It's a romp.
It's a it's a real light comedy.
Yeah.
So I would explain a little differently.
Yeah. Well, you know,
I mean, the the actual content of the play aside,
just sort of in the pantheon of of great American works.
It is it is an American masterpiece.
I've said this many times, but it's it's something of a of a standard.
It's an American standard right up there with the great jazz standards and great
contemporary songs and great pieces of art.
It's definitely in that sort of pantheon of absolutes.
Yeah.
American Buffalo is a wonderful play by David Mamet
that was written in the mid seventies.
It's about a group of three guys, sort of.
small-Time thieves who have gathered in Donnie
is the main, main sort of protagonist who runs a junk shop.
And the main story of the play is a guy has come in to their junk shop before
the play starts and bought a buffalo, had nickel for quite a lot of money.
So they all of a sudden decide, Oh, this guy must be a coin collector.
And we should we should plan on on thieving his house.
And so it's all about these three guys trying to figure out how to do this heist,
this burglary.
And, you know, on top of that, it becomes a play
about loyalty, friendship, code of honor, things like that.
It's very funny.
It's very compelling.
It's incredibly dramatic.
And I feel sort of so lucky to be had
this extraordinary group of actors working on it.
I play Donnie Dubrow, who is the owner of Donnie's Real Self
Resale Shop, which is where the play takes place,
kind of a junk shop an ex-con,
kind of of a fence,
small-Time, hustler, criminal, etc., etc..
Yes, I play Walter Cole, a friend of Donnie's,
and I'm sort of
used to be a thief,
maybe a little bit of a con man, ex-con,
you know, that's about it.
Yeah. Hustler.
I play a kid named Bobby.
And that's about all we know about his name.
But it's kind of down in his is luck.
Kind of recovering
addict junkie since he's seen some rough times.
But he's a very
hopeful and hardworking kid, really trying to get his his life on track.
And that track is sort of provided by these guys
and the refuge of the junk shop and you know, he like
them, have been has been dealt some not great cards.
And so, you know, if misery loves company, these guys are kind of a
match made in heaven because they all have the same hunger for wanting,
you know,
wanting more than what they've been given and feel like they deserve that
and want to, you know, do whatever they can to get that
that sort of peace that's missing from their entire lives.
It's an incredible story
and it's sort of a story that unfolds in a really surprising way.
So my hope is that they come in and they have a great sort of evening
of entertainment in terms of how this heist unfolds.
It's incredibly funny.
It's it's so great that we're doing it at Circle in the Square
because it's in the round.
So the audience is really going to feel like they're in the room with these guys.
And they're a great group. Of guys to hang out with.
They're incredibly funny
and the things that they're trying to sort of sort through as friends
and compatriots in terms of how they actually go about pursuing
this thing is going to be not only hopefully wildly entertaining funny,
but also incredibly dramatic and visceral, because what it ends,
what ends up happening and how the heist goes wrong
is when the play gets particularly dramatic.
If anybody had said, Oh, this is what's going to happen,
you're going to reverse for three weeks and then a week out,
it's going to shut down, then you'll come back two years later.
Nobody would believe that.
Yeah, but I can say that
it's almost
like we've been sort of
rehearsing it sort of anyway.
I mean, we carried on rehearsing over Zoom for a while,
you know, right after we got shut down in 20, 20.
And I think some of that has informed the work that we've been doing
in this rehearsal process that we've been in since late February.
I was saying before we started this revert to that,
I don't know many other scenarios, if any, where you would press pause
on any work and, and revisit again.
I started really kind of dating back
into work on this around the holidays
and I read the script for the first time, maybe like a year.
And in that time I went, oh, I found new stuff immediately
and I was kind of mad at myself because I was like, man, I like,
I should have been here when we were rehearsing in February.
But it is amazing that, I mean, there's a reason why this play's done so often.
And over and over again, there's always things to find.
I mean, it is a treasure trove, a masterwork of stuff
that is so well put together that every time I read or hear
and I listen to these guys do it every day,
there's still something new and interesting to find.
So you have two years to kind of ruminate on that.
You're going to find a lot of treasure.
Yeah, it's great writing and it's malleable and it's and it's
and you need time with Mamet, and we got some time.
We got some time
to get some time.
Yeah,