The play opens on the interior of Donny’s second-hand store stocked with questionable TV's, stolen traffic signs, radios, odd chairs, a guitar, a pile of long-playing vinyl records, and the other sad, miscellaneous, portable, picked-over remnants of contemporary civilization.
Teach is the wily cat burglar and Bobby is their apprentice. In contrast to the objects, the characters are desperately alive, trying to find something of value. Each man tries to be tough and professional and articulate, as if they were big time gangsters instead of small-time junk peddlers.
Do Donny and Teach trust each other? Can they endure the abrasive interrogation? They stress the enterprise beyond its limit, each man trying to become what he thinks he is.
Joe Napoli’s Teach drives the intensity by trying to drive out weakness and uncertainty but fractures the relationships.
Randy Hurst’s Donny tries to manage the team but is disabled by uncertainties. The hot friction between the two actors is uncomfortable to overhear, like a family argument, luring me into the relationship.
Vlad Sayenko’s Bobby is the sympathetic pivot around which the action swirls. Is he the new man to be trained or the weakness to be eliminated?
I felt that I was right in the action. The Actors Theatre is such an intimate space that if I got any closer, I'd be on stage myself. The intense arguments threatened to boil over into violence and involve me. David Mamet’s dialogue is gritty, familiar, fast-paced, tough-guy stuff that the actors use to disguise and describe their fears.
American Buffalo plays at the Actors Theatre of San Francisco at 855 Bush Street, near Union Square, Wednesday through Saturday until at least September 3rd, 2011.
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