On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage MAMET'S AMERICAN APHASIA BY LEO SAUVAGE The Long Wharf Theater production of David Mamet's American Buffalo, directed by Arvin Brown and starring Al Pacino, has returned to New York...
...To see a show that is truly funny -the funniest in town, by my estimation?a theatergoer has to stray uptown to Palsson's Supper Club on West 72nd Street...
...Bob: I'm sorry, Donny...
...Aphasia, to borrow the dictionary definition, is an "impairment or loss of the faculty of using or understanding spoken or written language...
...Bob: Come on, Teach, eat something...
...Don insists, "Never skip breakfast, Bob...
...The same actress dons all the necessary padding to play the "screamgirl" from Dreamgirls, and resurrects the "out-Holly-wooed" Ra-quel Welch as Woman of the Year...
...Alessandrini makes almost miraculous use of a stage and backstage that together would not fill half of Donny Dubrow's junk shop at the Booth...
...I blamed Brown exclusively for the long pauses evidently designed to give the empty speeches weight...
...Considering the speed of the changes, each number is amazingly different from the preceding one in physical appearance as well as conceit...
...Yet from what we can see the junk business is not exactly booming...
...A few minutes later we come to a lengthy scene involving a disagreement over an English muffin that Don (played at the Booth by J.J...
...In handling his cast, Brown has successfully eliminated some of Pacino's worst mannerisms...
...They are the most talented quartet-or sextet, with Barton and Alessandrini-north or south of Lincoln Center...
...Don sits by the telephone and Teach paces, both men becoming increasingly nervous...
...Teach: I don't want anything...
...Don: What do you want...
...Bob: It's okay...
...acosmiceavesdropperwho'scaught the American aphasia...
...The producers, to judge by the quotes they have selected for the newspaper advertisements, seem intent on selling/1 merican Buffalo as a commercial farce about three small-time thieves who theorize about a relatively simple robbery as if they were plotting the bank job of the century, and then prove too dumb to carry it off: "An uproariously funny evening...
...Passe-koff brings back Evita, stretching her arms wide and singing in the voice of Patti Lupone: "Don't cry for me, Bar-bra Streisand...
...Bob says, "I'm not hungry...
...As for the "social statement" view, it has been expressed in such laudatory terms as "Mamet means for the situation to represent America and its capitalistic system," or "Mamet has found a metaphor for the spiritual failure of entrepreneurial capitalism...
...Johnston) tells Bob (James Hayden) to get for the third and last character to appear, Teach (Pacino...
...Pause...
...Johnston, who created the part when the play made its debut in Chicago, at least speaks loudly and clearly...
...Unfortunately, with two of the three characters sickening mental cases and the third ludicrously exaggerated in his own way, whatever possibilities there might have been for humor fall flat...
...He convinces Don to let him perform the burglary in place of Bob...
...Donny was the most acceptable character two yearsago, and he still is...
...Enter Teach, a half-crazed street tough with a tendency to philosophize-like an aphasiac overcome by logorrhea, perhaps-about the world in general and womankind in particular...
...The play is at least as boring and silly to read as it is to watch...
...Is this the theater of the absurd...
...Actor/musician Fred Barton is at the piano, playing well-known show tunes that, refurbished with director Gerard Alessandrini's lyrics, would most certainly be forbidden to return to Broadway...
...As Bob, he groaned and moaned and wailed less intolerably than Thomas Waites did at the Circle in the Square...
...My conclusion is that I probably felt fine...
...I went to see it again, if only to make sure I wasn't simply in a bad mood when it played two years ago at the downtown Circle in the Square ("On Stage," NL, June 29, 1981...
...Pause...
...But in spite of Teach's not wanting any assistance, Don insists on adding an unseen fourth man named Fletch to the team for a very good reason: "Fletch knows how to get in...
...This prompts him to buy a coin catalogue, and now he has decided to organize the theft of his customer's collection...
...Where the other two get their money is something of a mystery...
...Bob is the only one of the trio who, we may assume, receives some sort of salary...
...Thus Bob ends up in the hospital, too...
...So what, Bob...
...Enormously funny...
...Pacino, except when he shouts, is often as difficult to hear as to understand...
...It begins, for example, with this trenchant exchange between Don Dubrow, a junk shop owner, and Bob, a mentally deficient youth with a drug problem who is his gofer...
...The whole company does-and does in-anthony Quinn and Zorba...
...Donny has received $90 from a coin collector for a rare "Indian Head" or "American Buffalo" nickel he had left amid a pile of far less valuable junk...
...Although some members of the audience seemed repelled, most were apparently happy to be recognized as "adult" theatergoers who could handle such a daring script...
...One critic went so far as to say the three deadbeats "present a working class America...
...One of the two best-known English expletives is vocalized 138 times, the other 40 (more or less, I may have missed a few...
