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Abdulqadir Ali Mohammad Al-Emad// Roll No: H-910

Contemporary American Drama

Dr. Thoty Subramanyam

29th November, 2010

Business Versus Friendship in Mamet's American Buffalo

(A Thematic Study)

"Business is a contract between two men" Unknown

David Mamet emerged as a playwright during the turbulent seventies. He earned

critical recognition for the unique yet harsh poetic language and pointed social

criticism found in his plays. The versatile talents of David Mamet are well known in

both theatrical and film circles. He is an award winning playwright, screenwriter, and

essayist, as well as a director of film and theatre and a professor of theatre arts.

Throughout his play American Buffalo, Mamet remains true to the theme of

the original literary text while at the same time adding his signature to the work.

Mamet's signature includes a strong criticism of how the individual is treated in

America because of the culture s materialistic tendencies and the corrupting influence

of American business ethics on all aspects of American life.

This paper focus at length on Mamet as a playwright, his unique use of

language, and themes common in this entire drama which incorporates Mamet's

concerns about the corruption of the individual in a society that values the dollar more

than the soul and include his bleak vision of the future if this trend should continue.

American Buffalo premiered in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre, Stage Two

on October 23, 1975. Gregory Mosher, the original director of the play and producer

of the 1996 cinematic version, writes in the introduction to a new paperback edition of
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the play how a relatively unknown David Mamet came into the Goodman Theatre in

Chicago and announced to Mosher that he had a play for their next season. Mosher

told Mamet he would read the script. .A confident Mamet replied, "you don't need to

read it. Just do it (Mosher ix). He also guaranteed Mosher that he would "put five

grand in escrow, and if the play doesn't win the Pulitzer, keep the money"" (Mosher

ix). Mosher read only a few pages of the text and knew that he wanted to direct the

play. He felt that it was unique and worth the risk. After this bold beginning, Mamet

won an Obie for Distinguished Playwrighting in 1976. The judges named Sexual

Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo as the reason for their decision.

The characters, like many in naturalistic theatre, are products of their lower

class environment. The plot works as a slice of three men's lives without the twists

and turns of a well-made plot to keep the audience guessing what will happen next.

However, the forces of heredity and environment that make victims of humanity in

naturalism seem to have abandoned these characters altogether in a situation

resembling that of Samuel Becket's characters in the absurdist play Endgame.

The play has been compared to Waiting for Godot, also by Samuel Beckett,

because of the inability of the characters to take action and the continuous waiting for

offstage characters that never appear. While some critics point to Mamet's vernacular

speech as a hallmark of naturalism, American Buffalo's dialogue does not technically

meet the requirements of naturalistic theatre. The language contains a poetry and

rhythm that is not a reflection of the naturalistic movement's demand for exact

recording of vernacular language. The discourse on the surface sounds like an

imitation of the vernacular speech patterns used by the typical Chicago hood. But

closer examination reveals much more than mere transcription. As Anne Dean points

out in her study of Mamet's language, the playwright "does not merely record what he
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hears around him, but manipulates it into free verse" {Language 17). At times the

dialogue compares to Chekov's inferred speech patterns in The Cherry Orchard where

characters often appear to engage in pointless conversation that reveals much about

the character's inner life. In this sense, this play is not a comedy that arouses laughter,

rather it is a tragedy or a tragic-comedy like Chekov's The Cherry Orchard which is

described by its author a comedy of four acts.

Mamet reveals the philosophical dilemmas raised by money as the primary

concern of American Buffalo early in the first act, when his protagonist Don gives

lessons on business to Bob, lessons that nicely foreground issues central to the "logic

of naturalism. "The first of these issues involves what is for many critics the defining

theme of literary naturalism: the conflict between one's sense of free will and one's

sense of behavior as determined. In discussing Fletcher--the winner of a card game

that precedes the action of the play and one of Mamet's many Godot-like characters

representing powerful off-stage forces--Don evokes the paradox of human freedom

through his own use of the terms skill, talent, and experience. First Don ascribes

