American Buffalo
Theater Schmeater
Through Dec 1.
Nasty and brutish, if not exactly short, this production of
American Buffalo, directed by Aimée Bruneau, gets it
(mostly) right. Mamet’s 1976 play profiles one day in a Chicago junk
shop and three men who talk, worry, and fight over a robbery they’re
planning for that evening.
Donny (James Venturini) is the owner of the shop, a benevolent
hustler who is trying to look out for Bobby (Trick Danneker), a young,
eager junkie who just wants to be one of the guys. Teach is a toxic
hanger-on who sows hate and distrust everywhere he goes. The characters
are recognizable types (one could read them as God, humanity, and
Satan), but thoroughly human. You want to think, “These people are
fucking animals.” But it isn’t so. These people are just fucking
people.
The acting isn’t unimpeachable—the three stumble over a few
lines and drop a few cues, which can spoil Mamet’s famously percussive
dialogue. But the performers have a fevered, desperate spirit,
particularly Mark Fullerton as Teach, who flaps and sputters around
Donny’s shop like a spastic, pissed-off scarecrow. Michael Mowery’s set
is as claustrophobic as it should be, with shelves full of boxing
gloves, crutches, old radios, suitcases, typewriters, gas cans, and
other sundries. The theater’s seats are only three rows deep, dumping
the audience queasily close to the action. The conclusion, when one of
the triumvirate is bleeding in a chair, one is smashing up the shop,
and the third watches helplessly, is genuinely alarming. Even the
chatty, drunk couple in the back row (who seemed like they’d walked out
of Mamet’s Chicago, with their leathery skin and thick smokers’ laughs)
were startled into silence. BRENDAN KILEY
H. P. Lovecraft’s
Dreams in the Witch House
Open Circle Theater at the Rendezvous
Through Nov 10.
Open Circle Theater’s annual adaptations of
H. P. Lovecraft
stories are always worth attending, if just to admire the mad-scientist
inventiveness of no-budget special effects and their love of the source
material. Last year’s production was well-written and well-acted,
imbuing Lovecraft’s people-phobic work with unexpected humanity.
This year’s play is a different beast entirely, not least because
OCT lost its home theater in South Lake Union and is currently
performing at the Rendezvous, a theater in a bar. Perhaps because of
this setting—where tension-squelching echoes of Marky Mark and
the Funky Bunch are plainly audible through the walls—Witch
House has all the broad charm of a schlocky B-movie.
This doesn’t mean it’s bad—the low-budget special effects are
as ingenious as ever—but you might find the sweet spot somewhere
between laughing at the cheese and jumping at the apocalyptic demon
attacks.
The plots aren’t as clever as they usually are, and one is nearly
impossible to follow, thanks to Lovecraft’s hammy “ancient-folks”
dialogue. After five years of digging, OCT might have tapped all the
great short Lovecraft material. There are two
“young-man-enters-a-spooky-house-and-faces-terrifying consequences”
potboilers and two “men-get-overwhelmed-by-evil” stories. They don’t
have twists so much as explosions of malevolence, but I’m not
complaining too much. All it takes to sell the horrible dialogue (“That
fellow gives me a tickle!”) is commitment, and OCT shines at playing
the material completely straight.
The sound work by Larry Ryan is genuinely creepy, with rats
scratching and an alarmingly loud demon-cat yowl. The other special
effects—one actor deep-throats a flashlight, handle-first, to
impersonate a demon; a chilling rat puppet skitters behind a
semitransparent sheet—and the actors’ pure-hearted love of the
material combine to create a sporadically fun production.
PAUL
CONSTANT
My One-Night Stand with Cancer
Ethereal Mutt Productions at ACT Theatre
Through Nov 17.
When she was 21 years old, the playwright and comedian Tania Katan
found out she had cancer in her right breast and had it removed. Nine
years later, doctors found cancer in her other breast. Katan had
another mastectomy and a hysterectomy.
Cancer is a solo comedy about Katan’s illness, as well as
being a young, Jewish lesbian who’s into theater and has a slightly
cracked family. When she takes her first shower after the second
mastectomy, Katan realizes she doesn’t have any breasts to tie her
towel around, so she walks to her room with the towel around her waist.
Her father is struck dumb. Her mother tries to be complimentary: “You
look just like Ben Affleck!”
It’s easy to imagine a solo show about cancer being manipulative,
but Katan negotiates the pathos of her subject matter without resorting
to emotional blackmail. The result is moving but not maudlin. BRENDAN
KILEY
