NEW YORK — David Mamet — the confounding, outspoken playwright that artistic progressives are dying to cancel — wrote “American Buffalo” in 1975, when he was just 27 years old.
Now, 46 years later, that same play is being revived for the third time on Broadway with a starry, accomplished and all-in cast made up of Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne and Darren Criss, working under the energized direction of Neil Pepe.
The script is a work of genius, of course, and a much misunderstood masterpiece. But this revival — although lively and highly entertaining and far better cast than the 2008 attempt — doesn’t delve so deep into the real emotional core of the drama. Pity. It has the horses to do so.
When he wrote this three-hander in a crummy hotel, Mamet had just returned to his hometown of Chicago after hanging around an East Coast college. By his own admission, he was lacking friends, skills and money. But Mamet would walk by the antique, or junk, stores on Chicago’s North Side and he hatched the idea for a caper play about a kid named Bobby who hangs around such shady emporia and who finds himself caught up in a small-bore scheme hatched by characters named Teach and Donny to rob a rich Chicagoan out of his valuable buffalo nickel. Hence the deceptively simple title.
The play’s three characters roar at each other in sparse patriarchal metaphor, demanding verbal submission and claiming victory, even though nothing they are actually saying or doing or achieving matters a jot in the grand scheme of things. These are small-time hustlers, masters of a universe of nothing.
Male actors often love “American Buffalo” for its spectacular monologues (”F---in’ Ruthie,” and all that), masterpieces of profane concision, and its singular display of pyrotechnic verbosity. And that’s very much on display in Pepe’s production: A big-haired Rockwell roars onto the stage, every inch the 1970s hero in his own head only, and lets fly in every direction at Circle in the Square.
The contrast with Fishburne, a rooted and physically imposing actor who locks eyes with Rockwell and cues up his unhinged verbal outbursts like a stationmaster dispatching trains, is rich indeed. Criss’ Bobby is like a caboose with whiplash, never knowing on which track to run.
That’s all cool to watch play out on Scott Pask’s deliciously cluttered setting, especially as Pepe knows when to keep audiences in the dark. But what we don’t really see here is the battle for Bobby’s soul, the war of potential father figures influencing an unmoored kid, maybe a metaphor for American or whatever, but most clearly an encapsulation of the playwright himself.
Rockwell is terrifically flamboyant but could do to be more dangerous, just as Criss needs to show more of the price his Bobby’s soul pays for hanging around with these two nefarious characters. If the play is to be more than edgy fun, it has to probe issues of parenting. And, of course, it also has to wrestle with another crucial Mamet theme: How American capitalism screws over those cut out of the elite, forcing them to emulate its competitiveness without any hope of real achievement. All they can do is damage. Both to themselves and to their young.
The show hits some of those notes, but never digs far enough into the consequence of there being no consequence for anything.
Today’s talk-show Mamet, of course, says stuff far removed from what this play is about, which is what his many detractors find so confounding. So be it. He is a writer who probed the American psyche and changed the course of 20th-century American theater. He then changed himself. People do. It does not invalidate their work.
The best productions of Mamet always probe the vulnerability that this great American writer hid so carefully from casual glances, never more so than in this particularly brilliant script.
Audiences will have fun here, as they usually do with this play. We await, though, a more revealing revival.
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Now at Circle in the Square Theatre, 1633 Broadway, New York; americanbuffalonyc.com
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