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Lost in Buffalo

By Shamrock McShane

Dear Samuel French, Inc.:

American Buffalo has never been produced in Gainesville Florida, a college town renown for its writers in residence.

A unique venue for the play is the Civic Media Center, the intellectual vertex of the city, on University Avenue.

We want to do the play at a student-affordable price for an intimate audience, with half our proceeds going to the non–profit CMC.

I have performed in highly successful productions of Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleana here. As a native Chicagoan and a playwright myself, I feel a great affinity for Mamet's work.

In fact, I worked in the theater with David Mamet and William H. Macy in Chicago in the 1970s and enjoy a continued friendship with both these great men of the theater today.

Mr. Macy has seen and liked my work here in Gainesville where he often visited his parents.

Last spring I attended the Atlantic Theater Company's 20th anniversary party in the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center in New York City, as Mr. Macy's guest and talked with Mr. Mamet about his play Faust.

All of which is to say I am confident that both Mr. Mamet and Mr. Macy would vouch for my competence as an interpreter of Mr Mamet's work. — Shamrock McShane

Get the rights?

Got the rights. Pay for the royalties — two hundred and fifty bucks.

Another two hundred for a phone ringer. The phone has to ring.

Mamet reminds us of an ancient Chinese proverb, that the time spent fishing is not deducted from one's life-span — and that the theatre is not like that. The time you spend fucking around in the theatre most definitely is deducted from your life-span. In fact, there is every indication that it just might lessen it.

The lines are still there but they are deteriorating.

The language is liberating.

But only within the world of the play. You can't take this language with you out onto the street, despite it's being the language of the streets.

Some people can still use it. The poor downtrodden lumpen–proletariat depicted in the play.

A magical night.

But there was no way to know ahead of time.

Not a clue?

Then Teach's sideburns and goatee had to go.

Things can disappear and still be there, you know.

Director? We directed ourselves.

It's a three–man job.

Shakespeare's company had no director, and they did all right.

It is Teach who refers to the deity and then goes a step further, twice, to get to Christ. So it would seem that Walter "Teach" Cole is not a Jew. Is this a logical supposition?

Walter "Teach" Cole is words on a page.

And then to ache with missing Teach, and to ache with missing Don. Even to miss Bob. Bobby, see who wants what.

It changed our lives. It changed me.

In what way?

Many ways.

Name one.

We had to push the performance dates back when we realized we weren't going to be ready on time.

We're gonna have to do the Jackie Gleason thing.

The what?

Gleason was famous for saving his performance for performance. He hated rehearsal. He thought it killed spontaneity.

Like rehearsing for a scene in a movie. You don't want it to look rehearsed. The environment, the site–specific nature of the play lent itself to a movie mindset. It was the difference between being in a place and being onstage.

Jackie Gleason…?

So when I demolished the shop for the first time, it was the first time. And each time it was different, depending on the position of the audience.

When Scot says he quit drinking beer to learn these fucken lines, you know it's serious. But it also takes half the fun out of it. I kept the other half of the fun to myself. I wasn't about to stop drinking beer. The whole point of doing the play next door to the Shamrock was to drink beer. Let's not lose sight of our goals here.

At the Shamrock we were well understood and appreciated.

Dinner theatre.

Dinner and a Show at the Shamrock and the Civic Media Center.

See American Buffalo.

And make it interactive.

Videotape it and broadcast it live from the CMC to the Shamrock.

It can be an event. It can be a special feature of the Shamrock's Monday Night Tom Miller Show.

"David Mamet's classic tragicomedy American Buffalo opened in Chicago in 1975. The story is that of three would–be crooks in a junk shop plotting to rip off a coin collection. They are brutes who need each other, but their words are like punches that almost casually build to real violence. Mamet's dialogue is profane poetry."

Who the fuck wrote that?

Somebody.

It's got just that tone to it.

Scot, Mike, and Sham are next door at the Shamrock.

Enter Don's Resale Shop.

Mike goes out onto University Avenue. Scot walks next door to the CMC. Sham stays put.

Buffalo Beats for Teach:

Gainesville becomes Chicago. Broadcast from the CMC to the Shamrock. Coordinate with the Tom Miller Show.

The tee–shirt I wear as Teach under my gray leather jacket thatıs twenty years old was a present from Dirk Drake, who found it in a thrift shop. On a black background is prominently featured a white skull that looks as if it's been through a nuclear episode, with the caption: Have a Nice Day.

My hair's a mangy six–months' growth jelled into stiffness. Five–days growth of beard surrounds a goatee.

Teach is a fuck–up. Teach is a dangerous fuck–up.

Mel Gussow in the New York Times wrote, "Mamet has a feeling for the contradictions that make up everyday conversation. His dialogue is not simply overheard, but it has the glow of reality."

