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.
American Buffalo feels thin, too. And sour. Like a cup of diner coffee left to cool. It's a showcase for actors. But what really is it showcasing? It's a play about men who feel that life has done them wrong. The way they speak of others - women, queer people, 'Mexicans' - suggests that they believe they are owed more, that they are possessors dispossessed, that the American dream is their birthright, even if they never do much to make that dream come through. They fight over scraps - imagined scraps at that - and then they fight one another. Back in the day, there used to be a lot of indignation over Mamet's language and whether it heralded a coarsening of American letters. The language, it turns out, wasn't the coarse part.
| 1976 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
| 1977 | Broadway |
Broadway |
| 1981 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
| 1983 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
| 2000 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
| 2008 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
| 2015 | West End |
West End West End |
| 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 |
Videos