Theatre Exile's "American Buffalo' (1st review)

David Mamet's testosterone-driven American Buffalo first brought him national recognition more than 30 years ago, and he has specialized in hard-edge, mostly masculine aggression ever since. Theatre Exile has gone back to the source in its revival of the play, which has lost some of its shock value but hasn't really dated.

What is apparent is Mamet's debt to Harold Pinter. Mamet's speech rhythms and sensibility are thoroughly American, but his mise en scène is thoroughly Pinteresque. Words are weapons, always potentially lethal. Manners are scarce. And someone will end up thoroughly humiliated, if not hurt a good deal worse.

American Buffalo takes place in a second-hand store, designed with baroque extravagance by Matt Saunders. The set is so much more than is really called for that it is a kind of fourth performer in this three-character play. It's also a kind of visual equivalent for the verbal exuberance of its central character, Teach, who in Pete Pryor's explosive performance ignites the proceedings.

A pretext for verbal assault

The plot, if there is one, is simplicity itself. Donnie, the storeowner (played by Theatre Exile artistic director Joe Canuso) plans a break-in and robbery with Teach, based on a tip from Bobby (Robert DaPonte), a waif-like drug addict who is himself trying to resell an American Buffalo nickel he apparently overpaid for. Bob's too young and unreliable for the big job, but Donnie and Teach wait for a third partner, Fletch, whose burglary skills are required. Fletch doesn't show up but Bobby does, eager to be cut in. Donnie, who has a soft spot for the lad, is indulgent, but Teach sees his payday slipping away.

As in Pinter, the plot is a pretext for verbal and finally physical assault. Donnie and Teach don't really know what they're trying to steal; they don't even know where it is. Not many capers are this haphazard. When Teach comes into the store, he's fuming unaccountably at a presumed slight from a mutual female acquaintance, though precisely what's she done isn't clear.

A man with no inside

Nor is anything else about Teach, except that life is one long series of slights and insults designed to tick him off. They are—real or imagined— the actual content of his life, a testosterone-fueled rage against all and sundry that, since it has no true object, expresses itself as a virtually non-stop tirade.

In a different world, what's getting Teach would be some unacknowledged inner hurt or grievance, but in the world of Pinter and Mamet the secret is that there is no secret. Teach has no inside, or at least none that can be even notionally presupposed. People are simply their behaviors, and there's nothing to be done about it— except, of course, to fight back when they are too unruly or violent.

This seems to be the strategy of Donnie, who isn't surprised by anything Teach does, doesn't take offense at verbal abuse, and hardly reacts even to assault and mayhem. It isn't that he's intimidated, or even especially tolerant. It's just that he accepts things as they are. You take them or walk away from them; you don't change them.

Is capitalism the culprit?

There's a subtext in this in which Mamet seems to suggest that bullying, violent, even quasi-psychotic behavior is in fact the logical product of capitalism, a point he makes more explicitly in his Glengarry Glen Ross, a much finer play. Teach has a few riffs in which he suggests that crime is simply American free enterprise, part of the great game of getting what's yours (especially if you can take it from someone else). Donnie doesn't rise to this bait; ideology is the last thing on his mind.

Pinter, whose politics were far more publicly radical, doesn't go in for it either. He simply lets his characters speak and act for interests that must be presumed as selfish, since in his theater no other modality of human relationship exists.

Pryor's dual triumph

The other reason Teach holds center stage is that he has testosterone for three: You either fight him, or let him rant. This puts the dramatic burden squarely on the performer, who must give Teach the requisite energy while making him funny enough to bear watching. Pete Pryor succeeds brilliantly at both tasks, and the opening night audience rewarded him with not only an ovation but also whoops of praise. It's a performance not to be missed in this theater season.

Something else might be observed about the world of Pinter and Mamet. There was once a category of theater known as the comedy of manners, where characters acted accordingly to socially defined rules of behavior. You can see the fag-end of this tradition in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which the two tramps perform elaborate rituals of courtesy that are meant, given their situation, as a joke. Nowadays, the very idea of manners is a joke, which is why cell-phone users shred what used to be public space with siren-like ringers and conversations carried on at the decibel level of Swiss alpinists. Teach might have seemed a bit of an oddity back in 1975 when American Buffalo was new, but his disciples today are legion. ïµ



To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Pamela Riley and Gresham Riley, click here.
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