The revival of David Mamet’s play about capitalism in a junk shop features Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne, and Darren Criss in a powerful performance.
“Life, Liberty & Levin” host David Mamet made an inflammatory statement on Sunday’s broadcast of the Fox News show.
He said, without providing any proof, that “teachers are prone, particularly guys since men are predators,” to engage in pedophilia. In the absence of community authority over schools, children are not only indoctrinated, but also groomed.
Perhaps Mamet was imagining a character called Teach, not teachers in general, when he used a non-traditional publicity strategy for the Broadway production of one of his finest plays.
When it comes to his friends and connections, as well as human nature in general, Teach is a gangster in “American Buffalo” who is prone to bizarre beliefs verging on insanity.
Sam Rockwell makes the most of a fantastic part as Teach in Circle in the Square’s electrifying revival, which premiered on Thursday. Rockwell plays Teach with a coiled and then terrifyingly uncoiled ferocity.
In the trash business managed by his poker friend Don, Laurence Fishburne in an exquisitely studied portrayal, he is already enraged and prowling the joint like an animal-like hybrid rat-peacock roosting in the shadows.
Don’s gofer and protégé, Bobby, played by the angelic but weak Darren Criss, is so pumped up on dreams of profit that the operation he intends to aid might be jeopardized by his involvement.
American Buffalo’s portrayal of lowlifes like Teach, two-bit grifters aping the realpolitik of American commerce, was revolutionary when it premiered in Chicago in 1975. While it was difficult to empathize with a father who would use an iron on a child, it did raise questions about the respectable businessmen Teach was channeling into his actions.
Savage prole poetry of predation, you would even say, Mamet used vocabulary as vulgar and cadenced as gunfire to express their man-eat-man mentality, which some term capitalism.
Is it any wonder that seeing “American Buffalo” at a time when everyone talks and acts like Teach makes you feel even worse? In the worst-case scenario, we’ve become used to the play’s ideas.
It’s hard to be complacent about this new production, which is the show’s third on Broadway. It’s directed by Neil Pepe with joyous enthusiasm, keeping its focus on the melody of the speech. The only music you’ll hear is that, as Mamet forbids any other type of sound, even amplification.
Sound design is lacking due to the lack of microphones and a sound engineer. It won’t be a problem at all: Circle’s capsule-shaped stage places the audience on three sides, allowing everyone to hear clearly while the actors work their way around the baroque structures of their characters’ mouths.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to communicate with this post.
It doesn’t matter in the slightest.
We’ll jump all over each other as we work at a blood bank if that’s what you want. However, it’s not a good idea.
A director who wishes to explore the larger ramifications of “American Buffalo” is forced to work at the periphery since the language is so rewarding for attentive attention and the story is spring-loaded to keep your focus on its mechanisms.
Longtime Mamet collaborator Pepe mostly moves the characters like mice in a labyrinth on Scott Pask’s clever junk store set. It resembles the ravaged brain of an alcoholic or the shattered conscience of a nation, crammed to the rafters with half-worth centuries of capitalism’s trash.
We view the action and other members of the audience through the rubbish — behind tables of trinkets and stuff hanging in our line of sight — as if to indicate that we are all in this together.
It’s also telling what Pepe has the actors do unintentionally as they make their way through the narrow aisles: When Teach isn’t manning the register, Bobby follows him like a dog. Then again, maybe not so idly after all. Dumbbells, boxing gloves, and “a thing that they stuff in dead pigs” are among the twiddly objects he prefers to play with.
The masculine attitudes of Teach contrast with Don’s milder but not polished interpretation of masculinity: avuncular but frightening, slower to rage but never entirely pleasant. Fishburne’s large, the unshowy performance makes you feel both the joy and the burden of Don’s production of that double image.
To steal the nickel after which the play’s name is titled, he’s a guy of principle; he’s a man without a family. In Bobby’s case, a heroin addict who has relapsed several times, Bobby’s tough-love method seems affecting until you realize it’s brainwashing.
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The term “grooming” may be more appropriate. It would be the same as what Mamet did on Fox about instructors, which is to say, it would be speculative and without foundation. Contradictions like this provide the play with tremendous energy and explosive comedy. When it rains, Teach, who carries a pistol, is a wimp.
Bobby is anxious to learn the rules of a world that has long ago hung him out to dry, despite his lines seldom going beyond five syllables, even in his greatest performances.
I can sympathize with Bobby. Since I am a fan of Mamet’s early work, such as the films “Sexual Perversity in Chicago, The Woods, and Glengarry Glen Ross,” I’ve come to expect that I’ll feel misled by his later work. “China Doll” and “The Penitent,” two more recent productions, aren’t simply odd one-percenter whines; they’re uninteresting.
“American Buffalo” is a great example of how the deterioration of Mamet’s technique matched with the transition in his worldview, from a red-diaper infant to a wealthy apologist. Is it possible for a guy who taught us how the powerless are crushed by the teachings of the mighty to now claim that the issue runs in the opposite direction?
I’m not a culture-killing ax-wielding ninja. Let the market speak for itself, as both Teach and Mamet may suggest. (I doubt that the repulsive “China Doll” will ever have a Broadway revival.) In the end, you have to wonder: Who’s educating whom when a playwright sounds like his characters?
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