American Buffalo
Buffalo’ revival roars along with operatic passion
Chicago Tribune ; Chicago, Ill.; Jan 22, 1991. Richard Christiansen, Entertainment editor. Very early on in “American Buffalo,” Donny, a man who prides himself on being wise in the ways of the world, tries to tell his dim young friend Bobby how life works:
” ‘Cause there’s business,” Donny says, “and there’s friendship.”
“American Buffalo” is about the tragedy that befalls men when they let business mess up friendship, when they lay waste their lives by ignoring the deep bonds of loving one another in favor of chasing after the great god Mammon.
David Mamet doesn’t put it nearly so grandly in his play. The three characters he places in a Chicago secondhand shop are from the junk pile of humanity-little men who are ignorant, foul-mouthed, comical in their shortcomings. Their laughable idea of striking it rich is to pull off the petty burglary of a coin collection that is housed just around the corner.
For Teach, the hopelessly failed wheeler-dealer who takes out the anger against his inadequacies in extravagant flights of rage, the collapse of the burglary scheme means the bitter end of his chance to make some kind of a score at last. He’s left only with the knowledge that he is ridiculous.
The greater sorrow, however, belongs to Donny, the shop owner, who, in listening to Teach’s schemes, has fatally denied his paternal obligations toward the helpless junkie kid Bobby, whom he treats as a surrogate son.
The innocent Bobby, ironically, is the only one of the three whose actions are motivated by love, and not greed, and, for his pains, he is kicked about by Teach and thrown aside by Donny.
In the revival of this modern American masterpiece that Remains Theatre has mounted under the direction of Mike Nussbaum, the tragedy of Donny, Bobby and Teach roars along with grand operatic passion.
Nussbaum, who portrayed Teach in the landmark 1975 Chicago production of “Buffalo,” has gone far afield from that seminal show’s spare, taut style. There’s a ragged street musician providing mood music on his saxophone; and there’s an elaborately realistic setting of the junk shop that stretches from one end of Remains’ wide stage to the next.
Mamet’s poetic heightening of the gutter language of these inarticulate men is still startling in the shock of its humor and the beauty of its rhythms, but the Pinteresque pauses of the dialogue have been all but abolished, the lines racing forward as Teach and Donny rail at each other in ever-increasing desperation.
Sometimes, as the volume goes up and the words speed along, the play shows signs of degenerating into a shouting match. The menace here is all too obvious; there’s nothing insidious about it.
But when the great turning point of the play comes, when the burglary plotting ends in violence, Nussbaum’s hyperactive staging comes into its own with an explosion of rage and frustration.
This is the moment in which William Petersen’s high-speed portrayal of a frenzied Teach reaches its emotional peak, with a lifetime of disappointment erupting in a terrible burst of destruction and a pitiable wail of grief.
Teach has the flashiest speeches in Mamet’s brilliant script, and Petersen goes at them full throttle-twitching nervously and hitching up his trousers with bravado as he spews out his nonsensical wise guy talk.
Donny is a more stolid, less volatile character who nonetheless must dominate the play; and in Larry Brandenburg’s workmanlike portrayal, it is not until Donny turns on Teach in the final moments of the play that one gets to see the dignity and strength of the man.
Kevin Hurley, however, gives a consistently intelligent and deeply moving performance as the slight Bobby. The confusion that clouds his tight face as he tries to fathom what is going on around him is visible, and the shock and sorrow that he feels when he is betrayed by Donny is heartbreaking.
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