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When David Mamet planned to bring his 1983 play Glengarry Glen Ross back to Broadway for a fourth time, he approached Nathan Lane about playing the lead. Lane accepted, but with one stipulation: “The first person you have to hire is Bill Burr.” Lane was later forced to drop out—Bob Odenkirk took his place in the revival currently running at the Palace—but his casting recommendation remains.
Even if you haven’t seen Glengarry Glen Ross in a while, you might remember the tagline: A group of surly Chicago real estate salesmen spend their time idly in the office airing their grievances. They air blasphemous, petty grievances, and thinly veiled gossip; they complain about their precarious position in the bourgeois hierarchy and the humiliations they suffer at the hands of their unfeeling bosses. In Death of a Salesman, the suffering salesman’s faithful wife reminds us that “attention must be paid.” In Glengarry Glen Ross, women do not exist, life is suffering, and loyalty is a mere lip service. The characters are all hard-working men, and they test their responsibilities and their masculinity with a desperation that is inseparable—two inseparable and competitive sports at which they cannot afford to lose.
“Glengarry” was Burr’s Broadway debut. He’s made a few films — he both directed and starred in the Netflix dad-themed “Old Dads,” and played a passable John F. Kennedy in Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts opus — but he’s best known as a stand-up comic, selling out venues from the Royal Albert Hall to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens. He’s not from Boston or Chicago, but it’s no wonder Lane associated him with Mamet’s characters. His raspy, piercing voice can make a rant about toasters sound like a cry for help. He has such a down-to-earth demeanor that he’s one of the few comics who’s made it to the top — he lives in a posh Los Angeles neighborhood and entertains by flying around in helicopters — without his routines feeling out of place. In an era of left-right polarization, he’s focused on just another axis of polarization: up versus down, with Burr aggressively anti-working man. (Sometimes the emphasis seems to be on “man”: When he was recently interviewed by Terry Gross, Burr went into an on-air hysteria about “feminism” that veered awkwardly between what seemed like something and what didn’t seem like something at all.) He’s fifty-six, with an anti-Trump wife and two young children. To my knowledge, he’s the only guest to yell “Free Luigi!” during a flippant late-night interview with Jimmy Kimmel. Burr is a man with a lifelong anger problem, but — and this has been a consistent theme throughout his last few specials — he’s working on it. “Men aren’t allowed to be sad,” he said on his latest special, “Drop Dead Years.” “We’re allowed to be one of two things: We’re either crazy or we’re OK.” But in reality, he added, “there are so many sad men. I realize that now that I realize how much I screwed up.”
In Glengarry, Burr plays Dave Moss, a cranky salesman who hatches a plan for revenge against his bosses, Murray and Mitch. Some of Moss’s lines may seem dated now—some of them sounded dated back in 1983—but his righteous fury at capitalist hustle (“You’re trapped by someone else. And we’re enslaving ourselves”) needs no updating. For this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, we met at a Tribeca coffee shop, where Burr occasionally interrupted himself to quietly laugh at the outfits of customers waiting in line.
[While you were living in New York, during rehearsals and during the show's run] did you spend time in Brooklyn or Queens?
I met [a friend] for breakfast. I joked that it was like a hipster Rodeo Drive. Lululemon — everything was just super corporate, elevated, everyone was trying to create an atmosphere. I don’t blame people. They did this to us. I think one of the ways we deal with the madness — which, I don’t understand why there’s any madness. There’s plenty of food, there’s plenty of money. There’s enough for everybody. And then these guys who have it all are like, “It’s all going to be taken away.” It’s like, “Yeah, you! You guys are taking it!” This isn’t some guy climbing over the wall who doesn’t have two nickels in his pocket.
Sure. But if these guys [oligarchs] start screwing things up, then normal people will really have something to worry about.
Well, it's always like that.
Sourse: newyorker.com
