The play most responsible for catapulting Mamet to the forefront of modern drama back in 1976, this play contains all his hallmarks. Three male characters inhabit a masculine world where the only references to women are derogatory and suspicious. They are desperate men whose hopes are shattered, revealing a deep emptiness, an existential incompleteness symptomatic of their place and time. And most conspicuously, Mamet's unmistakable fast-paced, violent, curse-filled language is unrivaled in its ability to make poetry out of every-day American.

The stage is filled with stuff from Don(Mark Grimmer)'s crowded junk store, from TVs and bicycles to nazi memorabilia and playboy pin-ups - but notably missing is a rare buffalo nickel. Having sold the coin for $90, Don thinks he has been ripped off by a coin expert and devises a plan to steal it back. He enlists the help of Bobby (Harry Lloyd), his slow, child-like friend. But after hearing about the plan, Teach (Michael Leslie), an Al Pacino wanna-be, convinces him to drop Bobby and split the rewards with him.

As the tension builds toward a break-in that is beyond their league, Don's friendships with the other two emerge as both distrustful and loyal, intimate and business-like. Their status switches back and forth, and like children on a playground they one-up each other with their claims to knowledge (about crime, about people, about life) and with their possession of toys (money, guns).

Grimmer's portrayal of Don is convincingly indecisive, ineffectual and sometimes just incoherent: he tells his friends to eat and sleep well at the same time as enlisting them in dangerous crime. But he is also the only one of the three capable of genuine friendship. Friendship is merely expeditious for the basically amoral Teach; Bobby is just a child, eager to please his "Donny".

Lloyd's performance as Bobby radiates the playful voices, wide eyes and gangly posture of a child, while retaining a sense of mystery and shiftiness that makes Teach's attempts to uncover a darker side seem plausible to the end.

But it is Leslie's Teach that occupies center stage. He speaks most of the witty Mamet lines with excellent timing (e.g. "Guys like that - I like to f@#k their wives") and infuses the play with its pseudo-philosophical grandeur (e.g. "free enterprise is the freedom of the individual to embark on any course he sees fit."). These evoke short bursts of profound insight, but so fleetingly, they function more as desperate attempts by Teach to cover over his empty, amoral identity than to give the audience real insights. Asked what he means, Teach responds, "What does it mean?…nothing!"

By the end of the day, their illusory and misguided hopes (symbolized by the nickel) have been exposed as empty and Teach loses any semblance of dignity. He trashes the store, declares in a whiny kids' voice that "There is no right or wrong…we live like cave men…I go out there every day…and there ain't nothing out there," then makes himself a silly paper hat and leaves.

But after putting up with the violence and trickery of Teach, Don finally asserts himself. He becomes a father figure, both reassuring, protecting and putting up with his two adult children. Against the maddening emptiness, Mamet has created a figure of paternal dignity to tend to our unsuccessful attempts to find meaning.

Oliver Morrison, 02.06.04