‘American Buffalo’ Does The Talking For Mamet, And James McAvoy As ‘Cyrano’ Says It All – Theater Reviews
deadline.comOffstage, and sometimes on, David Mamet can be infuriating and exasperating, as anyone who has witnessed his recent nonsensical, offensive media blitz can attest, and then along comes something like American Buffalo – possibly his greatest work, all due apologies to Glengarry Glen Ross – with a cast so in sync with the playwright’s “profane poetry” that for a couple hours it’s not impossible to put aside whatever it is Mamet thinks needs saying on Fox News these days.Superbly performed by Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss, with director (and longtime Mamet collaborator) Neil Pepe finding every comic beat and threatening glare, American Buffalo – opening tonight on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre – retains a vitality that eluded some recent equally starry revivals of works by Mamet’s bad-boy contemporaries (here’s looking at you, True West).First performed in 1975, American Buffalo was instantly notorious for Mamet’s then-novel rapid-fire cadences and casually strewn vulgarities, and it still packs plenty of both.
The stuttering, overlapping rhythms no longer startle – the style was co-opted and spread far and wide ages ago by just about every post-Sopranos crime show on premium cable – but they do thrill, at least when done with the panache on display in this production.The vulgarities, too, remain.
If the F-bombs don’t shock, the misogynist and homophobic epithets certainly do, perhaps more than ever. When Rockwell’s ill-tempered Teach refers to an (offstage) lesbian couple in degrading terms – a concentration camp is mentioned – the words sting regardless of the fact that Teach is speaking the lingua franca of his shoddy milieu (and certainly regardless of his oft-stated and seemingly
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