Photo by Scott Landis

Pity poor Shelley Levene, the has-been real estate salesman central to Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the corrosive nature of capitalism. Not only is pathetic Shelley, brought down to his knees from desperation, not too proud to beg his boss John Williamson for some more promising clients. But as portrayed by, improbably enough, Al Pacino, this shrinking violet Shelley isn’t even granted the dignity of a performer who can completely sell Mamet’s purple prose.

You’ll be forgiven for thinking the above is a misprint. Pacino has already appeared once, onscreen, in James Foley’s hyper-kinetic film adaptation of the Mamet play, released exactly two decades ago, in the powder keg part of slick salesman Ricky Roma. It’s one of the legend’s main mid-career film triumphs. Now, in a game of Broadway musical chairs (a game that can also be called “Hey! I Want A Tony!”), Bobby Cannavale has stepped into the Roma role that already earned Joe Mantegna and Liev Schreiber Tonys for their Main Stem at-bats, while Pacino moves into the Leven roles (previously played on Broadway by Robert Prosky and Alan Alda and in the Foley film by Jack Lemmon), re-teaming with director Daniel Sullivan after their awesome revival of The Merchant of Venice.

And yet despite more than six weeks of rehearsal prior to Saturday night’s opening, Pacino doesn’t seem to have found his groove as Levene, and Sullivan’s production loses its balance. Mamet’s play, awkwardly bisected into a first act that finds each of these 1983 Chicago salesmen at a local Chinese restaurant plotting for their survival in their own way and a second act in which the gang arrives at their North Side office following a burglary, offers a layered look at Levene, who must deceive himself, Willy Loman-style, into thinking he has momentarily lost his mojo only to eventually face his dire straits. From the outset in Sullivan’s production, looking convincingly dilapidated and of its period thanks to Eugene Lee, Pacino’s conciliatory delivery admits defeat. There’s no tragic fall in store for a character if we meet him at rock bottom.

Pacino bounces back a bit better in Glengarry’s second act, despite a few line stumbles, but Sullivan’s staging drains the show of its dog-eat-dog danger. If the first act feels slim, the tenser second act is robbed of nuance. Additionally, neither Pacino nor Cannavale mine Mamet’s staccato dialogue for their full dramatic effect. There is more cackle than crackle to their delivery. Impressively, Cannavale instills a consistent sense of respect in Roma for the veteran but floundering Levene, yet he is too transparently sly to be truly seductive; anyone, even duped client James Lingk (an outstanding Jeremy Shamos, as usual) could see his sleaze a mile away.

The rest of Sullivan’s cast acquits themselves far more convincingly. John C. McGinley, as gruff Dave Moss, digs into Mamet’s dialogue with the cutting delivery of a rap artist, and Richard Schiff delivers a thoughtfully tuned Broadway debut as the nebbish George Aaronow; Murphy Guyer is convincing in the minor role of investigative detective Baylen. It is David Harbour, though, who proves to be the MVP of this team as the exasperated Williamson, face flushed with the frustration of middle management. But these parts don’t all add up to a convincing enough whole. What should be a riveting look at sly foxes dancing as fast as they can only amounts to a lazy foxtrot.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street. www.glengarrybroadway.com Through Jan. 20.

La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and its founder, the marvelous, mercurial Ellen Stewart—well, if you know them, they need no introduction. It’s like saying “Thomas Edison” and “electricity.” But if you don’t, here are the Cliff’s Notes.

Stewart was a hopeful African-American fashion design student who came from Chicago to New York City in the early ’60s to follow her dreams. Upon arrival she found she had no scholarship and found a job as a porter at Saks Fifth Avenue to make ends meet. On weekends she would go to Orchard Street and buy snippets of fabric to made incredible concoctions, which she wore under her blue smock as she wheeled carts around Saks.

One day, on her way to lunch wearing a “Miss Ellen Creation” a shopper stopped her to inquire where she had bought the dress. When told it was her own design, the shopper, incensed at Stewart’s uppity-ness, took her to management. Management saw the diamond in the rough and gave her a line of dresses called, you got it, Miss Ellen.

A joyous Stewart in the 1970s.

Stewart had friends writing plays—her stepbrother among them—and attempting to make it in the theater. To help them out, exactly 50 years ago this week, Stewart had the prescience to rent a small space on Second Avenue and begin the La MaMa Theater. Any time Stewart attended a performance, she would ring a tinkling bell and croon in a voice tinged with Creole honey, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theater.” Last year alone the space saw 60 different showings of dance, theater, music, multimedia and everything in between from Downtown and around the world.

