For male actors-of-a-certain-age, you probably can’t find two juicier roles than those of Teach and Donny in David Mamet’s play American Buffalo. The former is a tightly wound, seething mass of resentments, a fast-talking blowhard both overconfident in his own competencies and conspiratorially certain that the world aims to fuck him over at every opportunity. The latter is a junk shop owner who has taken Bobby, a recovering drug addict, under his wing, and whose tough-love approach to mentorship feels exploitative, at best. The play’s plot involves a planned robbery to recover a coin – the American buffalo nickel of the title – that Donny believes he got duped into selling to a customer for a fraction of its true value. But both the heist and the coin serve the play merely as vehicles for its real interest: an anthropological study, if you will, of the mundane aspirations and frustrations of American men.
Forgive me for repeating myself, but such material is fully on brand for barebones productions, and you’ve gotta admire a company that not only knows what it does well, but continues to do it ever better and better. Under Melissa Martin’s carefully calibrated direction, the three actors flesh out the wants, needs, and power dynamics between the characters with acuity and insight. Take, for example, the opening scene, in which Donny (played by David Whalen) chides the much younger Bobby (Brenden Peifer) for having failed to keep an eye on their intended mark and schools him on what it takes to be successful in life: Whalen’s alpha-male Donny keeps his gaze laser-focused on Bobby’s face, while Peifer’s diffident Bobby looks anywhere but in Donny’s eyes. Their relationship is not only instantly legible but also feels lived-in and patterned; they fill a role and need in each other’s lives, one that comfortably orients their status not only vis-a-vis each other but also the world at large. Then with the arrival of Teach (Patrick Jordan), already in a high dunder over a perceived insult, the atmosphere shifts perceptibly – he is a different sort of alpha male, a bull in a china shop (literally, as it turns out later in the action), and Whalen registers the shift by changing his character’s tactic for maintaining status: instead of direct eye contact, he manspreads and offers Teach his back, as if to signal, through indifference, that he perceives no threat here.
For Jordan and Whalen, in particular, these characters provide an opportunity to exercise their acting chops to the fullest. Teach is hard to like – he’s a self-centered manipulator with delusions of grandeur – but Jordan offers us enough glimpse of his heart and soul that we can’t help but feel a little sorry for him, and may even want to root a bit for him. Whalen is relaxed and confident as Donny, comfortable in his skin and solid in his status as king of “his fort,” as he calls his shop. And Peifer plays the relatively underwritten role of Bobby with nuance, weaving together an eager-beaver novice’s dimwittedness with a street-survivor’s understanding of the necessity of keeping his meal ticket happy.
The production – which closes on Dec. 10 – has everything going for it: top-notch cast, tight directing, beautifully detailed set (Tony Ferrieri) and period costuming (Patrick Jordan), and the strange poetry of the American vernacular that marked Mamet’s writing at his creative height. In recent years Mamet himself has, of course, sunk to the lowest of lows, embracing QAnon conspiracy theories, plandemic nonsense, election denialism, and the homophobia and moral-panic-mongering of the far right, which makes admiring his work complicated, to say the least; the great writer of grifters has turned out to be a supporter and spokesperson for the greatest grift in American history.
If it helps, apparently the royalties for American Buffalo go to Mamet’s ex-wife.