\n<\/p>\n
Inside a spacious room on Manhattan\u2019s West Side, rehearsal for the latest Broadway revival of David Mamet\u2019s \u201cGlengarry Glen Ross\u201d was full of macho bluster and trash talk. And that was before the actors started running their scene.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
It was a Friday morning, and the show\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Then Marber noticed a satchel in front of them that he hadn\u2019t seen before. \u201cYou were gone, so the play changed,\u201d Burr responded in his staccato Boston cadence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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. \u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d he asked, a scornful snap in his voice. \u201cSmoke a cigarette like a man!\u201d<\/p>\n
Burr loves messing with people. There\u2019s a more accurate verb than \u201cmesses,\u201d of course, but I\u2019m not going to use it here. It\u2019s so intrinsic to his needling personality that when I asked him minutes before rehearsal why he\u2019s 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 \u201cout of spite.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Over the next hour, he kept messing with Marber. When the director, who is also a comedian and playwright, asked him to look at how McKean was using a toothpick in the scene, Burr said sarcastically: \u201cI got to pay attention to him? OK. Sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n
At one point, Burr clarified that he was ribbing Marber because he is also a comic: \u201cIf he was actually a person,\u201d Burr said, \u201cI\u2019d be hurting his feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
With \u201cGlengarry,\u201d Burr, 56, is entering new territory. He\u2019s acted in movies and in shows like \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d (with his \u201cGlengarry\u201d co-star Bob Odenkirk) and \u201cThe Mandalorian,\u201d but this is his professional theater debut.<\/p>\n
From a certain angle, it seems unlikely. Over decades of prolific<\/a> stand-up, Burr projected the persona of the loudmouth ranting at the end of the bar. He told me that for a long time, he didn\u2019t think theater was for him, associating it with musicals, which, he said, \u201caren\u2019t necessarily my vibe.\u201d Seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly on Broadway in \u201cTrue West\u201d changed his mind. \u201cI saw the power of it,\u201d he said of the production that was staged in 2000. \u201cIt was like stand-up, feeding off the energy of the crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n Burr owes this job, funnily enough, to Nathan Lane, an actor he has never met and who is not in the production. Lane, however, was originally asked to star as the older salesman Shelley Levene (Odenkirk took the job after Lane left for a TV series), and had told the producer Jeffrey Richards he would do it only if they cast Burr as Moss.<\/p>\n Lane sent Richards and Marber clips of Burr\u2019s performances, including one of him doing stand-up. \u201cGentlemen,\u201d he wrote, \u201cpay attention to the arena that is full.\u201d They were convinced. (Lane had less success talking Mamet into putting Alec Baldwin\u2019s \u201ccoffee\u2019s for closers\u201d<\/a> speech from the film adaptation into the play.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Along with being a great actor, Lane explained that Burr just sounds like a Mamet character. \u201cThe anger. The simmering rage,\u201d Lane told me in a phone interview. \u201cThere\u2019s a danger to him. That fits into the world of Mamet. I could hear him being a little funny and a little scary.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Inside a quiet Little Italy cafe, I began to tell Burr there was something he often talks about that resonates with me when he cut me off.<\/p>\n \u201cWhores?\u201d he responded, leaning back and chuckling, in a gray hoodie and jeans. No, I responded, I\u2019m not talking about whores, fully appreciating how funny it sounds for a New York Times journalist to say this in an interview.<\/p>\n I wanted to talk about male anger, a longtime<\/a> theme of his stand-up. Some of Burr\u2019s funniest bits are about how men, so nervous about appearing sensitive or weak that they won\u2019t risk their masculinity by buying a pumpkin<\/a> or even taking a bath<\/a>, repress those feelings which eventually transform into rage. When I brought this up, Burr interrupted again.<\/p>\n \u201cLet me ask you this,\u201d he said, flashing an intense stare. \u201cYou\u2019ve been with me for an hour. Do I seem like an angry person?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I pause. He did appear a little annoyed when I picked a fight with him about a bit he does about women\u2019s sports<\/a>. Burr is not the only one who likes messing with people. But alone in conversation, Burr seems like the same guy he is in front of a crowd, only more cerebral and mild-mannered. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of truth in the guy you see onstage,\u201d he said. \u201cBut you\u2019re just looking at me from one side.\u201d<\/p>\n The side I see here is a guy with anger issues who learned how to control them. Getting married and having kids helped, he told me, not to mention doing mushrooms, which he talked about in a 2022 Netflix special<\/a>. Burr rejects the idea that controlling his temper makes him lose his edge.<\/p>\n \u201cI want<\/em> to lose my edge. I don\u2019t want to go through life angry,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd here\u2019s the thing: If you have an edge, you never lose it. I can tap into that whenever I need to. You bark at the other dog and make it go away. I know<\/em> how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n He demonstrated this in the rehearsal room. Despite his jokey irreverence, Burr has approached his role seriously (he confesses to some nerves). He came into rehearsals almost completely off book, with a detailed take on the play, and the psychology and emotional life of the men in it. Marber told me that Burr is a \u201ctotal pro,\u201d a natural stage actor, perfectly cast. \u201cMoss is rude and unpleasant and abrasive, but you can\u2019t hate him for it,\u201d Marber explained of the character. \u201cHe has a certain amount of charm and way with words, just like Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n BACK IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM, <\/strong>in his scene with McKean, Burr is a salesman selling another salesman on an idea. (Just outside the door, Kieran Culkin, who plays the top salesman Ricky Roma, was hunched over his laptop working on his Playbill bio.) Burr was jokey and conspiratorial, warm and whispery one moment, explosive the next, but strategically. When his character was caught in a lie, Burr leaned forward and attacked. \u201cI lied. Alright?\u201d he roared, decibel level climbing. There\u2019s the danger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Moss\u2019s anger, Burr told me, comes from hurt. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t feel respected. He doesn\u2019t feel loved. He feels alone,\u201d he said. \u201cAs a man, you\u2019re not allowed to express that. You can\u2019t be intimate like that with another man in front of other men.\u201d<\/p>\n So instead, Burr explained, he curses at him.<\/p>\n In our polarized political moment, the comedian is pointedly hard to pin down. He delights in stomping on liberal sensibilities. But there\u2019s also a populist through line in his work, skewering bankers, insurance companies and the rich. Recently he ridiculed<\/a> Elon Musk, who was accused of flashing a Nazi salute<\/a>, and the day before I saw him at rehearsal, he was trending on X after TMZ posted a clip from his long-running \u201cMonday Morning Podcast\u201d saying billionaires should be \u201cput down like rabid dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n When I tell him that the right-wing media figure Ben Shapiro said he was going \u201cwoke<\/a>,\u201d Burr shot back: \u201cAll he knew is if he put \u2018woke\u2019 on what I said, he would make more money. I don\u2019t know who he is, but that guy is a jerk-off.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mamet has emerged in recent years as the most Trump-friendly playwright<\/a> produced on Broadway, but Burr sees the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cGlengarry Glen Ross\u201d not unlike critics and academics originally<\/a> did when it opened in the 1980s: as a critique of winner-takes-all, unfettered capitalism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s funny is a lot of this play I\u2019ve experienced through the rise of streaming services,\u201d said Burr, who lives in Los Angeles. \u201cWhen I got into this business 30 years ago, a character actor could make a living. Over the last 20 years, it\u2019s become just the movie star, a couple others. One person at the top is eating this succulent thing and the rest of us are eating the peels.\u201d<\/p>\n