he grew up in, he chuckled and responded: "Bellevue. Back when QFC was still a pasture land, and there was no bridge. I still say the 'new' bridge."... (more)

David Mamet's "Edmond" at the Balagan Theatre, directed by Paul Budraitis. Photo by Andrea Huysing.

"I wound up in Seattle because I was going to Indiana University, and I was about to graduate so I was looking into my options," Paul Budraitis said. "I was pretty much set on going to Chicago, and then a few things happened that kind of made me reconsider. And I wound up talking to somebody that was heading to Seattle, a grad student, and she sort of sold me on the place, saying at least it was worth checking out."

About a week before the opening of David Mamet's Edmond at the Balagan (through Feb. 6, tickets $12-$15), which Budraitis directed, he and I met up at Caffe Vita to chat about his history and work. Tall and solidly built, Budraitis has a calm voice but gives off a vibe of quiet intensity that was only heightened by his deferral to wait in line to get a coffee for himself, mysteriously offering only that it did "something" to him and it was probably better that he didn't have any before heading to rehearsal. This all left me imagining him a pent-up ball of over-caffeinated aggression, à la Henry Rollins, though that owes as much to a video I once saw of his solo performance as anything to do with the man himself.

Budraitis, whose family emigrated from Lithuania, moved to Seattle in 1995 and spent the next five years working in fringe theatre. His time at Annex Theatre was particularly formative, because it was where he first learned Vsevolod Meyehold's biomechanics method, which continues to inform his theatrical approach. But in 2000, he left to go to grad school in Lithuania, where he trained under the legendary director Jonas Vaitkus, who, along with Oskaras Koršunovas and Eimuntas Nekrošius, helped put Lithuania on the global theatrical map with a radical aesthetic approach developed in the crucible of Cold War repression.... (more)

Ali el-Gasseir, Sam Hagen, and Ryan Fields in Balagan Theatre's production of David Mamet's Edmond (Photo: Andrea Huysing)

"An everyman descends into the maelstrom of big city degradation," says one synopsis of David Mamet's 1982 play Edmond, later turned into a 2006 movie starring William Macy.

The director of Balagan Theatre's production (Thursday-Saturdays, through February 6; tickets: $12-$15), Paul Budraitis, downplays the element of biography--it was Mamet's first big play after moving to New York from Chicago, which was apparently an unpleasant shock: "It's a society that's lost its flywheel, and it's spinning itself apart," Mamet said in a 1982 interview. "That's my vision of New York. It's a kind of vision of hell."

Instead, Budraitis focuses on how the pressures of change can separate us from each other. "Edmond walks his lonely path so we don't have to," he writes in his director's notes. Mamet himself called Edmond, "a myth about modern life," "a play about an unintegrated personality," and "a play about someone searching for the truth, for God, for release."

It's also simply flawed, a stressed-out explosion of misanthropy and rage that a youthful Mamet tried to repackage in context of life's bigger questions. It's grotesque, violent, and profane...and, at Balagan, purely theatrical. It's a beautifully formal achievement, an intricate villanelle on bigotry, lust, and madness.

There, that description should help you decide if Edmond is in your future.
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