John Aylward on Glengarry Glen Ross
By Ian Chant |
Actor John Aylward as Shelly Levene. Photo by Derek Sparks. |
In the world of live theatre, ‘take two’ is not something performers get very often.
But when John Aylward takes the stage as Shelly Levene in David Mamet’s
Glengarry
Glen Ross at Seattle Rep this February, he’ll be revisiting a role he first
played more than two decades ago. We took advantage of Aylward’s unique perspective on
the play and sat down with him to talk about the opportunity to take on the same
character twice, what draws him to Mamet’s work, and why now is the right time to
bring
Glengarry Glen Ross back to the stage.
What drew you to your role in Glengarry Glen Ross?
What really drew me to Mamet is I did a production of American Buffalo in
the late ’70s. It toured some places where American Buffalo wasn’t received too well,
but the production was great, and I fell in love with Mamet. I saw the original Broadway
production of Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984 and I said to myself ‘I’ve got to play
that part.’ And I did, and now we’re doing it again.
I’m familiar with most of his plays, and I’ve seen most of them. I always thought he
was working up to a great play, much like Sam Shepard before he did things like The
Tooth of Crime and Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class.
Shepard was a very prolific guy, and Mamet is too, but he was fine tuning. For my money,
American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross are two of the greatest plays
of the last 50 or 60 years. He really changed the landscape of playwriting. He takes all
of the swearing that goes on in Glengarry...and turns it into a sort of urban
poetry. The music that Mamet writes...he’s a very disciplined playwright, and if you
follow his rules and play his music, you’re on the right track. He writes pauses that
mean something. You have to follow the rules, otherwise you’re going to be swimming
against a very strong current. But if you go with the flow and play the music, all you
have to do is have your chops down and you’re home free.
Why is now the time for audiences to get reacquainted with Glengarry Glen Ross?
I originally thought the language wasn’t going to have the same impact, because we’ve
become inured to the “F” word. When Mamet first wrote it, Glengarry was rather jaw dropping.
You came out of the theater feeling assaulted with this honesty and brutal language. It
was couched in this poetic way where it had this flow to it, but it was shocking. I don’t
think the language will be as shocking today. I think there are underpinnings that are even
more revealing about why it is considered a classic. It really takes on the very shaky
foundation for our system of capitalism and how people made their money and built this
country. A lot of it was based on fraud, and this play is an awful lot about fraud, and
scamming people, a very ‘Me First,’ greed, greed, greed mentality... Everyone was trying to
sell you something, everyone was robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the house came tumbling down
not too long ago because we got caught. And I think people will see this play and go “Oh, I
get it. I see what happened.” I think it works on a level not only as a classic play but as
a clue as to how we got where we are now.
