Inside a spacious room on Manhattan’s West Side, rehearsal for the latest Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” was full of macho bluster and trash talk. And that was before the actors started running their scene.
It was a Friday morning, and the show’s British director, Patrick Marber, back after being briefly out sick, approached two of his stars, Bill Burr and Michael McKean. They were sitting inside a makeshift restaurant booth, getting ready to play desperate real estate salesmen entertaining the idea of robbing their office.
Then Marber noticed a satchel in front of them that he hadn’t seen before. “You were gone, so the play changed,” Burr responded in his staccato Boston cadence.
Marber looked somewhere between annoyed and amused. Getting teased by one of the greatest living stand-up comics is an honor. But there was work to be done. Previews would start in just a few weeks, on March 10, at the Palace Theater. He turned, walked back to his table, picked up a vape and took a puff. Burr pounced. “What’s that?” he asked, a scornful snap in his voice. “Smoke a cigarette like a man!”
Burr loves messing with people. There’s a more accurate verb than “messes,” of course, but I’m not going to use it here. It’s so intrinsic to his needling personality that when I asked him minutes before rehearsal why he’s studying French, Burr described a revenge fantasy of sorts: an eventual stand-up set in France meant to irritate Parisians snooty about Americans mangling their language. Only Bill Burr learns French “out of spite.”
