Bilingual version of play shows depth of conflicts

“American Buffalo” offers an absorbing portrait of workaday men under pressure.

Deaf West Theatre’s feisty bilingual version of David Mamet’s 1975 play — co-presented by the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts and CATCO — enhances the intense drama, humor and pathos.

Director Stephen Rothman maintains a fluid pace and psychological realism amid jockeying male egos.

The tight two-act, suggested for mature audiences because of extreme profanity, revolves around the shifting loyalties of three misfit men at a cluttered Chicago pawnshop.

Deaf actor Troy Kotsur was the kinetic force propelling the play at Friday’s opening in the Riffe Center.

Full of rough male energy and agitated personality, Kotsur employs his entire body and soul to become Teach, the pawnshop owner’s old buddy who returns to reestablish himself as a criminal partner.

As the voice of Teach offstage, Collin Bressie does a beautiful job matching Kotsur’s expressive use of American Sign Language.

Paul Raci is seemingly the quiet eye at the center of a hurricane of testosterone as older shop-owner Donny, eager to steal an American Buffalo coin sold for too little to a collector.

Yet, Raci’s simmering performance suggests a lifetime of wizened experience. (James

Feuer provides Donny’s voice offstage with subtle shifts in tone.)

As Bobby, Donny’s young protege, Matthew Ryan Pest becomes a tantalizingly ambiguous emblem of warped innocence.

Deaf West’s insightful production makes Teach deaf, Donny the child of deaf parents and Bobby a hearing character struggling to master sign language. Such an interpretation respects the script while illuminating mid-1970s deaf culture and strengthening a poignant subtext: the difficulty of honest communication among pungently profane but inarticulate men.

The bilingual staging certainly makes communications clear via a seamless web of spoken and signed language, with occasional supertitles for the deaf and easy-touse headphones for other theatergoers.

Overall, this superb revival works so well as a bilingual production largely because its incorporation of deaf culture reinforces Mamet’s themes.