The first thing you’ll notice about the current production of Glengarry Glen Ross on at the Young Centre is designer Ken Macdonald’s elaborate chalkboard backdrop, filled with cheap and tasty Chinese dishes; accenting the board are two immense, cherry-red booths. It’s here we meet the hot-headed cast of characters inhabiting David Mamet’s world of smooth-talking hustlers and slick-suited muggers. The real estate office depicted in the play has a contest: top salesman wins a Cadillac Eldorado, loser is fired. It’s a brutal world, full of people who are considered expendable. Cheap, fast, marginally satisfying –the food board’s an apt symbol of this world of corruption and hustling.
The second thing you’ll notice about this David Storch-directed, Soulpepper production is its breakneck speed; at ninety minutes (including one intermission), this is a show you have to pay close attention to. Much has been made of the profanity-laced dialogue that runs through the play like a thick slick of oil on water.  In the hands of Storch’s excellent cast, however, the language sings like a raging Wagnerian score: the Armani-clad gods hurl explosive thunderbolts and pour on more salt than the bow of The Flying Dutchman’s eternally-wandering ship.

At the heart of Mamet’s 1983 work is the divide between the old ways and the new. Four Chicago real estate agents battle it out and bat away the rules to sell pieces of undesirable properties to unsuspecting, naïve buyers. Considering the scandal of the Madoff case, the subprime mortage mess, and the AIG debacle, never has a work about corporate corruption been more timely. The play opens with washed-up agent Shelley Levene begging John Williamson, the cold office manager, for leads. Once successful, Levene hasn’t closed a deal in a long time and is desperate for income to help his ailing daughter. Williamson is the newer breed of executive: cool, calculating, cryptic, and ultimately unknowable.

As Levene, Corner Gas star Eric Peterson delivers a manic performance that touches on pathos, vulnerability, frustration and horribly-bruised pride; he’s a man at the end of his rope, but hanging on by the teeth, and woe be to anyone who tells him he can’t or won’t succeed one last time. His manic energy plays off nicely against Jordan Pettle’s still, cold demeanor; he takes Levene’s abuses but seems slightly, rightly disengaged.
Stratford veteran Peter Donaldson, who plays the hyper-frustrated Dave Moss and appears in the next scene with William Webster (as George Aaronow), ratchets up the acid factor, his rant against Indians played for every despicable syllable it’s worth. It’s refreshing to see this kind of fearlessness in Toronto theatre, especially considering some of the scene’s dialogue was unfortunately excised during its recent Broadway run. Donaldson’s hot-air bravado and casual, big gesturing work perfectly against Webster’s small, fitful outbursts and the two men share a nice chemistry that works within the context of Mamet’s nasty world. Difference may be the spice of life, but it won’t make anyone the top dog.

As Ricky Roma, the smoothest talker of them all, Soulpepper Artistic Director Albert Schultz delivers a deeply magnetic performance, chalk-full of wit, charm, sexual charisma, arrogance, and cruelty. His introduction, when he hoodwinks the hapless James Lingk (Kevin Bundy) into investing in the worthless Glen Ross estates, is delivered with gusto and aplomb. Schultz merrily bobs between casual subtlety and full-on schmooze; the performance-within-a-performance is fascinating for the constructs being created –and demolished –therein. It’s theatre as sales as theatre, and it’s smart, ferocious, and mesmerizing.

Equally, Roma’s takedown of Williamson in the second act (when he unknowingly interferes on a deal with Lingk) is stunning for the force of its brutality and furious energy, and for the self-conscious, territorial nature of the exchange. Roma clearly stakes out his territory, literally and otherwise, and Storch has Schultz use his physicality to superb effect, hulking over the slight Pettle, as the former stares back at him, his silence a penitent bone on which the rabid Roma may gnaw. The two men are the yin and yang of the future world of corporate governance, and they know it.

Just as in the first act, MacDonald’s design in the play’s second act underlines the internal chaos, both within the agents, and the wider world of business. The smooth, polished surface of civility comes crashing down as the office is broken into. Levene’s indiscretion is exposed, his desperation –essentially failure –laid bare, his pride stripped away. The knob that was turned up to eleven on Peterson’s manic delivery falls off entirely, and he transforms into a broken, hollow shell. It’s not an irony Roma is the only character to truly emerge unscathed; after kicking, stomping and shouting, he carefully steps over the mess, leaving the old world behind. Like Williamson, he understands the new breed of corrosive coolness required to keep playing the game, keep winning the Cadillacs, and keep selling dreams. It’s an apt metaphor now, as it was over twenty years ago. Glengarry Glen Ross is frighteningly, thrilling timely –and in this production, it makes for timeless theatre. This hot pot’s at the boiling point.