Local theater company, Shadowland Theatre, gave themselves less than three weeks to stage a production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo
Tim Malcolm of the Times Herald-Record chronicled their mad dash to opening night.
Wood. Everywhere, wood. And mosquitoes.
The barn is made of wood. And the work inside the barn is about bending the limitations of wood. There's sawing, there's hammering, there's collecting. Then there's batting away all the mosquitoes.
Travis Kerr, a lanky bespectacled kid with fluffy blond hair, checks his laptop, which displays sketches and blueprints.
Kerr points out a slab of wood – called a flat – lying on the barn floor. Hammered to the flat are pieces of wood that indicate the frames of two windows. He saws out the wood inside the frames.
Watching him is Brendan Burke, artistic director of the Shadowland Theatre in Ellenville, who exclaims: “This is where the magic happens.”
It is magic: A dozen or so devoted volunteers will build, assemble and refine a set, take down another set and prepare for a three-week theater production. They'll each pull about 40 hours a week with one goal in mind: To put together a production of David Mamet's “American Buffalo.” They start with almost nothing and will need to have everything finished in 19 days.
Read what happened over the next eighteen days.
And here’s a cool time-lapse video by Paul Cowell showing the building and dressing of the set for American Buffalo.
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