American Buffalo review – David Mamet returns to Broadway with a thud
2 / 10
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.
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