Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- “American Buffalo” (Chicago, 1975; Off Broadway, 1976; Broadway, 1977, 1983) made its steady progress to becoming David Mamet’s breakthrough play. Revived on Broadway with Cedric the Entertainer, John Leguizamo and Haley Joel Osment, it has now become multicultural (black, Hispanic, Caucasian) but still concerns three lowlifes botching a heist.

As always with Mamet, it is also about the florid, scatological language they use, or abuse, to communicate. If the F-word really were an F-bomb, there would be nothing left of Times Square.

Donny Dubrow (Cedric) runs Don’s Resale Shop, a junkshop that Santo Loquasto has superbly designed and Brian MacDevitt jauntily lighted to afford a unique sense of the cluttered and bizarre, a veritable museum of junk. Donny is warily friendly with Walter Cole, known as Teach (Leguizamo), with whom he indulges in shady business, and mentors a youth, Bobby (Osment), his gofer and apprentice in crime.

A customer has paid Donny $90 for a buffalo nickel that may be worth even more. The man must own a valuable collection of coins and Donny plans a robbery, first with Bobby as his accomplice, then, thinking better of that choice, with Teach. An unseen fourth, Fletch, was also to participate.

Another Nickel

As afternoon turns to evening, things go awry. When Bobby mysteriously acquires another of the rare buffalo nickels, Teach beats him up badly before furiously vandalizing the shop. Don turns on Teach and makes peace with the injured Bobby.

There is more to it, but what really matters is the Mamet language. There are incomplete sentences, elisions, non sequiturs, stops and starts, ludicrous repetitions of the obvious, shadowy suggestions and unnerving implications. Monosyllables proliferate, often singly as laconic statements, and dialogue snaps, rattles and splutters along. Speech rides shotgun over speech in a shooting gallery for mouths instead of guns.

Although there are bits of black humor (“The only way to teach these people is to kill them”), what predominates is Teach’s seething anger, Don’s often disquieting calm and Bobby’s neediness puncturing desperate attempts to please.

Can we sympathize with any of these characters? Perhaps, slightly, with Bobby. But Don and Teach are unappetizing specimens whom only their author can love, and manifestly enjoys well in excess of the worth of their blighted bravado.

Foul Blather

The play is skillfully directed by Robert Falls, who has choreographed some arresting movements and imposed fascinating changes in tempo and dynamics. The actors squeeze everything possible out of their parts, Cedric, for example, managing to say “No” in peculiarly layered ways. There is even a vocal trio in the interplay of Cedric’s rumbling bass, Leguizamo’s whining, high-pitched tenor and Osment’s overeager or anxious countertenor.

But put it all together and it spells blather of the peculiarly Mametian brand, in which obscenity and scatology sprout like mushrooms in damp, shady ground. Cut out the foulmouthed verbiage and the play would be appreciably shorter but hardly better. It might even lose what specious colorfulness it has.

At the Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St. Information: +1-212- 239-6262; http://www.telecharge.com.

‘Waves’

Director Katie Mitchell and a company of eight actors from the National Theatre of Great Britain, along with a few technicians, put together “Waves,” a weird adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, “The Waves,” being offered by Lincoln Center for a brief run in Manhattan.

Video cameras project onto a background screen images of both waves and bits of hectic, confusing carryings-on by the actors. They race around a long, microphone-studded table and adjoining areas, all sparsely illuminated by sporadic, often handheld lamps. The actors speak into this or that mike in random monologues during brief stops in their race, while others produce the kind of sound effects we used to get in radio dramas.

I take scant pleasure in Virginia Woolf’s overheated poetic- prose fiction, all frayed nerve endings and sickly-sensitive detail-mongering. The plotless novel consists of differences in disjointed apperceptions by six friends, which, as they hurtle past us, we struggle to make heads and tails of.

The Procrustean, quick-dissolving images of the actors on screen, combining with the almost constantly careering bodies in the semidarkness, leave us briefly fascinated yet soon frustrated. For 2-1/2 hours (minus a 15-minute intermission), we are plunged in greater dark than the one in which the performers, videographers and sound-effect-makers bustle about. Whoever claims to understand what is going on has either just read the book or is hugely deluding himself.

Through Nov. 22 at the Duke, 229 W. 42nd St. Information: +1-212-721-6500; http://www.lincolncenter.org.

(John Simon is the New York drama critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: John Simon in New York at jis1925@aol.com.

Last Updated: November 17, 2008 23:00 EST