David Mamet's Bond of Futility

By Christopher Porterfield

AMERICAN BUFFALO by DAVID MAMET

Even before the action starts at Manhattan's Ethel Barrymore Theater, Santo Loquasto's setting begins to tell the story. It depicts a junk shop, a clutter of old furniture, toys and appliances that poignantly reflect the battered, grimy souls who cast them off.

Similarly, David Mamet's play is a sort of junk shop of language, and it too is forlornly eloquent. The speech of Mamet's three characters--the owner of the store and two neighborhood punks who hang out there--is an incrustation of street slang, non sequiturs, malapropisms and compulsive obscenity. The playwright revels a bit too much in this scatology and blasphemy. Delete the most common four-letter Anglo-Saxonism from the script and his drama might last only one hour instead of two. But Mamet has an infallible ear for the cadences of loneliness and fear behind the bluntness, and he also knows how to make the bluntness very funny.

The trio spends most of American Buffalo planning to burglarize the apartment of a coin collector who has recently appeared in the shop. But the men are gradually undone by their own inertia, mistrust and ineptitude. The job never conies off. At the end they draw together in a fragile bond of shared futility, human castoffs alongside the inanimate ones.

Under Ulu Grosbard's taut direction, Kenneth McMillan anchors the play as a bluff but bewildered shop owner. John Savage captures the confusion of the wild-eyed junkie who responds to the shop owner's paternal warmth.

Jittering between them like an arc of electricity between positive and negative poles is Robert Duvall as the older predator. Lashing out with desperate nihilism, Duvall crackles with the quality that Ingmar Bergman once said he looked for above all others in an actor: danger.

David Mamet, unlike the grunting, inarticulate characters he puts on the stage in American Buffalo, is as wordy as Webster's. In the course of conversation, the 29-year-old playwright can ornament his speeches with quotes from Tolstoy, Archibald MacLeish, Karl Marx, Voltaire, Jesus or Stanislavsky.

Yet for all these allusions, one of Mamet's favorite methods is basic eavesdropping; the cassette in his ear is continually recording the oddities of human speech. The most conspicuous piece of furniture in his new New York City apartment is a filing cabinet crammed with pages of dialogue overheard in pool halls, bars, elevators, Ping Pong parlors, gambling halls and every other stopping place in a brief, varied career.

Mamet was raised in a Jewish enclave hi Chicago, and his parents were divorced when he was eleven. He learned early on that language can be both a joy and a weapon. "In my family," he recalls, "there was always a large premium on being able to express yourself--if only for purposes of chicanery."

By his early teens, Mamet was earning his theatrical and financial capital, doing anything profitable, from washing windows to waiting on tables. "The first thing I learned," he says, "is that the exigent speak poetry. They do not speak the language of newspapers." He soon became backstage-struck and signed on as busboy at the Second City, Chicago's famous improvisational company. "It was a superb, superb training ground, and their rhythm--the rhythm of action, the rhythm of speech--influences the way I write."

Mamet began writing and directing at Vermont's Goddard College; after graduation he became an actor. But, he confesses, "I was terrible, and it bothered me a lot." He was bothered enough to try the other side of the proscenium in 1971, when he started the St. Nicholas Theater Company. He and his co-founders transferred the project from New England to Chicago three years later. Mamet now divides his time between that city and New York.

The St. Nicholas has produced most of Mamet's 20 plays, including his recent off-Broadway hits, Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Duck Variations. It will also produce his new children's play, Revenge of the Space Pandas, as well as Woods, a celebration of heterosexual love--no longer, he laments, "a hot item on the shelf of American commerce." Mamet has joined in the celebration, though he remains a bachelor and currently lives alone. In his spare moments he is working on the film scenario of Sexual Perversity and a new adaptation of the old Alec Guinness film, Last Holiday. The theater is his first love, however, and he has no intention of going Hollywood in any big way. "I don't want to break into the movies," he insists. "Who's got the time?"

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