Fletcher's success at cards to "[s]kill and talent and the balls to arrive at your own

conclusions" (4), (1) which implies some mixture of learned experience, innate

ability, and independent thinking. Then Don asks Bob rhetorically, "was he born that

way or do you think he had to learn it?" Bob dutifully responds "Learn it." Don

rewards him with "Goddamn right he did" and further entrenches himself on the side

of experience by claiming that "[e]verything that I or Fletcher know we picked up on

the street" (6). But just when it appears that Don is firmly on the side of free will and

the ability to learn from experience, he muddles the issue again with the first of this

play's several definitions of business: "That's all business is ... common sense,

experience, and talent." Here the two poles of what is learned (experience) and what
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is innate (talent) are combined with common sense--that dubious mantra of business

rhetoric that somehow denotes something both innate and learned.

There is no doubt that Don displays all of the elements of the tragic hero, but

there are comic overtones in this play that cannot be ignored. The comedy is dark and

reflects a cynical and sarcastic view of life on the part of the characters. Without the

comedy, the isolation and despair of the three characters emotionally overwhelm

spectators.

Thematically, the play contains many familiar Mametian concerns including

human relationships equated to con games, the ethical concerns of business versus

friendship, and an exploration of the individual corrupted by the greed of the

American capitalist system. American Buffalo demonstrates that from the beginning

of his career as a writer, Mamet showed concerns about how the American economic

system adversely alters individuals. Mamet made clear the message he intended for

the play to convey in an interview with Richard Gottlieb for the New York Times.

Mamet elaborates:

The play is about the American ethic of business. About how we excuse all

sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business. I

felt angry about business when I wrote the play. I used to stand at the back of

the theater and watch the audience as they left. Women had a much easier

tune with the play. Businessmen left it muttering vehemently about its

inadequacies and pointlessness. But they weren't really mad because the play

was pointless - no - one can be forced o sit through an hour-and-a-half of

meaningless dialogue - they were angry because the play was about them.
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The play opens with Mamet's idea that Mamet wanted to explore the ironies of

the "American Business Ethic" a term he considered to be an oxymoron. He found it

fascinating that things like theft and conspiracy were considered criminal when

committed by small time crooks but could be applauded as good business practices

when carried out by corporate executives. Regarding language, we find from the very

beginning frequent references to murder as a business to the mind-set of characters.

At the opening of American Buffalo, Teach is offended by his poker buddies, Grace

and Ruthie, who make an offhand remark about Teach taking a piece of toast off of a

plate of discarded food at the dinner. Teach views the women as ungrateful because

he has picked up the check for them on many previous occasions. He tells Don that

"the only way to teach these people is to kill them" (11). Teach remains ineffectual

and powerless to do more than strike out at Bobby with pieces of rabble from Don's

junkshop. The junkshop here reflects the parental-seeming relationship between Don

and Bob. This shop according to Douglas Bruster represents not so much a single

store, but all business. Apparently, what David Mamet attempts to dramatize in this

play is not only a business-based relationship but also a friendship-based relationship

where these ships are set in self-deceptive as well as mutual-deceptive business

worlds, in which loyalty, peership and trust are emphasized on the surface, yet

beneath it unfaithfulness, conspiracies and distrust actually become essences of

business.

There can be no doubt that the play reflects 1970's American society

struggling with scandal and fraud. When the play came out in 1975, the United States

had just gone through one of the most troubling years in its political history. In this

way, the play explores troubling contradictions lurking behind the concept of America

as a land of opportunity based on capitalism, a system under which everyone is

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supposed to prosper. Mamet chooses three petty crooks from the fringes of urban

American society to explore this problem. Mamet focuses on the way that

materialism, greed and the American business ethic creates a world where the only

concern becomes how much a person can amass in terms of material wealth. This

choice makes character much more important than plot.

The plot can be summed up in a few sentences. Act I begins one week later as

Bobby comes to report his latest findings on the man in question. Bobby, a recovering

drug addict proves to be an ineffectual spy. Don's friend; Teach shows up and wants

in on the possible heist of the coin collection and wants Bobby out. Don enlists the

help of an old poker buddy, Fletch, as an accomplice in the burglary. Teach opposes

this choice. Don and Teach spend most of the play discussing how they plan to carry

out the burglary. Bobby appears and disappears several times during the play as Teach

and Don talk. Bobby's actions make Teach believe that the boy plans to steal the coins

himself in order to get money for drugs. Ultimately. Teach bashes Bobby on the head

because he does not trust him. Teach then trashes the shop, and Don and Teach set out

to take Bobby to the hospital after finding out the boy was honest all along.

