"Glengarry Glen Ross" at Fairfield, as a Classroom Text By Channon Hodge The Time for "Glengarry Glen Ross": Fairfield University in Connecticut tries to use David Mamet's evil characters for good one week before a new production, starring Al Pacino, is set to start performances in New York. FAIRFIELD, Conn. - David P. Schmidt stood center stage at the Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University here and glowered through his glasses at the audience before leaping into a corrosive, expletive-laden monologue from "Glengarry Glen Ross." His character, Blake, is a hotshot manager, sent by the home office to inspire a handful of real estate salesmen with a contest: First prize, an Eldorado. Second prize, a set of steak knives. Third prize, you're fired. In this staging of David Mamet's 1984 play - with Blake grafted in from the 1992 film adaptation - the salesmen whom Blake hectors stood behind Dr. Schmidt. Instead of speaking to them, he delivered his screed directly to the audience, making eye contact to increase the level of discomfort. The listeners were used to seeing Dr. Schmidt speak. Most, after all, were Fairfield undergraduates, and many were in his classes on business ethics or business law. But they had never seen him quite like this. "A couple of my students told me that they were unnerved to see their ethics teacher playing that role," Dr. Schmidt said later. I think it challenged their expectations, or their stereotypes. And that can be a learning process. A collaboration between the university's arts and sciences and business schools, the production earlier this month was part of the syllabus for a dozen classes in business, economics, philosophy, communications and politics. A political science course took a Marxist view, discussing the work as an emblem of the dark side of capitalism. A philosophy course on existentialism examined the way the characters lost sight of their true selves. Business professors focused on both the ethical and practical problems of the office depicted in the play. Mostly, "Glengarry" was used to give the Fairfield students, many of whom are already worried about finding jobs in a slow economy, a glimpse of a harsh reality: a world where they may find themselves subject to abusive managers who pit them against one another, with the threat of firing always in the air. "We talk a lot about preparing people to go out into the world and find jobs, but we don't talk much about what it's going to be like out there," said Alistair Highet, the play's director and the editor of the university's alumni magazine. To bring these lessons more fully to life for students, Mr. Highet cast most of the principal roles with faculty members: people the students would know in a different context. Along with Dr. Schmidt, Donald E. Gibson, the dean of the business school, played John Williamson, the office manager, and two philosophy professors, Dennis Keenan and Ryan Drake, played the struggling salesmen, Shelly Levene and George Aaronow. Other roles were played by members of Actor's Nucleus, a company based in nearby Bethlehem, Conn., which brought twists of its own: both Richard Roma, the most aggressive and successful of the salesmen, and his client, James Lingk, were played by actresses, Kelly Briney and Melora Mennesson. The characters" names were changed to Ricky and Jamie. "Once we decided that Kelly should play Roma," Mr. Highet explained, "that meant that Lingk should be a woman too." Partly, he said, that was to ensure that the scene in which Roma sells property to Lingk would not be seen as a matter of sexual dynamics - "a woman using her wiles to get what she wanted," as he put it. "But I also wanted to respect Mamet's text, so I preserved the masculine pronouns as much as I could," he added. "Roma speaks about herself as a man in a world of men, and Levene says, "Roma is a good man, we know she is." I liked the effect that this generated, and the questions about gender in the workplace that the casting brought to the surface. But those were a bonus. In its first stab at using a single play as the basis for interdisciplinary study, Fairfield last year presented the Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga's "Perpetual Peace," about the use of torture in the war on terrorism, in a translation by Jerelyn Johnson, a professor in the modern language and literatures department. It was at the cast party for that show that Dr. Gibson, the business school dean, proposed staging "Glengarry." He and others involved said they had no idea at the time that the work would be revived on Broadway next month, starring Al Pacino and Bobby Cannavale. "I see this play as a cautionary tale," said Dr. Gibson, whose specialty is studying employee anger. Workplaces can be like this. But they don't have to be.