Stewart died this January past the age of 90, and there have been many obits, tributes and dedications to her, but none were as personal, uproarious and full of wonder as last night in the theater she called the Annex, now dubbed the Ellen Stewart Theater on her beloved East Fourth Street. Mayor Michael Bloomberg even lionized Stewart and renamed the block Ellen Stewart Way, promising million of dollars to help renovate the wonderful old theater. Actors Bill Irwin, Harvey Keitel, Diane Lane and Estelle Parsons were there. Parsons said, “Where would the bright lights of the theater be without her? Performers, musicians, composers, everything—there’s no place like it on earth.”

La MaMa spawned hybrid performance before anyone had thought of it. Stewart combined poets, choreographers, writers, musicians, composers and visual artists and let them all find their way to create boundary-breaking art. Composers Philip Glass, Meredith Monk and Elizabeth Swados all got their start at La MaMa, and last night Swados premiered her new La MaMa Cantata, which will bow in its entirety Nov. 7, Stewart’s birthday.

Wallace Shawn performed an excerpt of his Hotel Play and Amiri Baraka, whose early work as Leroy Jones was seen on La MaMa’s tiny stages, read a poem. He later told me, “Ellen was a very courageous pioneer in the wilderness of crazy, white America.”

The Annex was filled with tables and revelers kept switching chairs and wandering during performance breaks to visit those Stewart would have called her babies. One long-time La MaMa baby, director Paul Zimet of the Talking Band, told me, “I am seeing people I haven’t seen in years—the creative output of all of us in this room is so extra ordinary.” As he said this, director Ping Chong stopped by, followed by Dario D’Ambrosi, who had flown in from Italy. D’ambrosi began his career with Stewart in 1979 on a chance meeting.

One of the purposes of the evening, other than honoring Stewart and raising funds, was to award the first Ellen Stewart Theater award. Honoree Sam Shepard could not be there. His agent, Judy Boles explained, “Sam had to be on a film set unexpectedly in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Sam doesn’t fly so it takes time, but he sent this video.” In the video, the perennially handsome over-60-year-old declared his affection for Stewart. “I was told there was this woman with a theater Downtown and I had a script and I took it to her. She was gorgeous and she took the script and my hand and said, ‘Baby, we are going to do your play.’ She never read it and yes, we did it and many more.”

Stewart was famous for her instincts about people and projects. The story Shepard told is no different than any of the thousands told by others or witnessed by me during my tenure as the theater’s executive director during the ’80s and ’90s. Stewart would hold court for writers or directors to come to her, when she would let her “beeps”—what she called her instincts—go off. She said, “Baby, if it beeps to me, MaMa will do it. If it doesn’t, well then, no.”

Stewart’s beeps launched the careers of Peter Brook, Andrei Serban, Robert Wilson, Paul Foster, Jean Claude Van Italie, Lanford Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy, Wilford Leach, John Kelly, Al Pacino, Bette Midler, Joe Chaikin, Harvey Fierstein, Robert De Niro. As the seasons, unfold there will be more new stars in the La MaMa firmament—just wait and watch.

Top Photo: The late Ellen Stewart, founded of LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club. Photos courtesy of LaMama Experimental Theater Club.

By Deirdre Donovan

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has meant very different things at very different times. It began its stage life with a comic Shylock in a false nose and evolved through the centuries into a drama of great pathos. But whether you see this play as a comedy or tragedy, Daniel Sullivan’s staging at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, starring Al Pacino as Shylock, is incisive and arresting.

Lily Rabe, Byron Jennings and Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice.

Pacino’s Shylock holds the attention. Without forcing a syllable or gesture, Pacino constantly makes a point. He is incredibly interesting to watch, and plays his character as a small-minded patriarch who prides himself on his money lending on the Venetian Rialto. There are emotionally searing moments: for example, his character’s best-known speech of “Hath not a Jew eyes?” reminds you again that the spiteful Shylock is not without human feeling. Other contemporary productions have stressed this conceit but Pacino, with his gritty New York voice, pulls it off with fresh gravitas.

Fortunately, the rest of the cast is not eclipsed by Pacino. While the star undoubtedly has mega-wattage on the boards, there are a number of other actors who deliver big-time. There’s Lily Rabe, as Portia, who turns in an especially luminous performance. Playing opposite Rabe is the protean Hamish Linklater as Bassanio, who evolves from a mere fortune-hunter to Portia’s true-love during the evening. Byron Jennings, as the nominal character, is suitably urbane.

To be sure, the real protagonist of this story is money. And it eventually taints everybody who lends, borrows, steals, uses or enjoys its luxuries. Venice is a city of commerce, after all, and even the Christians know that money is the vital ingredient of their workaday world.

