The early plays of David Mamet are never classified as comedies, but the fine Kansas City Repertory Theatre production of ?American Buffalo? poses an obvious question: Why not?
It could be that Mamet himself projects such a humorless public persona in interviews and his personal essays that ?funny? is a word we resist attaching to a man who discusses his plays as intellectual exercises. Although we still encounter flashes of the poetically profane old Mamet (he was certainly present in ?Phil Spector,? the recent HBO film he wrote and directed), he has through the years seemed drawn to the elevated language of by-gone eras in such as plays as ?Boston Marriage,? his adaptation of the Edwardian drama ?The Voysey Inheritance? or his film version of British playwright Terence Rattigan?s ?The Winslow Boy.?
In ?American Buffalo? we encounter ?classic? Mamet. The dialogue in this 1975 play, which established him as a major talent, is raw but precise and the setting is far from anything resembling middle-class respectability.
Set in a ?resale? shop in Chicago, the piece depicts the bumbling efforts of a trio of sub-cultural bottom-feeders to pull off a rare-coins heist ? a crime for which they are woefully unprepared. The crusty shop owner, Don, has enlisted the help of Bobby, a slow-thinking young junkie who may or may not be clean. But when the bombastic Teach, a neighborhood character with no obvious means of supporting himself, learns of the plan, he convinces Don that Bobby is too inexperienced and untrustworthy to pull off the job. Only he, Teach, can grab the coins without breaking a sweat.
As the plan emerges, we realize that Teach is a big talker who doesn't really possess the requisite criminal skills he claims to have. But he plants enough doubt in Don's mind that the older man comes to distrust Bobby. There's a flash of violence as the little scheme comes unraveled and ultimately we're led to believe that talking big and indulging in grandiose fantasies is really what connects these guys. It's a sort of a mutual delusion society.
In the final minutes of the play, it all comes down to one question Teach repeats to Don: ?Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me?? And there you have it. These guys talk tough but are as emotionally vulnerable as little kids.
?American Buffalo? is generally considered a scathing commentary on market capitalism as these would-be thieves make plans in a shop filled to the rafters with the detritus of American consumerism. That view of the play is totally legitimate, but director Jerry Genochio and his splendid cast see the piece as something beyond that: A comedy of manners. The story of these aspiring master criminals is a near-farcical portrait of little men who want to think big.
As written, Teach becomes the dominant character in the piece. He's a guy who throws his emotional weight around but whose efforts to manipulate others usually comes to nothing. Brian Paulette offers a spectacular performance in this iconic role. Costumed in a leather jacket and florid shirt, with slicked-back hair and a drooping mustache, he visually brings to mind Dustin Hoffman's career criminal in ?Straight Time.? His handling of Mamet's staccato dialogue and profane arias is a thing of beauty. Ultimately Paulette allows us to see beyond the bombast to the inner life of a character who thinks and acts like an addict, even if Bobby is the ?real? junkie.
As Don, Robert Elliott strikes just the right balance as a guy who has cast himself as a paternal figure to young Bobby ? which makes his distrust of the kid all the more disturbing when Teach convinces him that Bobby is a turncoat. Teach and Don have something in common ? an ability to consider superficial evidence and come to the wrong conclusion.
Elliott and Paulette deliver operatic performances. Their characters express themselves in high-relief terms, using words like weapons and reacting to events with extreme emotions. Robbie Tann finds a different vocabulary as Bobby and delivers an utterly convincing human-scale performance as a kid who's the walking personification of vulnerability. Genochio has the skill to put these performances together into a coherent whole. One thing the actors share is immaculate timing. They guide us through the deceptively complex narrative with impressive clarity.
Anyone who saw the 1995 film of ?American Buffalo? knows just how deadly and humorless Mamet can be in the wrong hands. Here he's in very good hands. The result is an impressive portrait of humanity at the bottom of the social scale. It?s funny, sad, poignant and a little scary.
Helping Genochio and his actors to achieve something so raw and yet sublime is a superior design team. Patrick Holt (costumes), Jason Lyons (lighting) and Joe Cerqua (sound and music) all make vital contributions. Scenic designer Donald Eastman deserves special notice because his junk shop is so beautifully cluttered and so spatially dynamic that it virtually becomes a character.
Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/04/27/4205600/kc-rep-find-the-gritty-humor-in.html
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April 15th is just seven days away! Have you filed your taxes yet? If you?re one of the many waiting until the last week, then you?re in luck. We?re sharing some last-minute tips to help you get the most out of your taxes this year.
This post was published by Shannon, Community and Customer Support Manager for ReadyForZero. ReadyForZero is a company that helps people get out of debt on their own with a simple and free online tool that can automate and track your debt paydown.
Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – are the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahua. But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is currently wild. At $188 per coin, the direction of the bitcoin is anyone’s guess right now and, unlike equities, these things don’t split. In short, you should probably mine. But what is bitcoin mining? Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file. You can read a lot more about it here but just understand that for every block mined you get 25 coins or, at current rates, $4,722.25. Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $188, an alarming result that is probably caused by money movements related to Cyprus and a general bubble-like excitement over the platform in general. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price. As it stands, mining solo is very nearly deprecated. The process of finding blocks is now so popular and the difficulty of finding a block so high that it could take over three years to generate any coins. While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual bitcoins are worth. Pooled mining, however, is far more lucrative. Using a service like “Slush’s pool” (more on that later) you can split the work among a ground of people. Using this equation: (25 BTC + block fees – 2% fee) * (shares found by user’s workers) / (total shares in current round) While this is simplified, it is basically how the system works. You work for shares in a block and when complete you get a percentage of the block based on the number of workers alongside you, less fees. Using this method, I have been able to raise about $1.50 over the weekend by running a dormant PC. The astute among you will note that I probably used twice that amount of electricity. Being a neophile, I’m