"I just got out of my theatre class and the teacher (Sara Morsey) went into a half hour lecture on how the Satellite is the best source for finding out about what was going on in town. She read parts of Shamrock McShane's article (The Play About the Baby – see: newmoonrising.com) and went on to say that Mr. McShane is a journalistic hero who makes his readers actually think instead of spoon feeding them their news and reviews. She strongly recommended that all her students pick it up this and every month."

– Denise Hank

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Buffalo Beats for Teach | 'Buffalo' finds home at Civic Media Center | Rehearsal Schedule

Lost in Buffalo

By Shamrock McShane

Part 3

Well all right then.

Try to make each beat clear. It requires a tricky kind of naturalism, the aesthetic distance collapses and expands, a disintegrating fourth wall that then regenerates itself.

In the first act there are customers in the shop. We acknowledge them. In the second act they disappear. They are hiding out, wearing their cloaks of invisibility.

And the whole system collapses if you walk out there and the other guy doesn't know his lines. Now you're not just listening anymore. Your attention is divided. You're trying to anticipate the next dropped line.

You saying I don't know my lines?

You know you don't know your lines.

Well, I'm sorry but…

Sorry? What am I supposed to do with sorry? How can there be forgiveness where there is no trust?

I don't know. Whyn't you just try not being so much of an asshole?

How much of an asshole have I been?

You have been a great deal of an asshole. You have been marvelous much.

This not very nice person I have been, he lives one more night. The thing is, even if you're applying practical aesthetics, you're still inhabiting the character to the extent that you wear his scruffy beard, your hair is unkempt like his. It forces certain habits upon you.

A salient point — the audience knows nothing of this.

I sit alone at the bar in the Shamrock. It's 7:40pm. Kieron has poured me a Harp and is watching a rerun of CSI on the big screen. Next door the audience is gathering.

Finally. On closing night. They're packing the joint. There are theatre folk and bar folk and school folk and street folk and CMC folk.

We are hitting every beat. We are nailing it. Scot has got his shit down and he is liberated from the desk. He's all over the shop. He's engaging customers.

The first act hooks every soul into the second act, and on we go. The audience disappears and the fourth wall emerges. There's a crisis of anxiety because each of us must pounce on something and there's nothing but each other. And the junk. The shop.

"Gimme that fucken phone!"

I snatched the phone and it got loose from me and it went flying across the room and smashed into the lectern Chomsky spoke from, next to a bank of chairs, sailing like a missile past a row of spectators' faces. That close. Phone smashes to bits.

Now what are we gonna do? Phone's gotta ring later on in the play. When Ruthie calls!

Everything goes through your mind at once. Here you've brought the audience into your environment.

I went and got the phone and handed it to Scot, who had picked up the pieces of it that had broken off.

Then Scot calmly put the phone back together. In character. Saying his lines. Never missing a fucking beat. And then, when it was supposed to, the phone rang.

Every beat of the play rang true.

And then we drove away.

Gregg Jones was not there, and that was disappointing, because we've been friends for ten years. Gregg came over to my house one night a few years ago and we started reading Buffalo. I played Donny and Gregg played Teach.

"We gotta do this play," Gregg said.

And as the years went by, I would now and then propose a production for the two of us, especially once Mike came of age to play Bob. But nothing ever came of it. It's not easy for Gregg and me to work together. He's an Equity actor and I'm not.

At the Shamrock afterward, Olivia Grimes Potter asked, "How long did you rehearse?"

"Not long enough," Scot said. And we laughed our asses off.

You think you can do it without an emotional investment. And you cannot. You cannot do any great play without a significant emotional investment. It is going to hurt.

We say Hurt the People!

That"s our motto.

Get revenge.

It's a Revenge Play.

And right away you go into withdrawal. All day long, when you would be running your lines, flipping the loose–leaf pages of your sides like flip–cards, now you're not. At night, as eight o'clock approaches, you still break into a cold sweat.

When you would drive to the theatre you would wish that this cup could pass you by. But now that the show is closed, your heart fills with remorse, and you wish to God you had one more chance. Now — while you've still got the lines down.

And then to be physically distanced from Teach, to lose sight of him in the mirror. I went to the barbershop.

They don't call them that anymore.

I went to get a haircut. I'd been there last June when we finished shooting Votive Pit. They had my info in their computer. It was the info for Bald Man. So I ended up with another Bald Man cut.

"What's done is done. Forget about it. Let's get started on the thing. Tell me everything."