Bill Burr Is About to Hit Broadway. Broadway Better Duck.

New York Times

25-02-2025

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.'
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: 'I got to pay attention to him? OK. Sorry.'
At one point, Burr clarified that he was ribbing Marber because he is also a comic: 'If he was actually a person,' Burr said, 'I'd be hurting his feelings.'
With 'Glengarry,' Burr, 56, is entering new territory. He's acted in movies and in shows like 'Breaking Bad' (with his 'Glengarry' co-star Bob Odenkirk) and 'The Mandalorian,' but this is his professional theater debut.
From a certain angle, it seems unlikely. Over decades of prolific 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't think theater was for him, associating it with musicals, which, he said, 'aren't necessarily my vibe.' Seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly on Broadway in 'True West' changed his mind. 'I saw the power of it,' he said of the production that was staged in 2000. 'It was like stand-up, feeding off the energy of the crowd.'
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.
Lane sent Richards and Marber clips of Burr's performances, including one of him doing stand-up. 'Gentlemen,' he wrote, 'pay attention to the arena that is full.' They were convinced. (Lane had less success talking Mamet into putting Alec Baldwin's 'coffee's for closers' speech from the film adaptation into the play.)
Along with being a great actor, Lane explained that Burr just sounds like a Mamet character. 'The anger. The simmering rage,' Lane told me in a phone interview. 'There's a danger to him. That fits into the world of Mamet. I could hear him being a little funny and a little scary.'
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.
'Whores?' he responded, leaning back and chuckling, in a gray hoodie and jeans. No, I responded, I'm not talking about whores, fully appreciating how funny it sounds for a New York Times journalist to say this in an interview.
I wanted to talk about male anger, a longtime theme of his stand-up. Some of Burr's funniest bits are about how men, so nervous about appearing sensitive or weak that they won't risk their masculinity by buying a pumpkin or even taking a bath, repress those feelings which eventually transform into rage. When I brought this up, Burr interrupted again.
'Let me ask you this,' he said, flashing an intense stare. 'You've been with me for an hour. Do I seem like an angry person?'
I pause. He did appear a little annoyed when I picked a fight with him about a bit he does about women's sports. 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. 'There's a lot of truth in the guy you see onstage,' he said. 'But you're just looking at me from one side.'
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. Burr rejects the idea that controlling his temper makes him lose his edge.
'I want to lose my edge. I don't want to go through life angry,' he said. 'And here's 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 how to do that.'
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 'total pro,' a natural stage actor, perfectly cast. 'Moss is rude and unpleasant and abrasive, but you can't hate him for it,' Marber explained of the character. 'He has a certain amount of charm and way with words, just like Bill.'
BACK IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM, 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. 'I lied. Alright?' he roared, decibel level climbing. There's the danger.
Moss's anger, Burr told me, comes from hurt. 'He doesn't feel respected. He doesn't feel loved. He feels alone,' he said. 'As a man, you're not allowed to express that. You can't be intimate like that with another man in front of other men.'
So instead, Burr explained, he curses at him.
In our polarized political moment, the comedian is pointedly hard to pin down. He delights in stomping on liberal sensibilities. But there's also a populist through line in his work, skewering bankers, insurance companies and the rich. Recently he ridiculed Elon Musk, who was accused of flashing a Nazi salute, and the day before I saw him at rehearsal, he was trending on X after TMZ posted a clip from his long-running 'Monday Morning Podcast' saying billionaires should be 'put down like rabid dogs.'
When I tell him that the right-wing media figure Ben Shapiro said he was going 'woke,' Burr shot back: 'All he knew is if he put 'woke' on what I said, he would make more money. I don't know who he is, but that guy is a jerk-off.'
Mamet has emerged in recent years as the most Trump-friendly playwright produced on Broadway, but Burr sees the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Glengarry Glen Ross' not unlike critics and academics originally did when it opened in the 1980s: as a critique of winner-takes-all, unfettered capitalism.
'What's funny is a lot of this play I've experienced through the rise of streaming services,' said Burr, who lives in Los Angeles. 'When I got into this business 30 years ago, a character actor could make a living. Over the last 20 years, it's 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.'
Burr is at the top of his profession. Lorne Michaels asked him to do the monologue for the first 'Saturday Night Live' episode to air after the presidential election in November. But talk to him enough and you discover his memories as a struggling young person remain fresh. You will hear allusions to the 'crazy German Irish house' of his childhood, a place that lacked the warmth of his friends' homes. Or the early days in comedy when he felt out of his depth.
The 'Glengarry' character he most identifies with is not one of Mamet's hustling, fast-talking salesmen, but James Lingk, the ineffectual mark, the man getting sold and then apologizing for his own lack of power to make decisions. 'I was that guy until I was about 30,' he said, adding that he was socially immature for his age. 'How I didn't end up in the trunk of someone's car is beyond me.'
Burr's next special, 'Drop Dead Years,' which premieres March 14 on Hulu, also displays his vulnerability, beginning with a confession that the reason he got into comedy was to get a room full of strangers to like him. For a guy so comfortable antagonizing a room, who likes to mess with people, this comes as a surprise. Asked about it, Burr strikes a thoughtful tone, saying the way he pushes people away is also a way to cope. 'It's just another defense mechanism.'
AFTER BURR AND McKEAN finished running their scene, Marber complimented both and suggested McKean find a moment to swig a drink while Burr was talking. Afterward, the person keeping track of the script, sitting a few feet away from Marber, told Burr that he had gotten one word wrong.
It's a speech bemoaning how Indian people never buy from salesmen. The racist complaint zeros in on the look on Indian women's faces. The line in the play is that they look like they had sex 'with a dead cat,' but Burr said 'by a dead cat.'
'That's different,' McKean said in the voice of a punctilious copy editor, adding: 'Cat's reputation is bad enough.'
Marber used this moment to probe the meaning of this line. 'What are you saying?' he asked Burr.
It seemed self-explanatory, Burr said. Marber went back to the text. 'But are you asking if a dead cat is inserted into them?'
This was probably the most absurd moment of the past hour, the one most calling out for a joke. Maybe it was too easy of a setup or his comedian's instinct is to zig when others zag, but instead of making light of the situation, Burr grew loudly dramaturgical. 'Listen. You want me to expound on it?' he asked, commanding the attention of the room.
'He's an old-school guy that wants pretty women to smile when he's around them,' he said about his character. 'They give him nothing, which messes with his ego. So, what's he going to do? Say, 'I need to work on myself'? No! He says something unbelievably rude.'
After a moment of silence, Marber said 'brilliant' before breaking the fourth wall of the rehearsal room and turning toward me to ask if I had heard Burr's explanation. 'Proper actor,' he shouted, leaning into his British accent, perhaps doing his own needling. 'Proper stage actor.'
Burr smiled. 'Also,' he said, alluding to his earlier explanation: 'That was therapy.'