‘Buffalo’ Revival Has Most of the Angles Figured

Donny Dubrow’s “resale shop” is thick with dust, junk and macho preening. For those of us who love “American Buffalo,” the 1977 play that put David Mamet on the map as a singularly sharp observer of American ambition, the time is right for a major revival. It’s been 15 years since the last one, when Al Pacino’s off-Broadway Teach hatched half-baked plans among the curios, pretending to be a big operator, growing angrier and wilder by the second.

But that was on the cusp of the 1980s, when it seemed possible that Teach, Donny and a clueless kid named Bobby might just slime by into some small share of the American dream. Now, pre-millennium, the burglary the men are planning seems stupid and doomed from the get-go, and the play shows their chaotic lives and their quest for some “classical money” in a new and more poignant light. The Old Globe Theatre just about pulls it off. Directed by playwright Stephen Metcalfe (“The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers”), this production is loving but is just a shade too careful. At the pivotal moment, it lacks insanity.

An antecedent to the just-as-desperate but savvier hustling in Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “American Buffalo” is a language-drenched play; it is in love with language, no matter how many four-letter words it might contain and no matter how inarticulate its three characters may be. When these guys refer to something as “the thing,” you know exactly what they mean.

Metcalfe is tremendously sensitive to the language, to both its tragic and comic possibilities. After a hilariously inept buildup to a con that never happens, Teach (Dann Florek) explodes in an almost casual act of violence. Afterward, the men try to calm down and carry on.

Don asks Teach three times to get his car so they can start cleaning up the mess they’ve made. Finally, Teach makes moves to leave. “You gonna honk?” asks Don. “Yeah.” “Good.” Then, a pause as Teach stands at the door, saying needlessly, “I’ll honk the horn.” Teach stands and listens to the sentence hang in the air. Words make things solid; they change failure into action, into movement away from whatever chaos came before. That’s why these guys talk so much.

Thanks to set designer Ralph Funicello, the tiny Cassius Carter Centre Theatre is a perfect setting, where audience members surround and look down into Donny’s junk shop and feel as if they too are caught in it, spying the dust on the hideous chandeliers, typewriters and red ceramic bulls that Donny oversees in a shop no one ever visits.

Seth Green is heartbreaking and funny as Bobby, the kid who hangs around the shop, running errands for Don, looking at him like a lovesick puppy. He has zero brain power, and it looks like it hurts his face to think. As Donny Dubrow, Jonathan McMurtry is a soothing patriarchal presence, with a sonorous voice, tattoos and a long, skinny ponytail, the sign that he’s hanging onto his renegade days.

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Then there’s Teach, who likes to appear as if he’s figured out all the angles. His macho bluster is more funny than frightening, but Teach does need to cross over into insanity; he’s the one whose fragile self-respect is most hopelessly tied to the men’s little plot. Bald, bespectacled and looking like a buff Gandhi with a tan, Dann Florek is a physically imposing, brooding Teach, who paces like a caged cat before uttering his first lines (he sounds disconcertingly like Joe Mantegna, a favorite Mamet actor).

Florek’s solid physicality and grace part the air, and he brings onto the stage with him the expectation of violence, which simmers on the surface for the whole play. Only in the final clinch does it become clear that Florek has left something out. His Teach has been too contained, and when we leave the theater we still don’t understand why the failure of this piddling little caper sent him into the void, where he sees for a second the truth about his life: “I go out there. I’m out there every day. There is nothing out there.”

Metcalfe may have helped strand his Teach in the undertow. The music he chooses to start the play--a few measures of Philip Glass looped over and over, is a constant repetition on the piano, a line that keeps promising to change, to explode into something else and never does. That tension is riveting. That is exactly how Metcalfe has directed the play, with a keen attention to the buildup, not enough of an eye on the explosion to come.

Still, the buildup is amazing--funny, scary and inevitable. This “American Buffalo” is nearly great and certainly worth a trip to San Diego; it is a slice of Americana as valuable as the phantom Buffalo nickel in the greedy dreams of Mamet’s con men.

* “American Buffalo,” Old Globe Theatre, Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, San Diego, Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 17. $22-$39. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours.

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American Buffalo

Dann Florek: Walter Cole “Teach”

Seth Green: Bobby

Jonathan McMurtry: Donny Dubrow

An Old Globe Theatre production. By David Mamet. Directed by Stephen Metcalfe. Sets Ralph Funicello. Costumes Dione Lebhar. Lights Ashley York Kennedy. Sound Jeff Ladman. Stage manager Raul Moncada.