TT: Playwright in greasepaint

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review regional revivals of two of my favorite plays, Steppenwolf’s American Buffalo in Chicago and Jobsite Theater’s What the Butler Saw in Tampa. Here’s an excerpt.
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These days it’s no secret that the author of “Superior Donuts” and “August: Osage County” is a superior playwright, but Tracy Letts’ parallel career as a stage actor is mostly known only to those Chicagoans who see him performing on occasion with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. I reviewed the 2005 Off-Broadway production of Austin Pendleton’s “Orson’s Shadow” in which Mr. Letts played Kenneth Tynan, so I know what he can do. Now he’s appearing in Steppenwolf’s revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” and his performance is one of the many highlights of a production so strong that I don’t see how it could be bettered.
Unlike “Race,” Mr. Mamet’s latest effort, which is good but not first-rate, “American Buffalo” is one of the best American plays of the past half-century, a harsh, hurtful portrait of three small-time Chicago crooks who can’t figure out how to make it in a money-hungry world that has no room for losers. This production, directed by Amy Morton, who graced the original cast of “August: Osage County,” is as blunt and unsparing as a fist in the kidney. It is also very, very funny–I’ve never seen an “American Buffalo” that got more laughs–which makes the explosion of violence that is the play’s climax still more shocking. Above all, Ms. Morton and her cast convey with exceptional clarity the extent to which “American Buffalo” is rooted in a specific time and place, Chicago in the mid-’70s….
“What the Butler Saw” is, after “Noises Off,” the most perfect farce to be written in modern times, a masterpiece of satirical savagery disguised as a lightweight sex comedy about extramarital hanky-panky in a lunatic asylum. Joe Orton wrote it in a state of controlled rage at the hypocrisies, sexual and otherwise, of the British establishment, and he made each punch line count. Not only are the jokes wickedly amusing in every sense of the adverb, but they’re embedded in a slam-door-A-then-run-through-door-B plot so tightly constructed that the play almost directs itself–so long as you trust the material. Alas, I’ve yet to see a staging of “What the Butler Saw” whose director was willing to let Orton be Orton, and Jobsite Theater’s revival, for all its noisy gusto, makes the usual mistake of overegging the comic pudding….
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Read the whole thing here.
Here’s a scene from Steppenwolf’s production of American Buffalo: