Who’s on top? King John; at Shakespeare & Company, American Buffalo at the Berkshire Theatre Festival BY CAROLYN CLAY

It’s weird to see two plays in 24 hours and have the one by Shakespeare be unfamiliar while the other one has you mouthing along as if it were scrolling Hamlet’s famed soliloquies. But who would stage the rarely done King John if not fearless Shakespeare & Company honcho Tina Packer, in a handsome production (in rep through September 3) that brandishes broadswords and ideas with equal brio? Whereas David Mamet’s breakout work, the 1975 American Buffalo (at Berkshire Theatre Festival through August 13), so grabbed the ear 30 years ago that its scabrous mix of syntactically botched, over-reactive male outrage and trickled-down American-business precepts is imprinted on the mind. As it happens, both King John and American Buffalo deal with issues of kingpinship and insecure men warring over hegemony and loot.

Monarchy is a thing both fought for and shrunk from in King John, an irony not lost in Packer’s vigorous staging. As the play begins, at the start of the 13th century, John, son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (of The Lion in Winter fame) and younger brother of deceased Richard the Lionheart, has just taken the throne. And for many in the European political maelstrom, "taken" is the operative word. This faction considers Arthur, the young son of John’s other dead elder brother, Geoffrey, the rightful heir. But Eleanor has placed John in the catbird seat so that she can be the power behind it — in this production, Annette Miller’s imperious Eleanor occupies a slightly smaller throne behind the one warmed by Allyn Burrows’s pasty John.

John’s not the only king candidate with a forceful mom: Arthur’s maternal advocate, Constance, has enlisted French king Philip to her cause. The play’s least powermongering matriarch is a woman with a past: Lady Faulconbridge, whose younger son tumbles into court in the first scene to sue for his father’s estate, claming his big brother is illegitimate. Eleanor sees the elder son’s resemblance to the womanizing Richard Cœur de Lion and has John dub him Sir Richard Plantagenet. This strapping militarist, known thereafter as the Bastard, will become the play’s most colorful character and its caustic Hotspur, ever spurning peace when "honorable war" will do. But the most domineering of the play’s "mothers" is Mother Church at Rome, whose authority, before Henry VIII doffed it in 1533, could not be breached — as John learns to his peril. And Packer presents in Mel Cobb, as papal legate Cardinal Pandulph, a big red kahuna as crafty as he is silkily formidable, with more power to direct events than either of the kings.

The forces of John and Philip square off before Angiers (whose gaggle of citizen pawns are here costumed like Iraqis). But to the distress of the Bastard, a truce is brokered by way of political marriage before Pandulph shows up out of nowhere to excommunicate John for defying a papal command and order the staunchly Catholic Philip to have at him. John wins the skirmish, and the terrified young Arthur is captured. Back home, the king attempts a Richard III–worthy nephew murder but lacks the conscienceless courage of his corruption. After Eleanor dies, he falls victim to ill judgment, bad timing, portents, and a poisoning monk, without ever getting around to the Magna Carta.

King John, which was probably written around 1596, is neither as focused nor as resolved as Shakespeare’s greater histories. Apart from a few ringing shots in the arm from the Bastard (here a charismatically hawkish Peter Macon) and a chilling, condemnatory lament by Constance (the strong if one-note Barbara Sims), the speechifying is not Shakespeare’s best. And though the title character is childish, indecisive, and undefined (the well-spoken Burrows also gives him a scathing, antic side), he’s no delicious villain. Moreover, that flamboyant font of patriotic self-advancement, the Bastard, keeps upstaging him. Still, in Packer’s skilled hands, the play proves a ripsnorter with a tender heart.

King John comes to a battle-happy head earlier than many of the histories, and Michael Burnet’s red-lit scenes of combat are thrilling, with composer Martin Best bending mediæval motifs to electric guitar and percussion to create a cacophonous din. Perhaps wishing to emphasize the terror of children caught up in a violent confusion of war and politics, Packer casts several expressive young women as the once-carefree kids: the quaking Arthur; the chubby young son who will become Henry III; and Blanche, John’s niece, whose marriage to the Dauphin places her squarely between camps, where, as she says, "Each army hath a hand,/And in their rage, I having hold of both,/They whirl asunder and dismember me."

Ashley Bryant presents a charmingly girlish Blanche, and the agile Susannah Millonzi, tossed like a sack of potatoes among human tempests, alternates giddy playfulness with near-frantic fright as Arthur, who clings first to Constance and then to surrogate parent/jailer Hubert. And at the end, after Burrows’s white-tunic-clad John has met his spasmodic end on a wheelbarrow bed in an abbey garden, Meg Wieder, as young Henry, summons a mix of stoicism and sniffles that conveys the burden of rule on young, pre-selected shoulders.

Nobody comes into anything by Divine Right in the junk-shop fiefdom of American Buffalo, where the democratic, dog-eat-dog precepts of free enterprise hold ignoble sway as a hapless triumvirate of lowlifes attempt to advance themselves the American way: through the acquisition, by whatever means possible, of "real classical money." Proprietor Don Dubrow is chafing about a buffalo nickel he probably sold for less than its worth and is vaguely planning, with the aid of neighborhood kid Bobby, whom he’s taken under his wing, to get his own back and then some. Enter explosive loser and would-be bigshot Teach, who wants a piece of the action. But whatever the worth of the hot coins, if this gang-who-can’t-talk-straight were to pull off a heist, it’d be chump change for the goofily volatile Teach of Anders Cato’s exemplary BTF staging. He’s Chris Noth, who’s better known as faithless high-roller Mr. Big of HBO’s Sex and the City.

Of course, American Buffalo is no more about a robbery plot than it is about rare coins. That’s a pretext for the interaction among the characters, whose fragile surrogate family gets detonated by their lame, ruthlessly individualistic attempts to grab a piece of the American pie. Purporting to possess a business savvy he considers sacrosanct, Teach defines free enterprise, in one of the play’s gritty, idiosyncratic arias, as "The freedom . . . Of the Individual . . . To Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees Fit. In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit." Without this, he contends, "we’re just savage shitheads in the wilderness . . . Sitting around some vicious campfire." Such is the stunted, pompously profane poetry of Mamet before he became an affected arch-minimalist and guru of rhythmically intoned zombie acting.

Of the BTF trio, Jim Frangione is the old-school Mamet vet. You know from his first utterance that he’s fluent in Mamet-speak. Looking like a younger Dennis Franz (who played the role in the 1996 film), clad in string tie and saggy brown pants, his feet atop the metal desk from which he presides over Don’s grimy detritus-stocked cage of an enterprise (designed by Carl Sprague), Frangione provides terse counterpoint to Noth’s sexy alpha-asshole of a Teach and succor to Sean Nelson’s babe-in-the-deadbeat-woods Bob, a troubled kid whose downfall is that he thinks the other two know whereof they speak. Nelson, who reprises his role from the film, is so watchful and clueless that he sometimes seems more amateur actor than amateur crook. But Noth commands the stage from the moment his wounded, pontificating swaggerer of a Teach hits it, the picture of offended agitation, drowning in testosterone, parading in polyester, his good looks framed by bad sideburns. He may not be Mr. Big, but he’s big.