JUNE 2, 5:00 p.m
Location: Sala Transilvania
🎭 Bucharest Art Theatre

Duration of the show: 1h 35min
Age limit: +16

by David Mamet

Scenography: Tudor Albu
Costumes: Monica Florescu
Translation and direction: Bogdan Budeș

With: Angel Popescu, George Constantinescu, Stefan Iancu

Don Dubrow, a thrift store owner, wants to steal the coin collection of a customer who Don believes cheated him into buying a bison head coin. His accomplice is Bobby, the shop boy who is good at everything, but who gives up when Teach, a manipulative friend, convinces him that Bobby is incompetent. Distrustful, however, Don invites Fletcher, a character whom both he and Teach respect as an indisputable authority, to take part in the hit. Bobby becomes the scapegoat in a story built on suspicion, anger, dishonesty, violence and, above all, betrayal.

In a New York Times review of the 1983 Broadway production, critic Frank Rich called it "one of the best American plays of the last decade." He had also written about the 1981 production, calling the play "brilliant" and noting: "The text, however, is the central element. Working with the tiniest vocabulary imaginable—words like nothing, great, and no, as well as "four-letter" ones—Mr. Mamet creates a subterranean world with its own illiterate comics: life-and-death struggles, pathos, and even affection. In American Buffalo, he has created a deceptively small-scale tragedy that has the power to explode the largest of American myths."

American Buffalo is a play written in 1975 by American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, writer, and director David Mamet, who was nominated for the Tony Awards for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plough (1988).

After three preview productions at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, the text adaptation of American Buffalo premiered on Broadway in February 1977 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, and by June 1977 had run 122 times.

From 1977 to 2022, the play saw 7 different productions, including one in Chicago (1975), two in London (Donmar Warehouse, 2000 and Wyndham's Theatre, 2015) and four on Broadway (1977, 1983, 2008, 2022).

The cast of the 7 installments included Bernard Erhard, JJ Johnston, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan, John Savage, Al Pacino, James Hayden, Philip Baker Hall, Mark Webber, John Leguizamo, Cedric the Entertainer, Haley Joel Osment, Damian Lewis, John Goodman, Tom Sturridge, Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne, Darren Criss.

In 1996, the play was adapted into a film starring Dennis Franz, Dustin Hoffman and Sean Nelson.