David Mamet’s play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” about the scrappy world of real estate sales, was made into a movie in 1992, starring Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, Jack Lemmon and Ed Harris.

I mention it because the film — though low-budget and, considering the other movies those actors have made, comparatively obscure — is probably the finest example of male ensemble acting you’ll ever see: A razor-sharp tour de force for everyone involved, even Alec Baldwin, who had a special part that doesn’t exist in the playscript. (And you know a movie is cookin’ when it earns kudos for a Baldwin.)

Problem is, every stage production of “Glengarry” is now forced to live under the specter of Pacino and company. You can see how Theatrescape’s current Phoenix production of the show pushes and pulls against that little cinematic monster, and how director Christopher Mascarelli has either let his actors imitate their film counterparts or, more often, forced them to do something completely different, no matter how potentially unnatural it might be.

The star of the show, Equity thespo and comic favorite John Sankovich, is doing the Pacino character, Ricky Roma. While Pacino played top-dog salesman Roma as a cool-as-a-cucumber mousetrap, luring his sales victims like a snakecharmer with an appetite for cobra, Sankovich’s Roma woos a sucker at the bar like he’s subtly coming on to him, only at the last minute saying, “Hey, I’ve got some property you might be interested in.” It’s an interesting acting choice, that seduction, but it’s still a bit jarring.

Whatever machismo is lost in the new Roma is made up by Valley actor and full-time pediatrician Marty Berger, whose Shelley “the Machine” Levene (played in the movie by Alan Arkin) lets loose a flurry of obscenities in just about every bit of dialogue that goes deeper than two lines. True, everyone in the cast chews F-bombs like they’re Tic-Tacs, but something about Berger’s potty-mouth is especially great. Mamet’s got a way with cursing that makes it sound infinitely cool, and both Berger and Sankovich seem to get that.

Theatrescape’s cast seems to play its roles with a tinge more insecurity than you’d expect from a show about a bunch of guys who have such a strong love/hate relationship with their jobs — in which getting some jerk to sign on the dotted line is the difference between winning a new car or getting canned, and the rush of negotiating a sale is as potent as foreplay. Notice that the salesmen in this production don’t look each other, or their suckers, directly in the eyes very often.

Whether it’s intentional or not, that makes for a more humanizing experience than expected from the hard-boiled, classic Mamet characters we’ve come to know.

I applaud Mascarelli and his cast for staging “Glengarry” in the first place. It’s a gutsy thing to do, especially for a new theater company whose last show was a girl-powered, emotional drama (“Eleemosynary”). It’s even gutsier to stage “Glengarry” with an attitude that equally acknowledges and rejects its film counterpart