American Buffalo

The last 12 months have brought no fewer than three productions of American Buffalo to the Bay Area. Buffalo nickels are supposed to be rare, but if current trends continue coin dealers might have to worry about a glutted market. Anyway, this third show is not new; it reprises Subterranean Shakespeare's 1999 production and features a surprisingly bad-ass performance by Stanley Spenger in the role of Teach. Geoffrey Pond is the large, phlegmatic junk-shop owner Donny Dubrow, and Dick Hillenbrand plays a simpering young ex-junkie named Bobby. The story follows these three Chicago con men into the heart of a bad idea for a coin heist, and the close setting of OmniCircus on Natoma Street -- where you stare down at the stage like students watching a surgery -- lets the cast move by gently shaded degrees from boredom to ferocious rage. Spenger, who also directs, has a fine sense of timing and keeps the tension well strung. If ACT proved early this year that American Buffalo can work with large gestures in a huge hall, Sub Shakes shows it can also work at a near-whisper. Hillenbrand is especially good at delivering tiny noises to set off Spenger's bellowing Teach. OmniCircus is also a perfect setting for a junk-shop play; the welded half-humanoid robot sculptures and the genuinely stinking garbage can, which seem to live there year-round, only add to the fun.