American Buffalo

Long before such terms as "chosen" and "found" families were a part of our lexicon, David Mamet’s groundbreaking play American Buffalo revealed a family hitherto never seen on stage. Mamet’s unflinching depiction of this alternative nuclear family – a junkie, a man-child with anger management issues, and an enabling co-dependent – stunned audiences with its excoriating take on the bicentennial American Dream and its ingenious transformation of the vernacular into poetry masquerading as prose.

Set in a Chicago junk shop in 1975, American Buffalo examines the relationships of three men trying to navigate their way through an increasingly complicated world. The seventies created more than just cringe-worthy fashions, music, and hair. It also gave us gas shortages and rationing, inflation, and a relatively new word for the working class to wrap their heads around: recession

With no apparent marketable skills, what choice do Bobby, Teach and Don have other than to try to pull off a heist involving a valuable coin collection? Lady Macbeth’s "…the attempt and not the deed confounds us" eerily suggests Mamet’s family, as they attempt to change their position in the world and meet with nearly as disastrous results. The only difference is Bobby, Teach and Don being survivors, survive, and are forced to re-examine what their family has become in the aftermath of a violently cataclysmic all-nighter.

American Buffalo is directed by Mom and Dad Productions Artistic Director, Joe Feliciano. Mom and Dad has been producing theatre in Chicago for the past ten years. The inaugural production was the critically acclaimed adaptation of Conrad Aiken’s Silent Snow, Secret Snow. Their focus has primarily been on classical theatre, having produced, among others, Macbeth, Three Sisters, Antigone, The Way Of The World, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Ward 6 and most recently, the revival of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real which was New City’s Critics Choice. Joe recently served as guest director for Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s lauded production of Six Characters In Search Of An Author.