With the wrecking ball looming on the horizon, Mary-Arrchie Theater returns to its roots for one last stand, and in doing so, demonstrates once again the blend of visceral and cerebral performance that launched its 30-year-career as one our city's foremost off-Loop companies. David Mamet's terse little morality fable, American Buffalo, was a driving force in putting Chicago on the map in 1975, spawning a wave of imitations lasting into the mid-1990s. Its McGuffin is the rare coin—a 19-ought-something buffalo-head nickel—referenced in the play's title, recently purchased from Don Dubrow's seedy junk shop by a collector. No sooner has the unprepossessing relic left the premises, however, than badass buddy "Teach" Cole hatches a scheme to steal it back. As the progress of this plan grows increasingly complicated—thanks to the interference of teenage street-waif Bobby and assorted unseen (but vividly described) acquaintances—each of these would-be hustlers will find the extent of his greed tested to the brink of inhumanity. Young actors also frequently find themselves tested—by Mamet's dialogue. Teach's propensity for multiple vituperations conjuring veritable symphonies of vitriolic language too often makes for words gushing forth in a burst of unwavering adrenaline that directors are either unable or unwilling to interrupt, resulting in a thrilling ride for the perpetrators and a boring one for audiences. Not Mary-Arrchie, however: Under the orchestration of Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, players Richard Cotovsky, Stephen Walker and Rudy Galvin take advantage of their intimate playing space to carefully pace their text so that our attention is focused, not on verbal showiness, but on the ethical values under examination. For example, after Don has explained to Bobby the necessity of separating business and friendship, we become attuned to the subtle shades of meaning ascribed to those two words when uttered by speakers of widely varying scruples. Lest we discern this dramatic question too quickly, its author has cleverly buried it in a welter of distracting elements, beginning with Don's cluttered inventory—assembled by John Holt to encompass, among other detritus, five deer-head trophies, a pig butcher's spreader and stacks of lightweight metal tschotchkes to facilitate one of fight designer David Woolley's splendid bash-crash-and-trash debacles. Whether you have experienced Mamet's seminal masterpiece many times before or number among the few theatergoers seeing it for the first time, be assured that your final climb up the stairs to the loft above the grocery store will lead you to what may be the best production in its long history of defining "Chicago-style theater" to the world.
