Talking of Mamet, Pigs and Nickels

“American Buffalo” was hailed as a groundbreaking play when it premiered in 1975. David Mamet wrote about a profane, desperate, ragtag three-man gang that couldn’t get to the scene of its intended crime, let alone shoot straight. “Buffalo” was applauded for its staccato, expletive-laced dialogue and for distilling the fading of the American Dream in one day’s goings-on in a forlorn Chicago junk shop.

“Its characters are the refuse of American capitalism. It is Mr. Mamet’s heroic achievement that he reclaims the humanity of people who scurry about like rats in a dark and exitless cage,” New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote in reviewing a 1980 revival starring Al Pacino. Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman are other notables who have taken on the role of Teach, the manipulative, motor-mouth powder keg of the piece who spends the play seething with frustration and resentment that inevitably explode.

On a more arcane note, “American Buffalo” may be the only play in the history of the theater that deploys “a dead pig sticker” as a crucial prop.

So it was that director Andrew Barnicle and the three actors in the Laguna Playhouse’s production of “American Buffalo” paused during a recent interview when stage manager Nancy Staiger came into the rehearsal room to present the just-acquired prop. They took a moment to inspect the sticker and consider some possibilities for wielding it in the show, which begins previews Tuesday.

As Mamet informs us--through the character of Donny Dubrow, owner of Don’s Resale Shop--the pig sticker, known as a gambrel in the butcher trade, is “a thing that they stick in dead pigs [to] keep their legs apart [so] all the blood runs out.” This one, from the Farmer John plant in Vernon, was a hefty piece of curving metal with sharp points on either end, like a steer’s horns. A chain was attached. Barnicle and David Gianopoulos, the leathery-faced, black-maned actor playing Teach, discussed how Gianopoulos might best use it to wreak havoc at the play’s climax.

“You might want to swing it with this thing [the chain],” Barnicle said. “It’ll work like a medieval weapon. You just trash the set with that. See how you like swinging it around.”

Mike Hagerty, the stout, grizzle-bearded and unkempt-looking actor who plays Donny, has firsthand experience with pig stickers. He grew up in Chicago and worked his way through the University of Illinois by driving a meat delivery truck on a morning route before classes.

“I’d be sitting in class with little pieces of fat in my hair and blood on my shirt,” he recalled. Hagerty and Barnicle, who hails from Cicero, Ill., the town bordering Chicago that was Al Capone’s home base, vouch that they knew guys who spoke just like the characters in Mamet’s play.

For Barnicle, there is much more to “American Buffalo” than the street dialogue that, for its time, was shockingly profane for the stage.

“In 1975 [the language] was a big deal. It wasn’t just breaking down a barrier, but jumping over it by a mile. But 25 years later, it has more to offer” than just the gritty talk that initially made Mamet’s reputation. “That’s not what makes the play good.”

The flow of the play offers actors and directors a chance to build a sense of tension and menace as Teach, Donny and Donny’s young, drug-addicted apprentice, Bobby (played by Joshua Hutchinson) plot the burglary of a coin collector’s house. They are particularly interested in recovering a valuable Indian-head nickel (the American Buffalo coin that gives the play its title) that Donny has ineptly sold to the collector for a fraction of its worth.

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But there is also room for humor as the characters talk and talk in a blend of street poetry and malapropisms. Teach, especially, has an obsessive need to converse, as if Descartes’ declaration, “I think therefore I am” had turned into “I expound therefore I am.”

“Events are starting to snowball and in the middle they’ll stop and spend five minutes on some minutiae that’s irrelevant to their cause,” said Barnicle, the playhouse’s artistic director. He finds the humor in “American Buffalo” akin to “a Laurel and Hardy thing” by way of Samuel Beckett.

When the explosion is over, Teach is left to sort through the rubble of the junk shop, and of his hopes. He is deep in the meaningless abyss of life as Beckett envisions it; Teach’s culminating speech is a surrender that Mamet’s script underscores in capital letters:

“My Whole [Expletive] Life. The Whole Entire World. There Is No Law. There Is No Right And Wrong. The World Is Lies. There Is No Friendship. Every [Expletive] Thing. Every God Forsaken Thing. . . . I go out there. I’m out there every day. There is nothing out there. I [expletive] myself.”

But the director and cast of this “American Buffalo” think there is more going on than a parading of sad, futile clowns. They see positive values in the play, especially in the quiet aftermath of Teach’s moment of self-loathing and world-hating recognition.

“They have been faced with the brutal reality that their lives have been built on lies and garbage,” Hagerty said.

“But it ends with them all working very hard to take care of each other in the aftermath of a huge explosion,” Barnicle noted. “They kind of bond together and go off into the night to get things straight and figure out how they’re going to deal with stuff.”

“I think there’s a beautiful ending to this play,” said Gianopoulos. “I think the way we’re doing it says something about [the value of] friendship, no matter how fragile that friendship is. The most dysfunctional people in the world need friends and they need each other.

There is a danger in “American Buffalo” that an audience can simply scoff at characters this foolish and full of bombast and resentment. As New York magazine critic John Simon wrote dismissively of the same Pacino-fronted “American Buffalo” that the New York Times’ Rich hailed: “The characters are too dim, too puny, too repulsive.”

But Hutchinson thinks that the drives and frustrations of Teach, Donny and Bobby say something fundamental about the general human plight: “Our three characters are low-class guys in a whole different world [from the theater audience]. But we’re three guys in pursuit of something better. That’s universal.”

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“American Buffalo,” Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Previews Tuesday through Friday, 8 p.m., also Thursday, 2 p.m. Regular performances begin Saturday. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays 2 and 7 p.m. Ends July 1. $24-$43. (949) 497-2787.