The ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ revival has us wondering — where are all the Jewish Shelley Levenes?
Bob Odenkirk will play Shelley Levene on Broadway, like many other non-Jewish talents. Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar August 8, 2024
When it comes to the new Broadway cast of Glengarry Glen Ross, the leads are anything but weak.
Kieran Culkin will play the smooth-tongued Ricky Roma, Bill Burr the scheming Dave Moss, and Bob Odenkirk, continuing a long tradition, will be a non-Jewish actor in the role of the obviously Jewish Shelley Levene.
It’s something of a curiosity that David Mamet’s breakout play, about desperate real estate salesmen with an almost iambic talent for profanity, has largely eschewed Jewish actors for a character whose name is so Jewish it seems destined to endow a chair in Hebraic Studies.
Originating the part of Levene on the West End in 1983 was a fellow named Derek Newark, who, while having a name that recalls a traditionally Jewish enclave in New Jersey, seems to have been a gentile.
How about stateside, in Mamet’s native Chicago and then on Broadway in 1984? Robert Prosky (born Robert Joseph Porzuczek) played Levene. Prosky doesn’t seem to have been Jewish, but Peter Falk, who took his place in 1985 when the show went on tour, was. Falk, best known for playing Columbo and his collaborations with John Cassavettes, was an exception for major commercial theaters in the U.S. and U.K.
In 1992, when the film made the jump to the big screen, it was a twitchy Jack Lemmon who was eviscerated by a smooth-talking Alec Baldwin preaching the ABCs of closing. (This performance directly inspired the sweaty striver Gil Gunderson on The Simpsons, voiced by the non-Jewish Dan Castellanetta.)
In 2000, Charles Durning was the one in the Chinese restaurant, requesting the Glengarry leads in a regional production in Princeton, New Jersey. Other notables to play Levene include Alan Alda, Al Pacino (he was Roma in the film) and on the West End with Jonathan Pryce (he played Lingk in the ‘92 movie) and Dublin-born Stanley Townsend.
What does it mean that Levene, the pitiable shlimazl of Mamet’s drama is so often played by a gentile, even as the character of Aaronow, perhaps even more pathetic, has been embodied by great Jewish thespians like Richard Schiff, Alan Arkin, Jeffrey Tambor and Mike Nussbaum?
Ultimately, not much. It’s not as if Shelley Levene is the Baal Shem Tov. There’s no real cultural awareness one must bring to the part beyond an ear for Mamet’s rhythms and a high tolerance for yelling.
Odenkirk, who played an Irish Illinoisian posing as a Jew for 10 seasons of television, is perfectly suited to play “the Machine” Levene, a man whose efforts to succeed likewise reach desperate, extralegal extremes.
Jew and gentile alike know what it feels like to be a loser, to need money, to have a long run of bad luck. Those experiences, like cursing, make for a universal language.
A man is his job, and Odenkirk will do his. The show is set to open in the spring of 2025, and will, no doubt, be closing (always) sometime later that year.
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