Beyond this sparse plot lurks a powerful message about how the greed and

materialism of our society has created petty criminals out of the lower class. This

message comes out in the dialogue of the characters in the play when speaking to each

other. Anne Dean observed in her exploration of the play that these characters feed

into the society they hate mirroring the language and larger crimes of the big

corporations (86). These characters are cheap hoods justifying crimes with Wall-

Street logic, but since these are despicable, petty criminals we tend to condemn them.

The second most used word in the play beyond the ever-present "fuck" is "business."

Some of the most telling lines concerning business come from the character Teach
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whose loyalties go as far as the next business deal. .At the beginning, Teach tells Don

that "friendship is friendship, and a wonderful thing, and I am all for it. I have never

said different, and you know me on this point. Okay. But let's just keep it separate

huh, let's just keep the two apart, and maybe we can deal with each other like some

human beings" (Mamet, Buffalo 15). Teach later elaborates on what he believes to be

the essence of the American capitalistic system. .Again speaking to Don, Teach

reveals a cynical and self-centered approach to business:

Teach: You know what is free enterprise?

Don: No. What?
Teach: The freedom . . .
Don: . . . yeah?
Teach: Of the individual
Don: yeah?
Teach: To Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit.
Don: Uh-huh . . .
Teach: In order to secure Ms honest chance to make a profit. Am I so out of
line on this?
Don: No.
Teach: Does this make me a Commie?
Don: No.
Teach: The country's founded on this, Don. You know this. (Mamet Buffalo
73).
A few lines later Teach adds that "without this we're just savage shitheads in the

wilderness" (Mamet, Buffalo 73).

In the play American Buffalo, as the credits end, the poker game fades out.

The next series of shots introduce the three characters of the play to the readers and

give important clues to the relationship between these characters. There is a fade-in on

two people walking down a deserted street. As the older man, Don takes a direct path

down the sidewalk and across the street, the young boy, Bobby, buzzes around him,

always in motion. This scene reflects the drab life led by these characters.

If we think about the gray colour of their dress and of goods in the junkshop

when Don and Bobby enter Don's Resale Shop, it symbolically marks a major

achievement of this play. It is a chaotic mess of discarded junk, nooks, and crannies
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with deep, dark secrets. Leftovers from the decades of the forties and fifties hang

overhead. An old Schwinn bicycle often covers the top part of the frame as the actors

talk underneath. TMs bicycle, a symbol of lost youth and innocence like Charles

Foster Kane's sled named Rosebud, ironically comments on the descent of the

American Dream into this tomb of American popular culture. Don's store symbolizes

Don and his friends who are a collection of objects discarded by the rest of society.

further, it represents the state of Don's life as a businessman, a cheap imitation of the

real thing.

On the other hand, the street reflects an urban commerce that no longer exists

for the lower-class inhabitants except in those industries that thrive off of people's

poverty such as the pawn shops, plasma donation centers, seedy motels, rundown

diners, and second-hand stores shown on this street.

Teach spends much of Ms time in Don's shop spying on the place for this

reason not wanting the women to make a move he does not see. Like Don's empty

store, the empty diner adds to the feeling that these characters live in an abandoned

world. Thus, Don's desk operates as Ms command post in American Buffalo and

represents the control he has over the actions of the other characters in the play.

So we find a kind of isolation felt by these three characters in the play as they

all depend on each other yet can never trust each other at important moments because

of their perverse ethical code. Ironically, towards the end, the moment when they

most need to work together, the moment before their big heist, they are all separated.

Based on the above-mentioned, American Buffalo examines the underdogs, the

people at the bottom of society. Mamet himself states that he believes that these

characters give the best picture of what is wrong in American society. They

desperately try to amass possessions, wealth, anything that will give them status in
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our materialistic world. Illegal routes are the only options these characters have in the

bloody fight to the top of the materialistic heap. The characters in American Buffalo

represent the most ineffectual, the most down and out of any other character of any

other in the Mamet repertoire. These types of characters were direct products of the

anguish of the seventies caused by the Vietnam War and Watergate which Mamet

uses effectively to convey his message.

