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It starts like a pot of water placed across the warming coils of an electric stove: A few basic and, here’s the key, unassuming, ingredients are put under pressure, set boiling and bouncing off one another until they erupt, each reaching up and over one another for the surface of some black, burning container before spilling downwards. When the violence comes, it’s expected, but not always within your control, and so it is always startling.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure: The cast of American Buffalo (from left to right: Philip Green, Steve Tharp and Michael Volpendesta) debate the worth of a nickel and much more at Live Arts.
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David Mamet’s American Buffalo thrives on the tension of too-large forces grappling with too-small bodies and spaces—the outsized ambitions of young Bob (Philip Green) straining within his youth like a kid eager to wear his dad’s hand-me-downs, the same drive for success gone sour in "Teach" (Michael Volpendesta). Anyone who caught director Mark Valahovic’s performance as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire knows the intimidating shadow the mammoth man casts. In American Buffalo, Valahovic’s actors channel their director’s unsteady physicality just beneath the surface of their idle chatter.
Don’s Resale Shop grows out of a corner of Live Arts‘ UpStage theater, where a long stack of metal shelves protrudes, bisecting the shop’s floor, pointing towards a card table and the center of the audience. Don (Steve Tharp) runs the ideal mid-century junk shop, filled with metal and brass fixtures, old medical tools and a tuba (nice touches, set design), the type of venue that invites the younger generation to dig for the treasures of the old guard.
But no one comes seeking the old; rather, the three men at work in Don’s Resale Shop are consumed with the idea of making financial progress by finding and robbing the fellow that dug up a buffalo nickel in Don’s dump. And it is in the characters’ scheming that the first bubbles, warning signs, appear. Plots and plans among the three are choppy and rough to navigate thanks to Mamet’s trademark dialogue—specifics are dissolved into "it" and "stuff," making the audience intimate strangers, as if browsing Don’s shop, but also setting them on edge, waiting for a violent articulation of thought, a flare-up, a meltdown.
The tension that rides through Mamet’s plays is most palpable in the collective reasoning and debating of his characters, and the Buffalo cast carries the overlapping and interrupting debates off almost flawlessly. Green’s youth works against him as an aspiring moneymaker, but in his favor as he looks to Tharp’s character as a paternal figure; Tharp, for his part, is the epitome of wavering conviction, perfect for his role as the group’s barometer. Volpendesta progressively ups the temperature as the jittery, caffeinated Teach, falling somewhere between Denis Leary and Reservoir Dogs-era Steve Buscemi during his most frantic fits—all leather jacket, brushed-back hair and high blood pressure.
When the tension finally splinters the bonds between the three characters—the oversized aspirations finally wearing out their shells—a compassion of sorts (the type found among the collective experience of disappointment, like the tramps bonding in Beckett’s Godot) sets in among the three characters, who return to their uncharged states, each settling back into their skin from the vicious animal they combined to create. It is to Valahovic’s credit as a director that his loudest moment in American Buffalo is the silence that follows a huge commotion.
