Both plays were written in the mid-seventies, and “American Buffalo” has had a major impact on the language of American drama and brought the playwright to prominence. Though thirty years old, the play retains a strange power.  Chicago-born David Mamet premiered “American Buffalo” in that city in 1975, and two years later it opened a run on Broadway. It was also made into a movie.

The play’s single set is “Don’s Resale Shop,” a seedy junkshop filled with “things” and “stuff,” two of the characters’ favorite words. A stranger was willing to pay $90 for a buffalo nickel and Don now feels that the coin must be worth quite a bit more. He plots with his young helper/disciple Bob to steal the customer’s coin collection. When regular kibitzer Teach hears the plan, he wants to replace Bob who lacks experience in petty crime. This woebegone and ineffectual trio ends up fighting among themselves. So much for the plot. The play, however, is more than plot. It is nothing short of an interrogation and deconstruction of the “American Dream.” Images and ideas are carefully woven into the elliptic and indeterminate dialogue. For example, the buffalo nickel of the play’s title, minted between 1913 and 1938, features a rugged Native American face on the observe and an “American buffalo” on the reverse. Both were slaughtered and almost decimated as “Americans” moved westward. And Chicago figured prominently in the western migration. (The junkshop is referred to as a “fort” by Teach.) Waves of immigrants crossed America in pursuit of “things” and “stuff,” the American dream of accumulation and wealth. Yet Don’s Resale Shop employed no Rumpelstiltskin and junk is turned into money only by outsiders. Don and Teach want some of the bounty of free enterprise, but they are hostages to their limitations, embodied in their language.  Mamet provides the characters an idiom rich in its barrenness, eloquent in its inarticulateness, and poetic in its obscenity. Terse and enigmatic, the dialogue mesmerizes. Yet Mamet urges his actors not to analyze their lines (leave that to the critics) but simply to speak them.

Rafael Bromberg as Bobby is not always comfortable with Mametspeak, and his gestures sometimes seem unnatural. John Wylie and Shangreaux Lagrave are more secure with Mamet’s cadences and they interact well, but Wiley’s Don is straight man to Lagrave’s Teach. Lagrave’s character, clad in maroon and yellow by director Frank Melcori, commands center stage and audience attention. Teach’s lessons are ineffectual but Mamet’s are not.

“American Buffalo” by David Mamet at The Vortex Theatre, 2004½ Central, SE, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 6 p.m. through November 4. Tickets $12, call 247-8600. ADULT LANGUAGE.

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