When I first saw David Mamet's American Buffalo in 1976, it was just a short time after the United States Supreme Court opened the way to free verbal expression on the stage, and the use of vulgar expletives was new, groundbreaking, shocking. Now, "fuck," the word that got Lenny Bruce arrested, is so common in everyday speech, it is used as an adjective, and most comedians overuse it in their routines. So all shock value in Mamet's naturalistic dialogue is absent, and the story of three losers planning to steal a coin collection, despite some funny phraseology, is reduced to rambling banter with emotional outbursts. John Leguizamo is exciting -- a dynamo let loose, Cedric the Entertainer is an adequate junkstore owner, and Haley Joel Osment, an actor who is vivid on screen or television, playing the apprentice thief, is invisible- no impact, therefore it's a bit difficult to feel for him even when he is brutalized -- we don't know his internal makeup well enough to empathize.
The physical staging by director Robert Falls keeps the play active and dynamic, the junk-filled set by Santo Loquasto is spectacular -- I loved the costume he put on Leguizamo, and Brian McDevitt's lighting enhances everything.
Although much of the show is entertaining, most missing for me at the end is the lost feeling of desolation -- the deep devastating feeling of abandonment, of hopelessness the three men should be experiencing as they are left in a vast, empty, barren desert. What we have here is a modern clown show, including (beautifully staged) mayhem.
