American Buffalo
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery
YEAR
2022
EXTERNAL URL
Three Oscar-, Emmy-, and Golden Globe-winning actors in a 16-week limited run at the Circle in the Square Theatre — the same intimate thrust stage where Oklahoma! had played its full run. WordPress build with ticketing calendar and structured cast content, launching the same spring 2022 window as for colored girls and The Minutes.
Owned the full build at Situation Interactive.
Background
A two-year delay made a star-powered revival even higher-stakes.
David Mamet’s 1975 play about loyalty, greed, and a botched coin heist in a Chicago junk shop was set to return to Broadway in spring 2020 with Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell, and Darren Criss. Then Broadway shut down on March 12, 2020. The production held together through the entire closure — same cast, same director Neil Pepe — and announced its return for April 2022 at the Circle in the Square Theatre, the same thrust-stage house where Oklahoma! had staged its acclaimed revival run. Opening night landed on April 14, exactly two years to the day after the original target. The fact that all three leads honored two-year-old commitments through a pandemic was itself a story — and it generated the kind of advance press that demands a site ready to convert from day one.
This was one of three productions I launched within the same two-week window in spring 2022, alongside for colored girls and The Minutes — a concentrated stretch that pressure-tested every workflow.
Implementation
A ticketing-focused build with structured cast content for a three-person powerhouse.
The custom WordPress theme leaned into the production’s visual identity — bold orange and gray, stripped-down theatrical typography, no ornamentation. Everything about the show was spare and direct, and the site followed suit. The ticketing calendar served as the primary conversion surface, integrating with Broadway.com and premium seat vendors to give visitors a date-driven interface across the 16-week window. With star-driven demand and a hard closing date, the purchase flow had to be frictionless.
Cast and creative content took a different shape here than on larger-ensemble builds. Three actors meant three bios front and center, but the creative team behind them — director Neil Pepe, scenic designer Scott Pask, costume designer Dede Ayite, lighting designer Tyler Micoleau — warranted equal presence. Structured field groups let the marketing team manage all profiles, press quotes, and media galleries without touching code. The Circle in the Square’s thrust configuration gave the production an immediacy that the site’s layout reflected: tight spacing, direct messaging, nothing between the visitor and the ticket.
The compact three-person cast made the content architecture lighter than something like for colored girls, which had seven performers each requiring distinct visual treatment — but the ticketing pressure was identical.
Results
Four Tony nominations, $8.4 million at the box office, and a complete run.
The site launched ahead of previews on March 22, 2022 and ran through all 101 performances. American Buffalo earned four Tony nominations — Best Revival of a Play, Best Leading Actor (Sam Rockwell), Best Direction (Neil Pepe), and Best Scenic Design (Scott Pask) — and grossed $8.4 million across its limited engagement, with preview-period attendance at 94% of capacity.
Nothing about the site required modification after launch. The ticketing calendar, cast profiles, and content management layer all held through the full lifecycle — Tony nomination badges, critical praise additions, and schedule changes were handled entirely through the CMS. Launching this site in the same compressed window as for colored girls and The Minutes validated that the underlying architecture could be adapted quickly across very different productions without starting from scratch each time.
The ticketing and cast content patterns from this build carried directly into Topdog/Underdog and the larger musicals that followed later in 2022.
