Northbound

Saw Glengarry Glen Ross on Saturday, with the outstanding Broadway cast, led by Alan Alda as Shelley “The Machine” Levine. I wish I could tell you that I was more impressed than I was.

A couple of things are very impressive. The set design, for one thing. The first act takes place inside a completely nondescript Chinese restaurant, a nearly bare set, a couple of red-leather booths, a couple of lozenge-shaped tables, a fake fish tank behind it. (”Fake” because there aren’t any fish in it, although you can see the hands of the actors moving in the reflection off the glass.) Nice, but minimalist. The intermission comes — seemingly a little too early, seemingly a little too long, then the set changes. I will not tell you how it changes, except to say that the set designer got the longest applause of the evening and leave it at that. Absolutely fabulous set design there, and I am not the kind of person to rave about such things.

The acting, unfortunately, there you have a problem.

If you’ve seen the movie, well, you know the cast. Pacino. Lemmon. Spacey. Ed Harris. Alan Arkin. And — arguably outdoing all of them, at least in the quotability department — Alec Baldwin. (Baldwin’s character was not in the original play and does not appear in the revival.)

Now, that’s, well, problematic, you understand, as an actor. Alan Alda is a fine actor; just got an Academy nomination and a Tony nomination in the same calendar year, and you don’t get that unless you’re pretty good. But he’s no Jack Lemmon, even though he tries to be. Frederick Weller has the Spacey part, and he holds his own, and that’s pretty much it.

Liev Schrieber, reasonably, doesn’t even try to do Pacino. Instead, he adopts a little mustache and a Chicago accent and tries that — changing Ricky Roma from a world-weary New York Italian hardass to a wisecracking Midwestern smartass. It doesn’t work notably well. And what it does, really, is cut down on the intensity of the piece.

That’s part of it. And I think that everyone involved in the play noticed something, early on, something not so much about the play but about the audience. You noticed it in the first scenes with Alda, and it had to do with the audience reaction to his lines. Glengarry Glen Ross is, of course, famously vulgar in its use of language. (The IMDb catalogs the memorable quotes.) When Alda starts cursing, when he starts breaking loose with his language, it is not what you would call intense. Instead, what happens is that people start laughing. They think it’s cute, hearing this old guy — hearing Hawkeye Pierce — use that kind of language. And that sets the tone for the rest of the play — because some people, after that first scene, could not be disabused of the notion that this — this hyper-macho David Mamet Pulitzer-Prize kickass play — was a comedy.

The performers, to their immense discredit, seem to have adopted a well-if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-em attitude to the proceedings, and milk their lines for every laugh that they’re worth. You can’t fault their comic timing, I suppose, but it is their job not to give into that timing, to break it, to wring all the comedy out of the scenes. They don’t do it, and it hurts the performance. (Only Jeffrey Tambor — the comedian of the group — realizes this, and his character has the intensity needed.)

“Don’t open your mouth,” Mamet tells us, “until you know what the shot is.” Someone should explain that to director Joe Mantello.