The American Buffalo nickel from which the play gets its name becomes a

symbol of these fringe characters and the entire play. First the buffalo nickel is a

discontinued coin of the past. There are not many in circulation so they appear to be a

rarity. Closer examination reveals that while they are worth more than a nickel, they

are not worth much more than a nickel unless they have special qualities. They are

discarded pieces of another era. Like the Indian and the buffalo on the coin, the

characters are obsolete, ineffectual, and even extinct in the materialistic world of

corporate America.

Another metaphor for these fringe characters is the various paraphernalia from

the 1933 Chicago World's Fair found in a display case in Don's shop. Don first tells

Teach that the fair ran for two years and that merchandise from the fair is abundant.

Teach then inquires as to the value of a compact only to be told that it is worth fifteen

dollars because "there're guys they just collect the stuff' (Mamet, Buffalo 18). Like the

merchandise from the fair Don, Teach and Bobby are a dime a dozen petty thieves

selling themselves as worth much more.

The Lighting in the Play

The lighting in American Buffalo reflects the descent of these characters into

nothingness. These characters move into Don's dimly ht shop where outside light
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leaks in only at the windows and doors. Don and Teach spend much of their time in

the center of the shop where lamps must be turned on to be able to distinguish figures

even if it is daylight outside. It is as if these characters are in constant retreat from the

light of day. They spend very little time outside before they move back to the deepest

recesses of the shop. The last scenes of the play take place in the darkness of a rain

soaked night which points to the fact that these characters for all their planning are

lost in the dark cold wilderness of urban America.

To end up with the theme of business, in the hands of this playwright,

business becomes a kind of sacrament. While Mamet seems to revel in teasing out the

inherent contradictions of both economic life and its aesthetic manifestation in the

naturalist theatre, he also seeks ultimately not to criticize but to justify business and

economic exchange. Ultimately American Buffalo seeks to justify both the money

economy and the language economy by showing both as problematic but necessary

systems of signification, and systems not inherently antithetical to the establishment

of community between the male characters. Don, like all of us, must learn to accept

the inherent ambiguity of the sign, and love and trust others in the face of it.

The planned robbery might at first seem to take the money economy as a

given. The play opens with Don's advice to Bob concerning the ethics of business, the

gist of which is to keep things impersonal. While Don tells Bob that "there's business

and there's friendship," essentially his advice is to treat all relationships like business

relationships. Don demonstrates this attitude in his manner toward Bob. When the

latter offers an apology for failing to keep track of the coin buyer's movements, Don

replies, "Don't tell me you're sorry. I'm not mad at you" (4). Again, when Bob thanks

Don for offering to get him some vitamins, Don's response reflects a cold focus on

utility rather than anything like friendship: "Don't thank me ... I just can't use you in
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here like a zombie" (9). When Bob then offers yet another explanation for his failure,

Don responds, "I don't care. Do you see? Do you see what I'm getting at?" What Don

is "getting at" seems to be that in business, all relationships should be governed by a

coolly detached self-interest. We might see this as the corrupting of personal

relationships by the "business values" to which Teach claims allegiance. But then

consider that the planning of the robbery, which might seem prompted by these

"values," at the same time manifests Don's rejection of the alienated, impersonal

world of the money economy. Teach tries to remind Don that the man's buying the

nickel was "just business," but Don takes it personally. Simmel recognized that the

cool detachment that Don seems unable to attain was necessary for an economic life

where individuals must be able to calmly bid on what they desire instead of simply

taking it. Robbery, conversely, is characterized by "pure subjectivity in the change of

ownership," as is the giving of gifts (98). This helps explain why, in what Simmel

calls primitive societies, robbery has sometimes been considered more honorable than

exchange, since it involves a personal involvement and a good deal of risk on the part

of the robber. In this sense, Don's desire to get his nickel back through robbery,

clearly motivated by a sense of injured honor rather than a desire for money,

constitutes a rejection of the alienating world of economic exchange. The planned

robbery itself, then, represents yet another attempt at escaping the money economy.

