Guinan, Andrews, and Letts in “American Buffalo”. Photo credit: Michael Brosilow.

“There’s business and there’s friendship…things are not always what they seem to be,” lectures Donny to his waifish and doting protégé in American Buffalo, David Mamet’s paean to the spitting alleys and decaying streets of North Chicago in 1975. An examination of the polarity that exists between internal factors of both the individual and society, Mamet’s piece has historically begged the million-dollar question of the intersections among friendship, prosperity, and societal change- often at the same time.

The weight and worth of loyalty are subsequently thrown into the grinder of a small-time heist on Lake Shore Drive, pinning the fabric of blue-collar relationships against the tides of the 1970s. With this conceit in mind, one gets the notion that the brutally honest, unabashedly hale new production cursing its way across the Steppenwolf mainstage has taken on the discussion with prodigy.

Amy Morton’s superbly minded mounting at Steppenwolf likewise straddles Mamet’s concept of contrasting allegiances. Having previously equipped Steppenwolf’s 2001 revival of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross with an expert helming, Morton has tillered Buffalo through both a concept and actor’s directorial prism.

Plunged into the basement of a junkshop with only a glimmer of the outside world through opaque glass, the characters in Mamet’s work are situated between a repository for the past and the invasive threat of an unassailed future.

Donny, the owner of the rusted provender, concocts a scheme with the young apprentice Bob (a layered Patrick Andrews) to retrieve a buffalo nickel from a passerby customer who they deem, with minimal knowledge of specie, has paid too little for it. Teach, Donny’s gin-shuffling, two-bit buddy, simultaneously propels and pauperizes the heist by monopolizing the job. The question, he states, is one of loyalty. In matters of business- a category in which, for him, petty thievery has earned its rightful place- kinship will never serve an adequate measure of proficiency.

Photo credit: Michael Brosilow

Francis Guinan, one of Steppenwolf’s most laudable ensemble members of the past decade, has imbued Donny with a harrowing self-effacement. The shop owner, like the nickel coin itself, catalogs the past in both inventory and psyche. Maintaining the broken lawnchairs and greasy typewriters that history has bestowed him, Donny girdles himself in a basement of memory with the others, all three naïve to the culture that shifts outside their very window.

Therein lies the pillared structure of Mamet’s Buffalo and Morton’s deft interpretation of the text. With the assistance of three of Chicago’s most adroit stage actors, Morton has excavated the blistering tensions between these underclassmen and the changing 1970s society. The exploitable Donny becomes progressively disabused through Teach’s experience with the outside world. Bob, an insolvent adolescent, yearns for a mentor in an environment rife of infirmary. Severed culturally and financially from the throws of upper-leveled society, the men exist in the shadow of monetary commerce without the understanding that the things they demonize most- their loyalty and friendship- are the only currency they possess. Morton’s cerebral concept approach to a text that often feels dated (indeed, Mamet’s jarring diction and locale references seem cemented in a ghostly past) is bounded by these bravura performances.

Trifling through Kevin Depinet’s smartly elegiac set, Tracy Letts renders a heady performance as the impenetrable Teach. Clad in tight polyester and bell-bottomed slacks, Letts’ spouts every bit of Mamet’s wistfully terse diction with precision and heft. Proffering an ability to slip between acidic vulgarity and muted introspection, Letts tethers Mamet’s iambic pentameter script to a grounding of authenticity. Recently heralded primarily as a playwright (Letts’ August: Osage County received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Letts has not traversed the Steppenwolf stage since 2007’s Betrayal. American Buffalo has since proven a more adept playground in which Letts showcases a mastering of both pen and stage.

Morton has nimbly assembled both a cast and creative team that manage to resuscitate Mamet’s own applicability. At what price, she inquires, will the cost of commercial scrambling wield? It is a question of inestimable value embedded in the threads of our own history.

American Buffalo runs through February 14, 2010 at the Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St. For tickets or more information, please call 312-335-1650 or visit www.steppenwolf.org.