42 pages • 1 hour read
David MametGlengarry Glen Ross
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Contest
In the first half of the 1980s, the real estate market crashed, setting the scene for salesmen in the play to grow increasingly desperate with fewer and fewer closings. Mitch and Murray, who don’t want to take a financial hit as a result of the current recession, introduce the contest that looms over all the characters throughout the play. The first-place winner gets a Cadillac, and the second-place winner gets to keep his job. This means that the bottom two salesmen win pink slips. The board with their current placements in the contest isn’t mentioned in the stage directions—unsurprising, since David Mamet’s stage directions are deliberately sparse—so it may or may not be posted on the wall, but regardless, its significance is ever-present, and it drives the action of the play forward. Levene complains to Williamson that the prize for selling used to be money, and the commission was enough to motivate them to work hard and close. But although a Cadillac would be a status symbol for the winner, and driving it would undoubtedly impress potential customers and help sales, the car isn’t the real incentive. Being fired isn’t simply a matter of lost income, as demonstrated by Levene’s empty wallet in Act I. It’s about losing the identity of “salesman,” which is at the core of how they define and present themselves.
Moss opines to Aaronow that Mitch and Murray ought to be building up their sales staff rather than tearing them apart, but the two conspicuously absent men are only interested in wringing as much money as possible out of the salesmen’s efforts, and they have no qualms about discarding men like Levene, who has a long history of loyalty to the firm, and replacing them with new blood. They motivate their employees through competition and fear, and the competitive, individualistic culture that develops in the office serves as a microcosm of capitalism itself.
All this is doubly tragic, as there’s no indication that the salesmen needed anything more than their commission to motivate them to sell as much and as often as possible. The contest has made them desperate enough to do unethical and even illegal things. Levene attempts to bribe Williamson, only failing when he can’t produce the money on the spot. Moss plans the robbery and ropes Levene in as his accomplice, plotting to abscond with the leads and get jobs with Jerry Graff before their employment records can be tainted with termination for low sales. And their sales tactics are highly unethical, as they force and trick customers into buying, which may net some sales in the short term but will only ruin the firm’s reputation. The stress of the contest is causing the salesmen to detonate, even affecting Roma, whose position as the top salesman is all but assured.
Leads
Leads—names and contact information for potential clients—are the play’s primary currency, even more fundamental to the salesmen’s existence than money. The firm buys lists of leads for Williamson to distribute and the salesmen to follow up on, and the salesmen are constantly clamoring for better leads. As Williamson reminds Levene in the first scene, he can only follow the orders of Mitch and Murray as to how he distributes the leads; the salesmen are aggressive toward Williamson and territorial over the leads they think they are owed. Some leads are known to be much better than other, often older leads, and the prime leads are given to the salesmen at the top of the board. This creates a rat race in which the salesmen are pitted against each other as earning becomes a zero-sum game. The top leads take on exaggerated significance to the salesmen, as if they are guaranteed to pay out rather than simply abstract potential. After the office is robbed, Roma comes in frantic about whether the leads were stolen as if he’s worried about family heirlooms. The ill-advised decision to rob the office, only walking away with leads that are worth about a dollar apiece, further illustrates the outsized value the salesmen place on the leads. Moss tries to sell Aaronow on Jerry Graff, who struck out on his own by buying a list of nurses to use as leads, reasoning that they are an untapped market with steady income and—he hopes—a desire to buy real estate, but Aaronow comments that he has heard Graff has been struggling. Although Moss argues otherwise, it raises the question as to why Graff would want to get involved in a robbery just to obtain leads that may or may not lead to actual sales. The salesmen’s universal belief in the power of “primo” leads suggests a kind of superstition—one engendered by the intensely competitive, chancy, and precarious nature of their work.
Since Williamson is the gatekeeper of the leads, even though he is only following the protocol he’s been given, he serves as the scapegoat to absorb the men’s anger and frustration. The competition between the salesmen and their hatred and blame of Williamson function as distractions from the inequities and shortcomings of the firm itself. If the salesmen operate on leads, the firm’s responsibility is to provide them with enough sellable leads to make a living wage. Yet, when Levene tries to bribe Williamson for the top leads, it turns out that he doesn’t even have enough money to pay for his dinner. They are also held responsible for the leads they’re given, blamed not only for failing to close, but also for sales in which the check doesn’t clear or the client’s messy divorce gets in the way. The salesmen talk about streaks of good or bad luck as the reason for their current run of sales or non-sales, but superstition aside, even the most promising potential clients may become unsellable for an endless number of reasons that are outside of the salesman’s control. Moss claims that Mitch and Murray have “killed the goose” (30) by demanding that they sell at a high level within the timeline of the sales contest, but Moss is more aptly killing the golden goose by stealing the leads, which are worth a dollar each to Jerry Graff but any one of which might earn him far more if it’s assigned to him.
The Chinese Restaurant
The entire first act takes place in a Chinese restaurant, which is presumably close to the firm’s office and operates as the sales team’s go-to spot outside of work. Nothing is said in the stage directions or dialogue about the restaurant itself or the quality of the food they serve, but directors have often staged it as a run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant, drab and unimpressive. The restaurant is a liminal space between work and home, in which the men are still salesmen but unbound by the office’s expectations of propriety (or legality). It’s notable that their place is a restaurant rather than a bar, suggesting that they don’t go there to unwind and relax. They can get together to complain and commiserate to each other as fellow salesmen without revealing their private selves. The restaurant is an extension of the office, which means that it isn’t a place where they can let their guards down with each other. But it is the place that they seek out after a frustrating day when they want to vent and talk shop in profanity-and jargon-filled Mametspeak to others who fully understand their grievances. Yet they are still selling and closing with each other, which means that they still have to remain on their toes.
In the first two scenes of the first act, the restaurant serves as a meeting place to discuss illicit propositions. First, Levene, who is lagging in sales, offers Williamson a bribe in exchange for some of the top leads, which are supposed to go to the top salesmen. Considering the way the salesmen treat Williamson, it seems unlikely that they make a habit of eating with him, which suggests that Levene has asked Williamson to lunch for the sole purpose of bribing him, something he couldn’t do in the office. But the cast of characters is the same in both places. Only the location changes, implying that there is a code of ethics in the office that is more malleable at the restaurant. In the second scene, Aaronow makes the mistake of thinking that he is having a friendly lunch with a colleague, only to be unpleasantly surprised when Moss tries to extort him into committing a crime. Aaronow doesn’t seem to realize that his colleagues are his competition, which makes them his enemies, which makes him appear to be an easy mark until it becomes clear that he didn’t agree to the robbery. In the third scene, Roma is also perpetually a salesman, but he’s at the top, so instead of complaining, he sells. In the second act, however, he leaves to go to the restaurant to wait for Levene, unaware that Levene is about to be arrested. Roma, who has shown that he offers fake camaraderie as a way to manipulate his colleagues, is waiting like a Venus fly trap, using the restaurant as a place where Levene might open up and trust him as if they are friends outside of the office.
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By David Mamet
