Playwright: David Mamet
At: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark
Phone: 773-338-2177; $25
Runs through: Dec. 3
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
It's all here—everything we expect from the play that made David Mamet an international star and spawned a quarter-century of imitators: the valuable buffalo-head nickel; the bottom-feeding hustlers who hope to profit from its sale; the flimflams and double-crosses; and the salty language. But in 2006, its squalor is no longer shocking to theatergoers nor cathartic to young thespians. Besides, audiences at Raven Theatre are generally indifferent to arcane artistic concepts and acting-class posturing, instead looking only to enjoy a good story told well.
So what we do NOT find this time are the customary hyper-adrenal performances, with players declaiming their stichomythic dialogue at warp speed in bursts of Stanislavskian ecstasy. To be sure, Brian McCaskill's permanently pissed-off ( and, in this production, ever-so-slightly sissified ) 'Teach' Cole spews bile both verbally, in floods of profanity, and physically, casually inflicting damage on any object sturdy enough to withstand the punishment. Under Michael Menendian's direction, however, the runaway tempo precipitated by his free-floating hostility is repeatedly checked by Richard Cotovsky's ruminative Donny Dubrow and Seth Remington's withdrawn Bobby.
The effect of this decision is to render us sufficiently collected to comprehend the crisis at hand—instead of shuddering blindly from the aftershock—during the moments when the action breaks from its headlong course. The characters may be intent on their ill-conceived caper, but the object of their dubious scheme is not OUR McGuffin, so we can clearly discern—are you ready for this?—the rivalry of surrogate sons Teach and Bobby for the affections of surrogate father Donny. Who'd have ever thought there was THAT kind of parable in Mamet?
However weighty its subtext, the production's pace never gets mired down in high-tragic lugubriousness, but trips along efficiently to clock in at well under two hours. Even the famous resale shop setting—as assembled by Menendian and propmaster Danni Quider and implemented to maximum advantage by David Woolley's fight choreography, a collage of urban detritus designed to generate chaos and clamor when punched, kicked, slapped or thrown—practically shimmers with its own animating energy.