Emmy and Tony Award winner Laurence Fishburne and Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Sam Rockwell will star in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo.
Mamet will reunite with director Neil Pepe (Speed-the-Plow, A Life in the Theatre) for the production. Performances are set to begin in March 2020 with an official opening on Tuesday, April 14th, 2020 in a Broadway theatre to be announced.
Now might seem an inopportune time to be reviving a play by David Mamet, who could be called America's bard of toxic masculinity, although the term was hardly current-in fact it hadn't entered the popular lexicon, let alone swamped it-when Mr. Mamet was in his prime. But the bruisingly funny revival of Mr. Mamet's 1975 play 'American Buffalo' on Broadway proves that such a judgment would be myopic. It's true that the play depicts men-mostly the foul-mouthed Teach, played by Sam Rockwell -displaying volcanic amounts of swaggering machismo, seasoned by a little misogyny and homophobia. And yet Mr. Mamet's characters are themselves the victims of their flaws and throbbing insecurities, so that any toxins they spew poison their own bloodstreams. In his finest plays, including this one and 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' Mr. Mamet is hardly a cheerleader for testosterone-driven aggression; he is a clear-eyed analyst of its destructive futility.
Judged as a showcase, American Buffalo works beautifully. Rockwell has exactly the right tools to crack the Mamet safe. His half-whine, half-growl voice sings in what Todd London evocatively called the writer's 'fricative riffs' - unsurprisingly, given how well he's suited to other writers of masculine lyric like Martin McDonagh. Fishburne, judging his rhythms to the nanosecond, grips the play and captains it, and it's lucky that the close quarters of Circle in the Square allow you to see the details of his casual command. Criss, too, does fine work as the play's slow-minded straight man, though he finds fewer details in his character than the other two men.
1976 | Off-Broadway |
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1977 | Broadway |
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1981 | Off-Broadway |
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1983 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2000 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
2008 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2015 | West End |
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2022 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2022 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Play | American Buffalo |
2022 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actor in a Play | Sam Rockwell |
2022 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Scenic Design (Play or Musical) | Scott Pask |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Direction of a Play | Neil Pepe |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play | Sam Rockwell |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Revival of a Play | American Buffalo |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Scenic Design of a Play | Scott Pask |
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