Performance: The hard sell in 'Glengarry Glen Ross'

What is it about the fictional huckster that wins our sympathies? In real life, these guys are scamming your mom, looting Grandpa and feasting on the fantasies of weak and needy chumps.

Yet, put them on a stage, in a film or a book and somehow these predatory weasels become irresistible rascals -- no more a present danger than the neighbor boys who TP your oak tree. Oh, those scamps.

"Glengarry Glen Ross" allows us a safe distance from which to admire the stained slaughterhouse where ravenous slashers carve their pigeons with such finesse that the victim scarcely realizes he's been mortally wounded. Despite its venal intent, this is a marvelously audacious thing to watch.

David Mamet's "Glengarry," in a production by Torch Theater at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage, still arouses that primitive joy of the hunt. That Mamet wrote a classic is easy to discern in the simple games of human behavior, the instinct for survival, response to crisis and the feral nose for success, however that is defined. Unapologetically masculine and misogynistic, Mamet's play demands we consider a world in which hunters rule, and nesters cower.

"I swear, it's not a world of men," roars Richard Roma, portrayed with cocky and seductive charm by Patrick Coyle in Torch's production. "It's a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders. We are the members of a dying breed."

Roma is one of two thrumming engines that should drive Mamet's cynical homage to salesmanship, and Coyle has this character oiled, locked in and charged with volatility. In the first act -- a triptych played out on set designer Michael Hoover's perfectly imagined Chinese restaurant -- Coyle's Roma casts a hook baited with adventure and danger into the limp jaw of one James Lingk, a nicely realized sap in John Middleton's hands. Roma is not offering property as much as he's offering risk and thrill -- the chance to be alive.

As vibrant and throbbing as Coyle's Roma is, however, Terry Hempleman's portrayal of Shelley Levene misfires. Levene is the onetime master who has lost his potency even as he desperately aches to get back in the game. It is difficult to imagine that Hempleman's Levene, as directed by David Mann, was ever "the man." He might have been a country lawyer, or a schoolteacher, but never the sweaty, hustling stud of an urban sales office.

Mann's other actors are excellent. Jim Detmar has an explosive capacity as Moss, a malcontent eager to feed on his mates' misery. Ari Hoptman is the confused, unhappy Aaranow, and Peter Carlin perfectly illustrates the office manager, a man steeped in business school, not the street.