Steppenwolf Theatre goes slummin' in Princeton

The Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s current revival of David Mamet’s 1975 play American Buffalo, in residence at Princeton’s McCarter Theater until March 28, is, at once, claustrophobic and explosive, both testosterone-soaked and, surprisingly, deeply sentimental. Mamet, whose plays often pick at scabs on the American psyche, explores the shifting and unsteady sand that lies beneath the relationships between three low-life grifters as they try to plan a robbery.

Set in a sad little basement junk store –the kind in which everything is at least a little bit broken and completely coated with a thick layer of dust -- the plot centers on a group of men, all damaged and powerless, who hatch an inept plot to steal what they imagine is a valuable coin collection. Don, the store’s owner, convinced that a customer has tricked him into selling a valuable coin for much less than it is worth, plots the revenge heist with Bob, his young, slow-witted, part-time assistant. But when Teach, a hustler who spends his days shooting the breeze with the shop owner, gets wind of the scheme, he sees it as an opportunity to change his luck and his life.

Teach convinces the store owner that the scheme will run more smoothly is Bob is sidelined. Although Don is reluctant, he gently nudges the boy out of the way, tossing him a few bucks on the side. But even though Don defers to Teach, he enlists the help of a fourth man, despite Teach’s strong objections, to help them locate, case and rob the collector’s home.

Director Amy Morton has created a world that seems to shrink by inches as the play progresses. Confined and cramped, it is a world very much like the one Samuel Beckett created in Waiting for Godot, in which characters wait, anticipate, complain and grow frustrated. Morton’s vision of Don, Bob and Teach draw on Becket’s Vladimir and Estragon. Don, Bob and Teach want to transform themselves but they are simply not capable of changing anything about their circumstances. They are three characters in a feedback loop; they can hope, they can speculate, they can shake their fists at the sky. They cannot, however, escape their fate. They cannot move.

As the deliberate, brooding owner of the junk shop who sets the very sketchy scheme in motion, Kurt Ehrmann infuses Don with single-minded stubbornness that allows him to fail to notice the flaws in his plan. His Don has a static outlook, with a closely held list of half-truths and urban myths that shape his worldview.

 

Tracy Letts, best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of August: Osage County, is Teach, a pony-tailed, leather-jacketed hustler with a too-loud shirt and too much Brylcreem. Teach, who speaks in terse, aggressive, rat-a-tat diatribes, is a strutting, conniving conman whose braggadocio masks profound insecurity. Letts injects into the character an almost operatic machismo that, ultimately, and surprisingly, is as fragile as lace. Letts’ Teach is the heart, however rheumatic, at the center of the play.

 

As Bob, Patrick Andrews finds the sweet spot halfway between caricature and pathos. His Bob, though intellectually challenged, slowly reveals a crude intelligence, along with a sharply accurate intuition that belies his slowed speech and delayed reactions.

Often considered one of Mamet’s two or three best works and the one that cemented in the minds of theatergoers the trademark dialog -- coarse, vulgar and fast -- so closely associated with him, American Buffalo has lost none of its power to surprise and shock. And the production now at McCarter, hatched in Mamet’s hometown of Chicago and mounted by the Tony Award-winning Steppenwolf Theatre Company, captures the essence of Mamet’s iconic work with precision.