"When 'American Buffalo' first hit the stage, in Chicago in 1975, its portrait of lowlifes like Teach — two-bit grifters aping the realpolitik of American business — was a game changer. Though it did not quite induce sympathy for a man who would strike a kid in the face with an iron, it did make audiences queasy about the respectable entrepreneurs whose behavior Teach was translating to his own turf. In language as crass and cadenced as gunfire, Mamet turned their man-eat-man philosophy, which some call capitalism, into brutal prole poetry: a poetry of predation, you might even say."
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"Directed by Neil Pepe with the expert eye for appraisal that the characters lack, this production is vastly superior to 'American Buffalo’s' last Broadway incarnation, which ran briefly back in 2008. The play itself, which marked Mamet’s breakthrough, is as thin as a dime, but it’s got great atmospherics. Scott Pask’s set and Dede Ayite’s costumes plunge us into the shabby world of the action; seated around the thrust stage at Circle in the Square, the audience can almost smell the mix of dirt and desperation. "
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"Judged as a showcase, 'American Buffalo' works beautifully. Rockwell has exactly the right tools to crack the Mamet safe. His half-whine, half-growl voice sings in what Todd London evocatively called the writer’s “fricative riffs” — unsurprisingly, given how well he’s suited to other writers of masculine lyric like Martin McDonagh. Fishburne, judging his rhythms to the nanosecond, grips the play and captains it, and it’s lucky that the close quarters of Circle in the Square allow you to see the details of his casual command. Criss, too, does fine work as the play’s slow-minded straight man, though he finds fewer details in his character than the other two men."
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"Mr. Mamet does not write tragedy—his characters are poor pipsqueaks compared to the doomed but majestic figures of the Greeks. 'American Buffalo' ends with a whimpering note of surprising, and touching, grace. For all their fecklessness and desperation, these men intuitively know that their only respite from a world they cannot compete in is the small comfort they can take in each other’s unspoken affection."
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"Superbly performed by Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss, with director (and longtime Mamet collaborator) Neil Pepe finding every comic beat and threatening glare, 'American Buffalo' – opening tonight on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre – retains a vitality that eluded some recent equally starry revivals of works by Mamet’s bad-boy contemporaries"
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"The play jolts alive when Rockwell enters, and the Oscar-winner is practically compelling enough to buoy this staging. He has an able scene partner in Fishburne, who brings a stolidity and authority to the store owner Don, a gravity that anchors the second act as Teach flails and decompensates."
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"David Mamet’s 'American Buffalo' is now on Broadway, buttressed by a starry cast. Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss are sharp and lithe in this revival of the caustic 1975 play about three hustlers planning a heist. They stalk across Scott Pask’s ornate set as they hurl Mamet’s signature terse prose at one another. Their speech moves rhythmically — a sonorous medley. They maneuver their bodies with precision and intention. This critic stared, entranced by their dance."
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"The play’s three characters roar at each other in sparse patriarchal metaphor, demanding verbal submission and claiming victory, even though nothing they are actually saying or doing or achieving matters a jot in the grand scheme of things. These are small-time hustlers, masters of a universe of nothing."
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