Glengarry Glen Ross

Imagine that you are working on a contemporary production of the play. In what ways do you think the play is relevant to today’s audiences? What parts do you think haven’t aged well? What knowledge do you think audiences need to understand the play, and how might you educate them?

What is the significance of masculinity and gender in the play? How do women function within the world of the play, and how does their absence affect the way relationships form between men?

Choose one central character and analyze how economic circumstances limit his choices and inform both his self-image and his interactions with others.

Read Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. Compare and contrast the two plays. How do both plays depict salesmen similarly and differently? Consider the paths of Willy Loman and Shelly Levene, and how David Mamet reshapes the path of the failing salesman’s downfall.

In the late sixties, Mamet worked in a real estate office as the office manager, the role filled by Williamson in the play. Write an essay in which you explain Williamson’s role as an intermediary between the sales team and the company’s owners. Why is he the target of so many insults from the salesmen who work under him?

Imagine that you are writing a new version of Glengarry Glen Ross in which all of the central characters are women. What new themes might arise? What new consideration would you have to take into account?

Roma quotes “Always be closing” (72) as a sales mantra that is familiar to the other men. In its original context, the mantra refers to a sales strategy. How does the attitude it describes bleed into the salesmen’s personal lives?

More than any other character in the play, Roma embodies the ethos of “always be closing.” Are there moments of sincerity in the midst of his bravado and manipulation? What do these moments reveal?