David Mamet gouged his crater in the theater map on February 16, 1977 when American Buffalo had its Broadway opening. He’d already done some preliminary digging with the one-act Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which—in light of a recent Mamet event—may have been another hint to his way of thinking about male inclinations.
But it was the two-act American Buffalo, with its greatly expanded stage vocabulary, that awakened audiences and served as an introduction to many more like it. So much so that today it‘s unlikely spectators seeing and, hearing the fulminating work for the first time will experience the shock felt by 1970s Mamet virgins.
All the same, if American Buffalo doesn’t pack the wallop it did then (there is at least one actual unpulled punch), the third Broadway revival of the play contains sufficient deliberately grubby thrills to qualify as a must-see.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The action takes place in Don’s Resale Shop (Chicago?), where proprietor Donny Dubrow (Laurence Fishburne) endlessly trades barbed lines with tensed-up poker-player and sometime shady-deal-operations partner Teach (Sam Rockwell) as well as with his timid, dim-witted go-fer Bobby (Darren Criss).
It’s the off-kilter rhythm of the men’s speech (sometimes known now as Mametspeak) that renders them magnetic characters, even as what they’re saying to each other marks them as a threesome with doomed inability to make eventual sense of their trapped selves. Not that some of the convoluted utterances don’t tickle the funny bone—e. g., Teach saying “The only way to teach these people is to kill them.”
American Buffalo covers less than 14 hours of a day during which the most pressing item on the meager agenda is pulling off a vague robbery. In line with the frustrated and unfulfilled lives that Mamet sees many, if not most, men living, Donny, Teach and Bobby have no insight into themselves or each other. It could be said they have absolutely no concept of insight.
(For corroboration on Mamet’s enduring themes of man’s impoverished masculinity, check out Speed-the Plow and Glengarry Glen Ross, perhaps the best American play of the 1980s.)
That Donny and Teach are constantly argumentative and Bobby is repeatedly sorry for just about whatever he’s just done means that their combined obtuseness muddies the capacity to recognize a particular item of value right before their rapacious eyes.
That’s where Mamet’s inspired title comes in. A certain nickel reaches their hands—and, possibly, the same nickel a second time. This the buffalo nickel, minted from 1913 to1938 in several locations around the States. It could be of enormous value, but Donny, Teach and Bobby fail to recognize its potential worth. It’s as if they’re watching a three-card monte game and are bamboozled by the lightning hand movements.
Oscar Wilde’s quote about people knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing comes to mind. Only these three know neither the price of everything nor the value of anything
Because Rockwell has the showiest role, he rivets attention as he charges around like a bull in a junk shop. He’s an actor unleashed after Marlon Brando broke molds to establish a new one. Rockwell is grand at the volatile tradition. Fishburne and Criss more than hold their own, Fishburne authoritative as a shop owner unable to maintain authority, Criss as a little-boy-lost in a big, ugly city.
Neil Pepe, an old hand at directing Mamet (several Mamet plays have bowed at Pepe’s Atlantic Theatre), has shaken up the long-celebrated property with a Circle in the Square landing. Not truly theater-in-the-round, the auditorium has patrons seated around what resembles an extremely large lozenge, this time giving the impression of American Buffalo sticking out its lascivious tongue at the crowd.
To fill the space Scott Pask has perhaps created the set of the season. It’s seemingly laden with hundreds (thousands?) of objects to the extent that describing it as cluttered is a lame joke. With multiple additional vintage baubles hanging above, there’s more than Donny, addled pals, and ticket buyers can take in. Before the final blackout activity explodes, the set’s mistreated contents cause havoc that must have props persons shuddering and sheltering.
Therefore, a well-deserved shout-out to credited props persons Kathy Fabian, John Estep, Rachel Wier, Ryan McLaughlin, and Kate Lundell. Who did the shopping, enquiring minds wasn’t to know? A pistol is flashed, and keeping with Mamet’s belief that psychic guns too often don’t fire, this literal one, well…
The revival does detonate with almost all its original propulsion, which by the way, Pepe tries to bolster at least once. Mamet has Donny say into a phone as act-two begins, “Great, great, great, great, great, great,” then a pause in which he hangs up a phone and blurts, “Cocksucking fuckhead.” In Pepe’s revise, every “great” is dropped.
A closing advisory: During the last week Mamet has been in the news for making some inflammatory remarks about pedophilia among the left. His questionable comments may cause theatergoers to think twice about attending this revival. It may come down to their deciding in the same way art lovers decide about, say, the music of the well-known anti-Semitic Richard Wagner. It’s a personal choice.
American Buffalo opened April 14, 2022, at the Circle in the Square and runs through July 10. Tickets and information: americanbuffalonyc.com
