‘American Buffalo’ at the Gnu Theatre

It’s three men and a buffalo-head nickel in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” (1977), opening Thursday at the Gnu Theatre in North Hollywood. The theater’s artistic head, Jeff Seymour, is directing.

“What’s so wonderful about this play?” Seymour asked rhetorically. “Aside from the way Mamet has with (his low-brow, fragmented) dialogue--which is fascinating when it’s done right--the story has to do with friendship, loyalty: how we treat our friends.”

The plot centers on resale shop-owner Donny (played by Robert Costanzo), who plans a burglary with his young gofer Bobby (Dennis Christopher); their plan is then discovered by Donny’s neurotic friend Teach (Joe Spano) and becomes a three-way gambit that takes on explosive dimensions as long-suppressed fears and frustrations erupt under pressure.

Seymour swears the recent run of all-male plays at the Gnu has come about strictly by accident.

“All I wanted to do with my last plays was find something for Patti D’Arbanville (who appeared in John Patrick Shanley’s “Italian American Reconciliation” at the Gnu in 1987),” he said. “I set out to do that--and came up with (the very macho) ‘El Salvador.’ I set out again to find another Patti D’Arbanville play--and found ‘American Buffalo.’ ”

If Seymour has the kind of winner in “Buffalo” that he had in “El Salvador” last year, d’Arbanville shouldn’t mind waiting another few months.

WAR PLAY: “The title’s misleading,” said director Deborah LaVine said of Terri Wagener’s “War Brides,” opening Friday at Long Beach’s International City Theatre. “It has nothing to do with war or brides.” The piece, which LaVine describes as “lyrical, very lazy, sort of Southern Gothic,” focuses on seven women in a Montgomery, Ala., boarding house, circa 1917. “It’s about what happens to these women when the world changes around them. In this case, war is the catalyst.”

LaVine, who staged last year’s critically acclaimed “Distant Fires” at this theater, was drawn to the play and the opportunity to work with an all-female cast. (“Fires” had been all-male.) She acknowledged that the experience of working with women is very different from that of working with men.

“The men instantly created a family, understood what they were after and formed relationships,” she said. “Women are slower to do that. They’ve been working in their own spheres. Only now are they starting to become a unit. Also, women see me as a buddy. For the men, I was more of a nurturer, the mother figure.”

CRITICAL CROSS FIRE: “Stars in the Morning Sky,” Russian playwright Alexander Galin’s dramatization of the official “sweep” relocating Moscow prostitutes for the 1980 Olympic Games, opened recently at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Bill Bushnell directs.

Said Dan Sullivan in The Times: “The play connects with the American viewer--both with our current scorn for ‘losers’ and current concern about the homeless. . . . All of this makes Galin’s play pertinent intellectually. But it is not a riveting experience in the theater.”

From the Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton: “Excise the play’s sociological significance and what remains is a sentimental, heavy-handed, contrived, old-fashioned melodrama about fallen women who drink too much, shout too often and wallow in self-pity.”

In the Daily News, Daryl H. Miller wrote: “Galin’s script contains some dark humor along with the dark drama, and Bushnell can’t seem to decide whether the play is a tragedy or a comedy. He milks the comedy, which gives the otherwise somber play a strange tone.”

Said Drama-Logue’s Richard Scaffidi: “Just because a person, idea or script makes its way courageously out of the Soviet Union doesn’t make it important. In fact, ‘Stars’ suffers from maladies abundant in plays originating locally: it is repetitious, self-important, stilted in its dialogue and unimaginative in its characterizations.”

In the L.A. Weekly, Bill Raden faulted Bushnell’s “banal, curatorial staging,” adding, “The production’s finer points--Douglas D. Smith’s expressive, shell-shocked set, Deirdre O’Connell’s work as an alcoholic whore--are reduced to yet another look at those poor oppressed people of the U.S.S.R.”