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W Weekly Where the buffalo-head nickels roam By Saraya Brewer When David Mamet’s play American Buffalo premiered to Chicago
audiences in 1975, it saw no shortage of dropped jaws. Whether the
audiences were squirming uncomfortable in their seats due to the
free-flowing obscenities and brash portrait of American capitalism,
or just reeling in the shock that somebody had finally taken the art
of theater language to a new level, the sense that they were
experiencing something new was unanimous. Though the shock of gritty
realism and the repetition of the f-bomb in live theater has
considerably died down in the last 30 years, next week Lexington
will have the chance to experience the theatrical gem that is “American Buffalo is one of those plays that helped change the
American theater landscape,” says director Eric Seale. “ In the 70s
especially, people wanted theater to be this charming, cute escapism
of musicals and sweet stories, and you know, everything wraps up
nicely in the Playwright Mamet, whose repertoire includes Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross, definitely doesn’t concern himself with sweetness or comforting resolution. American Buffalo takes place in a Chicago junk shop, and follows three small-time crooks as they plot to rob a coin collector, all the while justifying their actions as legitimate business in the name of capitalism and free enterprise. Shop owner Donny (played by Kody Kiser) enlists his teenaged gofer, Bobby (played by 16-year-old Sayre student C. G. Niquette), to steal back a valuable buffalo-head nickel he recently sold, after realizing the nickel was possibly worth a lot more than the $90 he got from it. Once his down-on-his-luck buddy, Teach (played by Bob Singleton), catches wind of the scheme, he insists on being in on it, and the characters uncover the dark underbelly of greed and capitalism (incidentally, some of the very attributes that led to the near-extinction of the American buffalo itself…hmmm). Singleton describes his character, the disheveled and
violet-tempered Teach, as “one of those people that tries to follow
at least the shadier rules of business, but without doing the 9-5
version of it. You know, you see a lot of illicit enterprises that
are successful because they are run well from a business sense,
they’re just unethical, or violent, or illegal, or all of the
above.” Since Robert Duvall’s portrayal of Teach in the 1977
Broadway version of the play, theatergoers have seen performances of
this character by Al Pacino, William H. Macy (who also played Bobby
in the play’s first production), and Sex in the City’s Chris
North.While Mamet’s characters, however deplorable they may be,
inevitably precede the plot, it’s his pioneering use of language
that puts Buffalo on the map as a modern American classic. The
characters talk, well, exactly how you would expect uneducated,
inner-city Chicago drifters to “Mamet should be known as a language playwright,” Seale said, “not because he uses obscenity sometimes in his work, which is why they call him that, but because he writes really amazing language. It has a sort of cadence to it. He took iambic pentameter and he kind of turned it on its ear.” Fortunately for the crew, the Balagula Theatre at Natasha’s Café,
with the exposed brick wall and barred windows behind the stage,
lends itself nicely to the set of a Chicago shop. Because it’s not
exactly set up as a theater venue, the space can often pose a
challenge to the cast and crew of a play. (On a side note, Black Diamond, the buffalo rumored to be the model
for the original Buffalo nickel in 1913, was sold to a meat-packing
company a couple of years after the debut of the coin. Despite
public efforts to save him, but in line with free enterprise, the
company went on to |
