David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross

While some of the perverse language in this play seemed unnecessary, I found the context of this poem to be very realistic. All of the real estate men involved (Williamson, Baylen, Roma, Lingk, Levene, Moss, and Aaronow) let the stress of their circumstance cause them to make selfish and dirty decisions. I wonder why Mamet provided the two age ranges of the characters. Did the characters in their forties respond differently to the stressful situation than those in their fifties? Two of the characters in their fifties played important roles in robbing the real estate agency. They took a more drastic approach to keeping their jobs than the men in their forties. Maybe the men’s ages have little to no significance. I guess that facet of the play is left up to the reader. The ending to the play was fairly predictable and unfortunate. Poor Levene, the one trying the hardest to redeem himself within the agency, happens to know a bit too much about the missing files and is immediately placed in prison. I wonder why Levene didn’t put up more of a struggle upon being falsely accused. Naturally, the ones who actually committed the crime did nothing to stop Levene’s wrongful arrest. While the themes of selfishness and stress are evident within Mamet’s work, I did not come away from his play with a moral or any type of closure. Perhaps, he simply wanted to illustrate the possible effects of stress in the workforce. Overall, I enjoyed reading the said poem, because it stood out from the other works that we read this semester. Mamet definitely possesses a unique writing style. His confusing dialogue correlates greatly with the human thought-process. People rarely think in complete and fully coherent sentences. Mamet seems to represent this complicated way of thinking in his character’s conversations.