Our Sympathy Hangover

In 1982, David Mamet shared troubling news. The American dream — our national amble, the short sunstruck highway between birth and success — had come to an end. “And the people it has sustained,” the dramatist told an interviewer, “the white males, are going nuts.”

But the play he wrote about all this — subject, those going-nuts white males — itself enjoyed a dream career: “Glengarry Glen Ross” won a Pulitzer in 1984, and then brought its low news to every corner of the globe. The star-studded film adaptation is one of the few absolutely surviving movie items of 1992. And when its third Broadway revival opened earlier this spring, in our own unsustained times, four sizable stars greeted the fans and selfie sticks.

That is, Mr. Mamet’s drama should cross the stage like a returned prophet, an I-told-you-so with lighting cues and an act break. That it does not — that the sales pitch to our imaginations has wickedly shifted — is the story of a fascinating national cooling.

Why does “Glengarry” feel weirdly wrong for now? Even though you can tick the parallels off on your fingers: Tilt-a-Whirl economy, conservatives (even Mr. Mamet now claims to be a conservative), frantically discouraged males?

Part of it’s that instead of being horrified — except perhaps by the non-P.C. language — we’ve become inured, listless: We’re now ruled by Mr. Mamet’s antiheroes, and lots of us just cheer them on.

The news Mr. Mamet had to deliver was always bad. When audience members sit down to “Glengarry,” what they’rereally commemorating is a cardiac event. In the early ’80s, Mr. Mamet’s stepfather-in-law told him the following bad-economy story: Before an office presentation, one older salesman had become so anxious about his job that his heart gave out. And the company president simply “stepped over his body to leave the room.”