Justin Stewart Cotta, who plays Detective Baylen in the Melbourne Theatre Company production of Mamet’s play, can relate to the themes explored in Glengarry Glen Ross. Over 20 years ago Cotta was encouraged by his grandfather to enrol in a law degree in his native Queensland. “My grandfather was a real estate agent, and he sold me on the idea of doing a law degree,” Cotta laughs.
After completing his degree Cotta chose to work in the gardening section of a local department store rather than seek a career in law (“for the sake of freedom,” he laughs); meanwhile, Cotta’s law school contemporaries gravitated toward the jobs as junior solicitors in same charged office environments as explored in Glengarry Glen Ross.
An accomplished musician, Cotta pursued a career in music that took him (via two different bands) to Columbia Records and Elektra, the latter the label formed by Jac Holzman that morphed from jazz to the home of ’60s rock icons The Doors, The Stooges and Love. Not surprisingly, Cotta saw the same duplicitous and narcissistic behaviour portrayed in Glengarry Glen Ross during his time in the music industry, both within his bands and in the offices of the record labels.
“It’s funny looking back on those times and seeing the same type of office politics portrayed in the play seeping out in the band room and at rehearsals,” Cotta says. “They’re universal themes: when greed, money and deceit, white lies, subtle mistruths, little things like that – they’re all at play in the office, in the group of guys in a band room if they’re not communicating.”
In the ego-laden corridors and offices of Columbia and Elektra, Cotta can also look back and see variations of the characters portrayed in Glengarry Glen Ross – especially Richard Roma, the slick talking, charming and successful real estate salesman played by Alex Dimitriades. “Alex does a great job of playing Roma in the play, and as part of his sales pitch he’s the everyman, and he understands everyone – he’s part philosopher, he’s part best friend, part father figure, even part extra-curricular lover,” Cotta says.
Cotta characterises the behaviour at the core of Glengarry Glen Ross as “a seduction” which can be seen in so many intense commercial environments. “That seduction is almost the norm in the upper echelons of the big record labels in the States,” Cotta says. “There’s a rehearsed charm that it is in play, and Roma’s got it in spades. It’s being sold on friendship – the politics of friendship, and not being able to see the forest for the trees in terms of loyalties.”
Cotta first performed Glengarry Glen Ross during his tenure at NIDA in the late 1990s, almost 15 years after Mamet’s play was first performed (a film version of the play, featuring an additional character not in the original script – played by Alec Baldwin – was released in 1992). This time around Cotta plays Baylen, the policemen charged with getting to the bottom of the fraudulent activity being perpetrated by the desperate salesmen.
Cotta admits his own fascination with the play come down to his own (figurative) seduction by David Mamet, and Mamet’s command of language. “I’ll put my hand straight up and say I’ve been seduced by David Mamet!” Cotta laughs. “It’s the rhythm, it’s the language, Mamet loves his jazz, and his writing is so specific – he’s almost militant in his use of punctuation. A pause is a pause, a semi-colon is not a colon, and a full stop is not a question mark. There’s a science of words, a science of literature that he’s a slave to. And when you do one of his plays, he insists you stick to it exactly. And it’s in the way that characters speak that totally explain who they are.”
While Mamet wrote his play in the early 1980s, a few years before individual greed and amoral corporate behaviour eroded the foundations of the financial system, leading to the stock market crash of 1987. Less than 15 years later, and the bursting of the dot com bubble suggested little had been learnt; when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, its victims included countless fast-talking salespeople whose financial and personal livelihoods evaporated before their eyes.
“The themes of Glengarry Glen Ross are still being repeated – it’s a pretty weird time now with a lot of people being left behind,” Cotta says. The fact that Mamet’s play is rooted in the American corporate experience doesn’t make it any less relevant to 21st century Australia. “These guys are here,” Cotta says. “And it’s the sell rather than what’s being sold that’s important. There’s still this absolute focus on money, and this measure of success we call numbers.”
Cotta admits that there have been times when he’s been seduced by ambition and the potential for success – as, indeed, most of us have been, whether we like to admit it or not. “I think we’ve all been guilty of having ambition or success clouding what it is that we started out doing,” Cotta muses. “I think we’re all susceptible and prone to that seduction.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
