

Obviously, the good news about Circle in the Square is, like you said, it feels immersive, it feels like you’re in the room with the actors, which in the case of this play is a huge plus, because it’s really about three people stuck in this very small junk shop. But after talking with Scott Pask and thinking about it, it became a very exciting process. When Jeffrey Richards, the producer, said, “What about Circle in the Square?” at first, it threw me for a loop. Can you tell me about the technical challenge of staging this play in this almost immersive way? It really feels like we’re in the junk shop with them. It’s been a gift to work on it.Īt Circle in the Square you’re not quite in the round, but it’s a deep thrust, with audience on three sides. It’s brought a fresh, alive feeling for me as a director. But to have Laurence Fishburne in the role of Donny is incredible, and Sam Rockwell as Teach and Darren Criss as Bobby. The final thing I’ll say with regard to your question is, with this particular group of actors-it was obviously exciting to work with Bill Macy, Philip Baker Hall, and Mark Webber. In many ways, it’s resonating as much or more than it did the last time I worked on it.
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There’s something about the play that resonates for me right now about what it means to find community, what it means to have friends and loyalty in a system that may be geared against you, and how to kind of fight your way into that system.
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Smarter people than I have talked all about what that means, but there’s something resonant-to answer your question about why now-for people who’ve gotten the raw end of the stick, people who have not been included or welcomed into the American dream. It’s a working-class person’s pursuit of the American dream. But there’s something about the play and what they’re after-not only the structure of it, but what it represents-that became sort of iconic. So in some ways it’s a small, very human story about three guys trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. On the one hand, it’s a story of three small-time thieves who need this opportunity for a big break, a big burglary that could make all of them.

NEIL PEPE: We’ve been thinking about that. ROB WEINERT-KENDT: The big question with any revival is, why this play now? What does it have to say to this moment, and how does it feel different from when you last directed it? I spoke to the director a few weeks ago, before the most recent outrage, and while Mamet’s politics certainly came up, we also spoke about Pepe’s tenure at both the Atlantic Theatre and at the school run by his wife, the actor and teacher Mary McCann. Macy in 1985, which Pepe has served as artistic director since 1992. Long before this ugly moment, plenty of theatre people (if not so much theatregoers) have loudly questioned whether any plays written by this man, even his early plays, should continue to be produced at all.Ĭlearly Neil Pepe, the director of the new American Buffalo, still finds value in Mamet’s work on Broadway he directed the sleek 2009 revival of Speed-the-Plow and the 2010 production of A Life in the Theatre, and 20 years ago directed Buffalo at the Atlantic Theatre Company, the Off-Broadway theatre co-founded by Mamet and William H. Surely some folks involved with the new Broadway production of American Buffalo, which opens tomorrow, must have had a version of that Teach-like dialogue running through their head when the play’s author decided to go on Fox News last weekend to join the recently ginned-up right-wing moral panic about sex education in schools and say that “teachers are inclined, typically men because men are predators, to pedophilia.”ĭavid Mamet’s rightward shift has been no secret to anyone paying attention for the past few decades, but this latest salvo clearly crossed a new line, putting the 74-year-old playwright squarely on the wrong side of a culture-war battle that has life-or-death stakes for many, and not only educators. Fuckin’ Mamet, fuckin’ Mamet, fuckin’ Mamet, fuckin’ Mamet, fuckin’ Mamet…
