Theatre Exile's "American Buffalo' (2nd review)

A generation ago, when David Mamet was still a hot item, Chicago's Second City troupe did a parody in which actors in a Mamet play found themselves trapped onstage due to their inability to devise an appropriate Mamet-style ending. No matter what theatrical tricks they tried, the stage lights refused to go dark in order to permit their exit. Finally, one exasperated actor threw up his hands in resignation and muttered, "Fuck!"— at which point the lights obligingly blacked out.

Mamet's American Buffalo was something of a revelation when it first surfaced in 1975, with its crackling obscenity-laced dialogue and its unforgiving view of predatory urban males. The novelty has largely worn off, and Mamet, to judge from his later work, has largely burned out. (His insipid screenplay for Wag the Dog in 1997 literally put me to sleep.) But in American Buffalo and the other works from his salad days— most notably Glengarry Glenn Ross— Mamet proved himself a master at capturing the euphemisms and rhetorical devices through which men rationalize and evade the cruelty of their words and deeds.

The three characters in American Buffalo are small-time sleazeballs planning a burglary, but of course the words crime or burglary never cross their lips. Instead, they ramble at length about friendship, loyalty, respect, reciprocity and human decency. Don (Joe Canuso, in the Theater Exile production) is the proprietor of a second-hand store that appears to have no customers; instead it functions more as a robbers' roost where Don and his cronies can size up likely marks. Don fancies himself the wise mentor to his young protégé Bob (Robert DaPonte), explaining the basic rules of adult life ("Keep business and friendship separate") and cutting through commercial complexities ("That's all business is: Common sense, experience and talent"). Yet Don lacks the common sense to perceive the hazard in his partnership with the profane and explosive Teach (Pete Pryor), whose obsessions with the slights accorded to him by others blinds him to his own considerable shortcomings.

The absence of women

Conventional wisdom holds that women are intuitive and men are analytical. Don and Teach fancy themselves analytical men, but they're so busy ranting— and reacting to each other's rants— that they never pause to figure out what's really going on, and consequently they're helpless. The presence of a woman might restrain their behavior and their judgments, but these men avoid women precisely because they resist being called to account. We might as well be in the Wild West, with its excess of boisterous single males obsessed with proving their toughness and unrestrained by the law or religion or the domesticating influence of women.

So American Buffalo offers ample food for thought. Theatre Exile's production is tightly choreographed by Matt Pfeiffer, no easy task with all the door slamming, chest thumping, trashing and smashing involved. Peter Pryor as Teach is a fascinatingly hyperactive creature to watch, reminiscent of a combination of Bill Murray and, in his temper tantrums, of Jack Nicholson (in, say, Carnal Knowledge). The junk-filled set elaborately designed by Matt Saunders is a joy to the eye and leaves nothing to the imagination.

Consider Scorsese, by contrast

My problem with American Buffalo lies simply in my feeling that other writers attack this subject matter more incisively than Mamet does. The Sopranos, say, or the films of Martin Scorsese capture the delusions of urban males and the psychological consequences more realistically, more meaningfully and also more entertainingly. Scorsese's Goodfellas provided a genuinely novel perception on the old "Crime does not pay" theme: His seemingly invincible criminals are brought down not by the law but by their own greed and overconfidence. Even Quentin Tarantino's comic burlesques of the same sort of young urban wiseguys (in, say, Pulp Fiction or Get Shorty) offer more memorable lines or tableaux. (Whenever someone praises me too fulsomely, I find myself recalling— but of course not repeating— Harvey Keitel's wonderfully obscene line from Pulp Fiction: "Let's not start suckin' each other's cocks just yet.")

American Buffalo strikes me as thin gruel by comparison. You will be entertained and perhaps provoked but unlikely to emerge with anything resembling a larger moral lesson. ("Before embarking on a criminal enterprise, choose your associates carefully"? "If timing is important to your work, don't hock your watch"? "Even burglars need therapy"?)

Theatre Exile, to judge from its last two offerings, gravitates (consciously or not) toward plays that examine the unforeseen consequences of relationships. Both American Buffalo and Blackbird dramatize interpersonal conflicts that wouldn't have occurred if the characters had undergone therapy. Come to think of it, most of the theatrical oeuvre as we know it wouldn't exist if the characters had seen a shrink. Modern psychology and psychiatry have barely begun to scratch the surface of the human psyche. It will be interesting to see where playwrights will find material once people start visiting therapists as routinely as they now visit doctors. ïµ



To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Pamela Riley and Gresham Riley, click here.

To read Dan Rottenberg's follow-up, click here.
To read responses, click here.