This production takes a few liberties with Shakespeares’ text: Sullivan has inserted a scene that has Shylock baptized in full view of the audience. This invented stage business vividly underscores one of the sticking points of the story: The Christian morality in Venice is often cruel and punitive.

If The Merchant of Venice is a deeply disturbing play with dark energies, then The Winter’s Tale is awash with enchantment. Although the drama opens like a tragedy, Shakespeare’s genius turns the plot inside-out before the final scene arrives.

The story, in many ways, resembles a fairytale. Polixenes, King of Bohemia, visits his old friend Leontes, King of Sicilia. Polixenes is so charming to his wife Hermione that Leontes believes that they are lovers and he has fathered her unborn child. I would be a spoiler to recount all the intricacies of the story here, but suffice it to say that Leontes’s mad jealousy causes a number of tragic events.

The problem with this production is that Ruben Santiago-Hudson is miscast in the leading role. Merely adequate in the part, Santiago-Hudson doesn’t add any fresh nuances to his character. Curiously, the star turn in this production belongs to Marianne Jean-Baptiste, playing the feisty Paulina. This show, directed by Michael Greif, also has the daunting task of playing in repertory with Merchant. Repertory theater has many virtues, but it has one unavoidable drawback: one production typically outshines the other.

Still, you can’t go wrong with this show. Certain plays repay repeated seeing, and The Winter’s Tale is one of them.

Instead of thinking in the “hit and flop” mentality of Broadway, you should go to both Delacorte offerings this summer to enjoy their Shakespearean resonances and to watch the actors perform in contrasting roles. In Merchant, you have a rare opportunity to watch the legendary Pacino on the boards; and in The Winter’s Tale, you can reflect on the wonder of “second chances” in life.

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Shakespeare in the Park
Performances continue through Aug. 1.
Tickets to both shows are free.
For additional information, visit www.shakespeareinthepark.org or call 212-539-8750.

“Is this the one with Al Pacino?”

That was the question du jour directed to those of us waiting on line to see Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare in the Park. Confirmation was needed because the play alternates nights with the Pacino-free A Winter’s Tale.

The snake of free-theater lovers stretched way past the commonly referenced “big rock.” For those of you new to NYC, that means the line was really, really long.

A yearly ritual for my husband and myself for the past 25 years, Operation Delacorte was usually something I did alone—procuring only two tickets for our date night. Last year though, I brought my teenage son (who swore he’d never again participate) so that the whole family could attend. This year, my 12-year-old daughter, Meg, joined me, enthusiastically I might add—waiting six hours to get four tickets.

I must admit, I really didn’t think Meg knew what she was getting herself into when she proclaimed, “I want to sit for Shakespeare,” and feared that after an hour we’d be packing up the towel, sand chair and oversized bag full of books, writing assignments, a PSP as well as DS and newspapers to trek home across The Great Lawn.

But no, the girl who has ants in her pants stuck it out. Since she wants to be an actress, I suspect she felt it was all part of the dues-paying process.

Right now, thespian is one of those “when I grow up…” pipe dreams, like being a princess, cowboy or astronaut. But if she keeps taking her drama classes after school, and attending theatre camp, it may turn into a serious career goal, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

The life of an actor is hard; a New York actor even harder, since so much production is done in Los Angeles. And with the demise of Law & Order—the show that kept many New York actors working—there will be even fewer opportunities.

She has had school teachers, gymnastic coaches, camp counselors and even acting teachers who are still anxiously awaiting their big break. I’ve also met many mothers through my children’s schools and sports teams who moved here long ago from various parts of the country “to be an actress.” Even though they have found success at their Plan B jobs, and speak of the unfulfilled dream with acceptance, their voices reveal a twinge of lingering disappointment. (Like actors, writers live with rejection as part of the game. I, too, can speak with pain about many an editor’s “I’ll pass.”)

I, like any mother, don’t want to hear that dejection in my child’s voice.

Until, if and when Meg changes her mind and chooses a new career path, I’m trying to find a way to think positively about a business where I have no connections in which to help her.

Watching Pacino as Shylock gave me some hope. Like me, he grew up in the Bronx. I once heard him speak about how his neighborhood, as well as his lack of interest in schoolwork, was the steppingstone to joining a gang.

A teacher suggested he try acting, and the student listened. Despite his humble beginnings, Pacino’s determination, hard work and talent have made him a star.

With someone like that as inspiration, maybe someday all of New York will be out en masse—way past the big rock—to see Meg star in Shakespeare in the Park. I just hope she doesn’t make me wait on line. n

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Lorraine Duffy Merkl’s debut novel, Fat Chick, from The Vineyard Press, is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.