excellently cast and brilliantly played

July 29, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

The setting for David Mamet’s American Buffalo now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival is a Chicago junk shop crammed with worthless debris of decades and during the play inhabited by nary a customer.

However, before the action of the play begins there has been a customer who suspiciously paid $80 for a rare Buffalo nickel and this event triggers all that follows.

Three low-life characters greedily hatch a plan to, having thought they had located the customer, break into his home and steal what they assume to be a valuable coin collection. Their heist fails to work out.

The play’s plot is on the surface a thin one, but the play is not. It is dynamically present in the three characters and especially in the language (and lack of it) that are the essence of the play.

The junk shop’s owner, Don (Jim Frangione) is a slow, sad, thick headed man bumbling his way through poverty, not only of cash but of wit, words and a future. He, in a strange and touching way in this harsh play, befriends and tries to teach Bobby, a teenage lad who seems to have no family connections.

Bobby (Sean Nelson), who first played this role in the Dustin Hoffman film version of the play seven years ago, is a pathetic loser, liar, not very bright teenager. He serves as a go-fer for Don, mistakenly provides information for the heist, is victimized and almost killed.

And then there is “Teach” who is the brains, such as they are, of the entire venture. Teach (Chris Noth) is a really scary character. Audience members who have known him from TV roles such as the one he played in Law and Order will scarcely recognize him. From the moment he smashes on stage his hysterical anger at the world he inhabits, and his maniacal frustration to vent that anger are absolutely chilling.

He is violent and loquacious but with such a limited vocabulary that every sentence contains an obscenity and the f-word, variations, replaces the words he gropes for.

And there are pauses. Great pauses. In his dialog and in that of the other two. This language and lack of it are a Mamet specialty and handled beautifully by the three actors.

They cannot even connect with each other. Some of their exchanges are like the old joke concerning “Who’s on first”, but are funny, only in a menacing way. All three characters thus tend to be scary in their talented, love/hate inadequate relationship.

Anders Cato’s direction is intricate and serves the play well, at times rapid paced and violent, at others holding the pause just long enough, combining smashing violent moments when the wall literally comes tumbling down, with those of tender pathos when Don cradles the wounded Bobby.

The promotion for this play warns it is not for children, and even some adults may be offended by the language (or lack of it) despite the fact that the play is 30 years old and street language has been with us, whether we want it or not, for a long time.

As for the BTF production, it is a fine one in all respects; excellently cast, and brilliantly played. Mamet admirers will love it and those to whom Mamet is new may find that there is a strange poetics in the fractured vernacular, where words rattle in a convoluted gibberish that comes almost tortured from minds that seem incapable of coherent thought.

And the theme of the play is broader than the plight of these three characters — “there’s business and there’s friendship” on many economic levels.

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