Erratic Scripts

...On the other hand, most people who have seen American Buffalo-whether in Chicago in 1975, on Broadway in 1977, or the current production at the Greenwich Village Circle in the Square-Are convinced it is one of Mamet's best works, and I think they are wrong...

...A second happy Hudson inspiration was having actress Collen Dewhurst try her talent as a director by staging this work, initially produced in Vancouver four years ago...

...indeed Ethel Barrymore is suddenly turned into a non-person...

...We were in the ruins of the Berlin of 1944, but to be impressed by it, not molested: Nobody tripped over obstacles or had to change places or had water or plaster falling down on him in the name of "audience participation...

...Bobby, Don's gofer and floor-sweeper, periodically fetches the bag from some drug store...

...Richard Peaslee's handling of the music and chorus contributed to this happy result by not allowing them to overstep the bounds of accompaniment, by keeping the decibels down, and by using such expressive instruments as William Schimmel's accordion rather than "concrete" sound effects...

...not a word is wasted or misplaced-or misused...

...Some of the playwright's lovely one-acters fit the praise far more aptly...

...That is difficult to stomach...

...The artistic achievement of Ned and Jack would have been complete if Rosen had not made one big mistake that unbalances the construction of his play...

...I am not altogether alone...

...What reality...

...Finally, Teach makes a hat out of a newspaper and goes into the rain to get his car...

...For although I have tried hard to discover the source of American Buffalo's wideac-clain, I have not succeeded...

...During the rest of the play the three men-who make up the entire cast, with the most acceptable being Clifton James as Don and the worst being Al Pacino-Are plotting the theft of a rare American Buffalo nickel from a coin collector...

...The cruel scene was magnificantly orchestrated by Colleen Dewhurst and masterfully played by Dwight Schultz as Ned and by Peter Michael Goetz as Jack...

...Both have an honorable place in the American theater, so it is painful not to be able to say anything laudatory about them this time...

...The third exercise in tedium starts with the arrival of Al Pacino as Walter Cole, called Teach...

...Reunion is a tender, touching story...

...But unlike his friend Barrymore, who has his fate in his own hands and is angry only because he does not know what to do with himself, Sheldon tries to keep down his despair and to confront what he cannot prevent with equanimity and humor...

...Rosen posits that shortly after midnight on November 17, 1922 , Barry-more went straight from his truimph in Hamlet to his friend Sheldon's apartment...

...But under Carl Weber's sharply delineated, clockworklike, yet harmoniously unified direction, the poet's voices build up to a very interesting demonstration of total theater...

...But Brown's long pauses, apparently designed to give weight to the empty speeches, merely serve to underline their meaningless...

...He was still wearing the costume of the Prince of Denmark under an overcoat that had pockets large and numerous enough to contain three bottles of champagne...

...American Buffalo, a play in two acts lacking sufficient substance even for a quick one-acter, offers an unrelenting torrent of words that are realistic enough if realism means that every fifth or sixth word has to be an obscenity...

...If Sheldon Rosen has no meaningful place for her in his scheme of things, he should have kept Ned and Jack what it really is, a two-character play...

...The production of American Buffalo at the Circle in the Square comes from New Haven's Long Wharf Theater and is directed by Arvin Brown...

...Without ever turning its back on the harsh truth that spawned it...

...Moreover, it is beautifully written...

...Bobby (Thomas Waites) starts crying like a baby and says that his ear is bleeding...

...The last scenes are devoted to discussions between Don and Teach about taking Bobby to a hospital...

...Teach paces up and down, gesticulating and repeating that everything is screwed up...

...Leaving the Circle I overheard a man say to his companion: "I really didn't get what it was all about...

...Teach-such a nervous wreck that it is difficult to image how hecould last more than a week in the world he lives in-Gets angry and hits Bobby over the head...

...The audience now is free to leave, and the critics to write their heartfelt reviews...

...But nothinggoes smoothly...

...Yes, that's what she said, although everybody knows that he is always ready "to pop" for a sweet roll or a roastbeef sandwich...

...What theater...

...In the first scene, Ethel Barrymore (Barbara Caruso) precedes her brother John to Sheldon's apartment for no other reason than to prepare the field for what is tocome...

