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American Buffalo Blog 14/05/12

I worked with Mark the last time we put on a David Mamet play, Glengarry Glen Ross and having hugely enjoyed that experience, was delighted to be able to get involved with American Buffalo! As one of the production assistants, one obviously sees the production evolve from the early stages of character development through the blocking stage and we have now just had the first few 'books down' rehearsals. Often it seems that several steps are taken backwards at this stage before we can advance again. We are in a lucky situation of having two PAs, this has meant that while one follows the book, the other can simply watch taking notes as a second pair of eyes to the director. Whilst it might seem a little harsh to start picking up the actors on minor deviations from the text at their first go without scripts, it was nonetheless very interesting to listen out for mistakes. Some of them  were naturally born out not having the comfort blanket that is a script in their hands, however, perhaps the most interesting was the subconscious correcting of grammar. Mamet of course frequently writes intentionally ungrammatical language for the sake of the realism of his characters. Overall as things stand, we appear to be in pretty good shape.