Finally, Don's failed attempt to stage the disappearance of money is

represented by the titular nickel whose sale incites the talk/action of American

Buffalo. As a unit of currency that transforms into a work of art--Don refers to it as

"real Classical money" (36)--the buffalo nickel is a powerful symbol of both the

desire for and the impossibility of escape from the money economy. Once valued, like

all circulating currency, not for what it materially is but for the value it represents, the
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now-discontinued buffalo nickel becomes a collector's item and so reenters the realm

of material things: whereas one normal, circulating nickel is as good as another, each

buffalo nickel is one of a kind, its value varying widely according to its date,

condition, and other factors. But while in this sense the nickel seems to escape the

money economy, it also reenters that economy as a commodity whose value can be

fixed to a certain degree and listed in the blue book Don shows to Teach in the second

act. This failure to escape the money economy is not particular to rare coins, of

course. Any antique object or work of art that becomes desired not for what it either

does or represents but for what it materially is embodies this same fantasy of escape,

with the same predictable results: the object is lifted high above the base marketplace

and priced accordingly.

To conclude, in this comedy in two acts, we find the title as an imagery of

animal and also in this play we never come across a polished language. We are in a

society where laughter is a serious business and this society is depicted and criticized

by a comedy which is more serious than a tragedy. In the society of this play,

everything seems is political and political is more refreshable than sex. It comments

on relationships including friendship which is a business and betrayal in contrary. If

we deeply dive into the imagery, we have in the beginning the metaphor of the poker

game that returns throughout the script in the use of hand imagery to indicate the

power struggles of the three characters. There is a eerie emptiness in the visualization

of this movie that mirrors the empty lives of Don, Teach and Bobby. They have been

abandoned by society, yet they do not seem to know this. They view themselves as

important wheelers and dealers in the business world when in reality they are

leftovers from a long forgotten era.

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Therefore, we can see how Mamet's fascination with corruption lends itself to

the use of noir techniques through his art of characterization and plot. His characters

constantly battle outside forces that never reveal themselves for what they are until it

is almost too late. As previously demonstrated, lighting, setting, color, and sound are

used in this play to minor the psyche of these characters as in noir.

To my mind and to my heart, David Mamet's American Buffalo is not only a

historical and political reflection of its ages but it addresses the human issues today

not only in the U.S. but also everywhere in this zodiac and all over this planet.

Today we find ourselves in an especially resonant cultural moment that can

help us shed more light on Mamet's American Buffalo. The financial crisis has thrown

into high relief the question of values and value. We are collectively questioning what

we have paid for the American obsession with wealth and we are witnessing the

stratification of wealth—the winners and losers—when the game falls apart.

American Buffalo has much to offer in the way of a cautionary tale. That it offers its

wisdom in a story beautifully told and deeply felt is a testimony to Mamet's gift.

Thus, no writer has more thoroughly investigated these anxieties than David

Mamet, whose work for the stage and screen relentlessly revisits the theme of

economic life and its relation to moral, ontological, and epistemological issues. In

American Buffalo, his earliest full-scale investigation of these themes on the stage and

what is usually regarded as his first mature play, Mamet thematizes the anxieties that

will inform all his future work. In this play about the planning of a never-to-be-

committed robbery by junk shop owner Don, his "friend and associate "Teach", and

his young "gopher" Bob, Mamet dramatizes the attempted escape from the money

economy that is located as the obsession of naturalism—the doomed attempt to stage

the disappearance of money. A careful reading of American Buffalo finds what will
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become the familiar Mamettian conflicts between talk and action, seeming and being,

as rooted in the playwright's own complex and often paradoxical relationship with a

dramatic and literary naturalism informed by the anxieties of economic life.

Works-Cited

American Buffalo, By David Mamet. Dir. Michael Conente, Perf. Dustin Hoffinan,

Deniris Franz, and Sean Nelson, Samuel Goldwyn, 1996.

Class-notes, Lectures on American Buffalo by Dr. Thoty Subramanyam, 2010.

The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America,1840 to 1940, John

Springhall, 2008, Macmillan.

The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet, Christopher Bigsby, Cambridge

University Press, 2004.