...Nevertheless, the director is ultimately responsible for the staging of a work, so my pardon is not absolute...
...Now, as then, the show has drawn a chorus of hosannas from the critics...
...Teach: I don't want an English muffin...
...Pause...
...Like steelworkers or garment industry seamstresses...
...in fact, he is driven there by a placated Teach...
...On Stage MAMET'S AMERICAN APHASIA BY LEO SAUVAGE The Long Wharf Theater production of David Mamet's American Buffalo, directed by Arvin Brown and starring Al Pacino, has returned to New York ?this time it is at Broadway's Booth Theater-with a new supporting cast...
...Bob: Today...
...And Teach, despite boasting of his generosity in paying for coffee, cigarettes and sweet rolls, has no discernible source of income at all...
...Don: So...
...When the show first came to Broadway in 1977, Mamet was praised by a reviewer as "that rare bird, an American playwright who's a language playwright...
...The play has been interpreted as both a comedy and a dramatic social commentary...
...He intends to leave the break-in to Bob, who may be in love with his boss...
...As the drama grows still more taut, the trio wonders whether a cup of coffee missing after Bob's first trip to the neighborhood diner, but retrieved on a return voyage, has been paid for once or twice...
...Shortly afterward Don wants Bob to have some breakfast...
...Bob: It might...
...I would say it accurately describes the affliction suffered by the author no less than his three characters...
...Reading the script, I obviously discovered he was following the playwright's instructions...
...My favorite routine of the evening, though, is Quinn's rendition of the Show Boat classic, "Ol' George Abbott...
...Don then extols the "nutritive benefits" of yogurt...
...Don explains that the morning repast is "the most important meal of the day," whereupon Bob repeats "I'm not hungry...
...It works as neither...
...American Buffalo is no Bald Soprano...
...He has done nothing, however, about his star's Actors Studio way of talking...
...Teach: Yeah...
...Teach: You think so, huh...
...Don: All right...
...The story that emerges amid all the cursing is hardly a redeeming feature of the evening...
...Pause...
...Finally, Bob arrives bearing the news that Fletch has been mugged and is in the hospital with a broken jaw...
...Here, on the small, curved, silvery stage that comes into view after the climb up a steep staircase, Sella Palsson of Reykjavik, Iceland is presenting the latest version of a review produced since 1981 called Forbidden Broadway...
...Bob: I don't know...
...The satire is sharp enough to devastate its objects without being mean...
...I found the repetitiousness an insufferable device...
...Jan Neuberger, Marilyn Passe-koff, Patrick Quinn, and Doug Voet perform with ingenuity, sagacity, wit, imagination, and excellent voices...
...Neuberger gives us a few good laughs at the expense of Liza Minnelli and Carol Channing, and she and Voet perfectly parody Twiggy and Tommy Tune in My One and Only...
...An examination of the published edition only compounded my negative impression...
...Bob: I'm sorry, Donny...
...The possibility that the owner might remember it is dismissed as "not based on fact...
...If the words "love" and "roses" were uttered 178 times in less than two hours, the result would be the same...
...Teach: Well, what do you think...
...Teach: I don't want an English muffin...
...Pause...
...A cliche is a cliche...
...Teach, believing Bob has schemed with Fletch behind his and Don's backs, attacks the poor gofer, drawing blood from his ear...
...1 like some of Mamet's other plays very much, but it took a lot of will power for me not to leave this one at intermission...
...During most of the second act, which takes place on the big night, Don and Teach wait for Fletch at the shop...
...Don: Yeah...
...Mamet seems headed in that direction at one point in the second act when he comes up with an almost funny exchange of suppositions about where the owner of a safe would write down the combination...
...The numismatist, of course, will keep his collection...
...But one got the impression that he was trying to remember the pain and despair he felt when, at age 10, he lost control of his bicycle, crashed into his neighbor's fence and injured his ear...
...Bob asks, "Why...
...Pause...
...Fascinating and funny .. . Memorable, fascinating and funny...
...Even a colleague who was less enthusiastic than before about the direction and the leading man still celebrated the text as "one of the best American plays of the last decade...
...While I am not any more enamored of Brown's direction than I was two years ago, I will amend one criticism...
...We are treated to an unending repetition of four-letter words, plus related anatomical and physiological constructions...
...Don: Get him an English muffin, and make sure they give you jelly...
...Teach: Is it going to rain...
...From here Mamet segues into the vital issue of rain: Teach (to Bob): How is it out there...
...If he thinks that Teach has to mumble on stage because he does so in real life, the actor's theory is severely misguided...
...Don seems to always have a bundle of banknotes in his pocket, and he speaks without distress about being one of the losers in a poker game where $400 changed hands...
...Elocution problems also troubled the talented Hay-den, another devotee of The Method, whose tragic death occurred a week after the performance I saw...
...This bit of fun, though, is drowned in the muddy context...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 21