Julia Novick wrote in the Village Voice, "Mamet has not tried to make poetry out of the way people talk; he has made music instead. Mamet is already perhaps the most exquisite verbal stylist among American playwrights."

"I became fascinated by the way the language we use, its rhythm actually, determines the way we behave, more than the other way around."

"What I was trying to say in American Buffalo is that once you step back from the moral responsibility you've undertaken, you're lost. We have to take responsibility. Theatre is a place of recognition, it's an ethical exercise, it's where we show ethical interchange. I'm interested in what Tolstoy said — that we should treat human beings with love and respect and never hurt them. I hope that American Buffalo shows that, by showing what happens when you fail to act that way." — David Mamet

The play is like a dream, a recurring dream.

That's called rehearsal.

Dreams and works of art are related to reality in the same way. We create nothing. Not when we dream and not when we make art. We just rearrange pre–existing material.

Scot says he can't do the play. He's sorry.

The movie ends up being about making the movie — at least it does for the people making the movie. So, it's the same with the play. You end up turning into the characters in the play, and you end up enacting the story of the play in your lives.

So, if Scot quits on us here, we end up enacting American Buffalo in reality. Our friendship is destroyed. Violence is done.

We turn into Don and Teach. We turn into cavemen, into "violent shitheads in the wilderness, sitting around some vicious campfire."

I tried various psychological ploys. I said, Scot, look on the bright side: Nobody's gonna come see the fucken thing anyway. I mean, I was at the Shamrock last Sunday night, and that whole fucken block was dead. Nobody's gonna come. Opening Night will be like a run–through What the fuck? It's either that or we break up.

I don't know.

Look, if you want to feel guilty, just go through with it, and suck. And that can be your penance. It'll serve you right.

I don't know.

Then, you know what, fuck you.

We turn into Donny and Teach.

Yeah, I don't know, maybe.

See, you always end up depending on somebody.

This is because we cannot live alone.

Shit, no. If we could, we would.

All the other Cyclops on the island…

And we each live in our own cave.

Scot and I have worked together for ten years. This'll be great. We'll kick back, have a couple beers. Run the lines. Get our shit down. Then go do it for real.

Save the demolition of the shop till opening night.

What I do, what they see, is something that hasn't happened before.

Mamet will definitely fuck with you. Mamet will fuck with your head. It is Mamet's stated purpose to fuck you around, and yet he doesn't want to fuck around with you, and you definitely don't want to fuck around with Mamet.

The illusion of freedom.

And then on to our rehearsal. We arrive at the Civic Media Center a little before five and it is closed up tighter than a drum. So we end up rehearsing at the Acrosstown. They don't even know we're in there. Mike's got the key. We let ourselves in. Like thieves in the night. And we run the play.

About midway through the first act Scot resorts to his script.

Scot's got a lot of shit going on in his life, I donıt know: we extrapolate — he's got marital problems or he's a coke head, or both, and he killed Cock Robbin, who gives a shit, it's all good. Buffalo is a seedy place, a seedy world. Scot fits right in. So do I. I'm from Chicago, home of the Insane Unknowns.

The good news is that Scot's excommunication has been rescinded. The white smoke goes up. Ascension.

Scot is back on the team.

"I'm embarrassed."

Did he say that?

Last night we rehearsed American Buffalo amid the lesbian knitting circle at the Civic Media Center.

That is not the proper nomenclature, dude.

Nevertheless. The lesbian knitting circle did not respond, did not interact. Were they offended? They didn't say. They didn't speak to us. They seemed to take no notice. I don't think they were pretending. They seemed quite genuinely uninterested. They were not otherwise engaged in spirited political discussion; they spoke of the pros and cons of wearing underwear. Such is the new millennium activist.

The run–through got fuzzy toward the end of the second act. Concentration wandered.

I told Scot how I had made cue cards for myself at the desk when I did some of the phone monologues in Oleanna. He scoffed at first. But now he's got cue cards spread out all over Don's desk in the shop.

Itıs opening night. We know this feeling. It goes good with beer. We've felt it often enough while standing on the back porch of the Acrosstown Theater, watching the cars go by on Main Street, hoping that one or two of them might turn in.

The phone would ring inside and we'd rush to answer it. "Acrosstown Theater." And someone would ask, "What time does the show start?" And we'd say, "What time can you be here?"

We've put on any number of shows that nobody has come to. I mean nobody.

This looks like another.

Except that the Reviewer for the Gainesville Sun might show up tonight. If he does, he might be the only one.

Word is he was about the only one in the audience the night he saw the last play he reviewed, This Is Our Youth, at the Acrosstown.

What we have contrived is a site–specific production of David Mamet's modern classic drama American Buffalo. The Civic Media Center, a counter culture lending library and political activists meeting place in a storefront on University Avenue becomes Don's Resale Shop, where the motto is Everything Has a Price.