Review
AMERICAN BUFFALO
Ground Zero Theatre and U of C Department of Drama
Starring Jim Leyden, Trevor Leigh and Phil Fulton
Written by David Mamet
Directed by Martin Fishman
Runs until September 13
Reeve Theatre (U of C)
I wonder if today’s David Mamet, the Hollywood director and screenwriter, would still be able to write American Buffalo. This 1975 play, one of his earliest, is a real street-level drama, written with the kind of urgency you’d associate with a hungry young playwright, not a big-time mover and shaker.
The young Mamet may be the intellectual superior to his lowbrow characters and he may allow us to laugh at the absurdity of their dim-witted scheme to lift a rare coin collection, but he also understands their motives and the desperation of little men for whom life is always dealing a losing hand.
In the set-smashing climax of this intense chamber piece, the tightly wound Teach, one of Mamet’s great bullshit philosophers, finally cracks under the strain of the street and declares despairingly, "I’m out there every day. There is nothing out there." Those revelatory lines resound like a thunderclap of truth amidst all the cagey bickering and big talk between Teach and his friend-accomplice Donny.
American Buffalo is a small but brilliantly conceived play and a significant prelude to Mamet’s masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross. Unlike the real-estate sharks in that drama, these men barely know how to converse on the telephone, let alone make a deal, but in their minds they, too, are businessmen, chasing the American dream, hustling for the buck they feel is owed to them.
The new production by Ground Zero and the University of Calgary does the work justice. Trevor Leigh as Teach and Jim Leyden as Donny are clearly perfect for their roles, although they take a while to get settled in them. When they do, near the end of Act 1, things begin to sizzle.
Leigh, who has grown in stature as an actor in the last few years, gives a shrewdly observed performance as Teach. Looking like some old greaser, with handlebar moustache, patterned shirt and white cowboy boots, he paces and twitches ever more compulsively as the play progresses, wired on coffee and cigarettes, pushed to a comic near-incoherency by lack of sleep. The only thing he’s missing is a sense of the simmering violence that finally boils over at the climax.
Leyden has the quieter role as Donny, the half-decent, avuncular junkshop owner who’s looking out for the teenage drug addict Bobby (Phil Fulton). Nonetheless, it’s Donny who instigates the robbery plot, convinced that he’s been screwed by a coin collector who bought a rare buffalo-head nickel from him. The fact that Donny has no idea what the nickel is really worth, but instinctively believes he was cheated, is both amusing and poignant. Here’s a guy who’s probably been fucked over by strangers so many times he automatically assumes he’s been taken, yet at the same time he doesn’t realize that one of his cronies has been fleecing him at cards for years.
Yet for all the character’s ignorance, Leyden manages to make him seem reasonable, even level-headed, next to Leigh’s angry, cranked-up Teach, who wants to do the heist so badly it’s like an aching physical need.
Student actor Fulton is impressive as a likable Bobby, whose dumb innocence is sadly mistaken by his elders for low cunning. Martin Fishman’s direction is clean, but Douglas McCullough’s junkshop set could use more clutter – although his dangling chairs and askew picture frames could be a nice symbolic touch, perhaps a reflection of the characters’ disordered minds. A solid start to the theatre season. |
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