...In the first act the words stream from Don, whose basement junkshop'smain feature is the card table he dines on from a brown pap-erbag...

...So if The Fuehrer Bunker is not the deep analysis into the "destructive feelings and intentions" of the NazileadersW...

...He is furious because he just went somewhere for a cup of coffee, and when he took a piece of toast from the plate of a woman named Ruthie, she said "Help yourself...

...It uses factual background to venture into some possible aspects of their relationship, and to probe the feelings that might have animated them at a crucial moment in their tragic destinies...

...Carl Weber works from the outside, and his actors, moving somewhat like the marionettes Meyerhold was accused of seeing in his casts, fit together with marvelous precision...

...In 1977, one New York critic described it as a "touching, pointedly ironic play [that] says a lot about the relationship between reality and theater...

...This results in a highly dramatic scene where Barrymore, sufficiently sober to know what he is doing, tears up and throws away the only copy of Sheldon's last play...

...Jack is John Barrymore at the zenith of his career in Hamlet in New York, destroying himself by mixing Hollywood artificiality with his theatrical firewater...

...Though Barrymore empathizes with his friend, he also envies his calm and his courage...

...For The Fuehrer Bunker the American Place Theater was turned into a bombed-out shell, with carpets ripped out, rows of seats removed and others partly broken up...

...One of their unbelievably monotonous and boring conversations obstensibly deals with vitamins, the importance of breakfast, the fact that you can't live on coffee alone, and how good yogurt is for you...

...On Stage ERRATIC SCRIPTS byleosauvage Those who had the misfortune of catching Lone Canoe at the Goodman Theater in Chicago last year soon felt they were watching David Mamet's worst play, and I think they were right...

...The Hudson Guild Theater had a more inspired idea last month when it presented a limited engagement of Ned and Jack by Sheldon Rosen, a New York born playwright living in Canada...

...His direction may be Al Pacino's only excuse for two hours of obnoxious rambling and rumbling: The director probably thinks this is the right way for the actor to convey the shiftless existence of the character...

...Ned and Jack is an imaginary episode in the life of two very real personalities, two extraordinary characters who did more than simply exist...

...In Reunion, for example, which I happily discovered one night at the Guthrie II in MinneAL PACINO apolis, a simple everyday situation is captured at the precise moment when it connects the past to the future and is transformed into a dramatic sequence with a new life of its own...

...D. Snodgrass wanted it to be, it is something else, and probably better...

...The lengthy encounter seems to portend that Ethel Barrymore will figure prominently in what follows, but the playwright drops her...

...She responded: "Neither did I." I had to resist chiming in, "Well, it was about nothing...

...For it is doubtful such an analysis could have been handled well on stage, but W. D. Snodgrass' lines sometimes his own verses and sometimes textual excerpts from Himmler's personal files-were exactly what Weber needed to give us, in the welcome ruins of Hitler's Berlin (a few steps from Rockefeller Center), an unexpected evening of remarkably well-coordinated poetic and satirical theater...

...Snodgrass' investigations do not give us any new insights into what might have been going on in the heads-it is impossible to speak of the hearts-of characters named Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering or Joseph Goebbels...

...w ? D. Snodgrass, whose The Fuehrer Bunker was seen in limited engagement last month at the American Place Theater, published the work in 1977 as A Cycle of Poems in Progress...

...Ned is Edward Sheldon an important playwright before World War I and in the early '20s whose paralyzing arthritis eventually isolated him from life until his death in 1946...

...The author of Ned and Jack assumes Sheldon has just learned his life is worse than finished because his sickness has been diagnosed as incurable yet not fatal...

...Then the man who won the $400 and was supposed to be the fourth accomplice fails to show up because, Bobby reports, he was mugged and had his jaw broken...

...Another stupefying exchange dwells on Don's having lost $400 to someone at that same table the night before...

...His "deeper intentions," he explained in a program note, were "to investigate the thoughts and feelings" of the Nazis by including "voices they would hide from others, even from themselves...

...They are unable to ascertain whether the collector is in his apartment or not...

...He must already have consumed at least one bottle, stimulating some buoyant carousing but not drowning his persistent dark forebodings about his future...