January 22, 2003

By Robert Avila

A RARE ILLUSTRATION of the truly dreamy side of the American dream came in a 2000 Time-CNN poll that found 19 percent of respondents convinced they belonged to the top 1 percent in income and another 20 percent confident they would be there one day. Trickle-down economics may be a convenient myth for justifying the upward "redistribution" of wealth to the already wealthy, but its staying power derives from an even more powerful myth: striking it rich. When Calvin Coolidge said, "The chief business of the American people is business," it was not an idea that needed to trickle down; it was already there.

Nobody made that point like David Mamet in American Buffalo. His 1975 play about three luckless lowlifes planning a heist of precious coins is an ingenious dissection of the business ethic from below, one that brought him to the forefront of American theater with its penetrating wit and propelling, contagious, streetwise dialogue. More than a quarter of a century later, American Conservatory Theater's potent revival shows the play still packs an impressive punch.

Set in the Chicago junk shop of Donny Dubrow (Matt DeCaro) – a lovingly arranged clutter enveloping the stage in Kent Dorsey's vivid design – the plot is put in motion by the sale of a buffalo nickel to a local collector. The coin's unanticipated value whets Donny's appetite, and he enlists his young gopher and protégé, Bobby (Damon Seawell), in a plan to steal it back. Soon, however, Donny's friend Teach (Marco Barricelli) gets a whiff of the plan and muscles his way in, ousting Bobby behind his back.

The play's tension comes from the competing interests of the social and the antisocial, between the free-for-all that goes by the name "free enterprise" and the human values that operate despite, rather than because of, it. Donny, Teach, and Bobby (who together resemble nothing as much as a family) inevitably undercut their loyalty to one another in the pursuit of "business." The contradictions are forcefully and brilliantly brought out in Mamet's spare, staccato, expletive-laden vernacular. Donny's schooling of Bobby in the ways of the world, in business, presents a hilarious mixture of jungle ethic ("You don't have friends this life") and homespun wisdom ("Never skip breakfast, Bob"). Meanwhile, Teach jealously competes with Bobby for Donny's loyalty, while his insomniac rants about free enterprise and loyalty ineptly conceal a series of petty betrayals behind a show of outraged honor. His chagrin at being slighted by two off-stage associates, for instance, leads to a typically telling contradiction when Teach opines, "The only way to teach these people is to kill them."

Director Richard E.T. White subtly brings out this family dynamic while perfectly capturing the play's distinctive rhythm and humor. Barricelli is a wonderfully comic Teach, alternately unctuous and bullying, bearing down on Donny and Bobby with the scavenging instincts of a stray dog. DeCaro's Donny is a rock of quiet assurance and rather sympathetic, especially opposite Seawell's fresh and creative turn as the seemingly doomed Bobby. Where "business" is both the motivation and the ultimate excuse for a social melee, their loving but disastrously compromised relationship is a palpable tragedy – a bit of flesh behind the Indian-head nickel, that startlingly apt symbol for the violent relation between value and exploitation in our founding mythos.