Customer Reviews

American Buffalo

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am an actress, playwright, and constant theatergoer, so I'd like to think I know when a play is good...and believe me, this play is excellent. It is stark, realistic, and yet has a fantastic quality all its own. The story follows three small time crooks: Donny, the calm vet, Teach, daring and aching for adventure, and Bobby, the slow, amiable kid. Their plot to steal a valuable coin collection is the center of the play, but so much more goes into it. Honor amoung thieves, the busted American dream, and masculinity are at the core of this piece, and Mamet, with his honest style, pulls off what could very easily be a dumb crook spoof. It's a little hard to read at first, as all Mamet is, but if you envision the story, you'll get through it. I recently saw the play in New York at mamet's Atlantic company with Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy, and Mark Webber, and it was truly great. I suggest owning the play and getting to a local performance asap.

It's unfortunate that the first Amazon review of Mamet's brilliant work is by Mr. C.B.Liddell, a pompous, pontificating Brit who doesn't understand the play. I'm not sticking up for Mamet: his works are very hit and miss, and even the hits are an acquired taste (like Monty Python), I'm just standing up for a damn good play.

One of the problems with American Buffalo is that its language and setting (low-income Chicago in the 70's) are unfamiliar and difficult to appreciate for many people, but it's loved by many actors and writers in the same way that musicians appreciate "musician's music." Also, like Glengary Glen Ross, it can be emotionally violent and offensive for some people.

Still, a great work of art, in my humble opinion. Don't pass up the chance to see it performed by talented actors who know and love the play!

Years ago I saw this play on the Great White Way. The set was fantastic with the busiest, most cluttered junk shop imaginable, packed to the gills with all sorts of stuff. The play itself was and is a very slight effort, and I cannot understand why it's being revived for the 2008-2009 Broadway season. There's very little to it. Three men are talking and talking and pausing. As in McDonagh's and Pinter's plays, we are not dealing with rocket scientists here. Mamet is the poor man's Pinter. Both come out of the absurdist tradition, but Mamet often seems to me to be hitting first base hits that never go anywhere and certainly don't score.
Donny runs the junk shop; Bobby is his helper; and Teach is a very small time crook. The title refers to a valuable American buffalo nickel. Donny doesn't really know the real value of the nickel that has been bought from him. A crime is hatched to steal a coin collector's trove. Should another man, Fletcher, be included? Should they go in with a gun? These are real small time crooks who don't have a clue.
The absurdist dialogue involves inanity, non-sequiturs, and nonsense. Mamet is good at sussing out conversational rhythms and the way language is often only symbolic among friend, more evocative than communicative.
In one exchange Teach says, "According to me, yes, I am the person it's usually according to when I'm talking. Have you noticed this?" The play is as much about language as it is about the action of the play. The audience finds great comedy in the circumlocution of the absurdist dialogue. Listening to dumbbells arguing about nonsense can be very funny. It's sort of pointless, a lesson in futility.
As usual in plays things go awry toward the end. Much goes unspoken in this play, and the audience can draw inferences as to what happened offstage.
There are subtexts in the play. What did Bobby do while he was gone? Is there a relationship between Don and Bobby? Things slip out as these characters talk about seemingly straightforward matters. The shop set is unbelievably cluttered, yet the dialogue is simple and uncluttered.
When I first saw and heard the play performed, I thought it was riddled with profanity; now it seems quite tame. But worthy of a revival? It's a play that has little to convey and essentially goes nowhere. Count me out of the revival.

Movie tie-ins may be a necessary evil, but come now- why, 15 years after its uneventful release, are the miscast mugs of Dennis Franz and Dustin Hoffman still haunting this book cover? Why am I being told that it is "Now A Major Motion Picture?" I love Grove Press, and I thank them for keeping Mamet in print, but sometimes they perplex me.

Whatever the case- the play is an American classic, is a masterpiece of subtlety and characterization. I have never seen it in a theater- I can admit that the first read can leave you a little dumbfounded. It's slight, it's mundane. This is really Mamet at his most Pinterfied. But where Pinter was domestic, Mamet is professional, and this (with Glengarry and Speed-the-Plow) is among his best and most brilliant dissections of business relations, trust and betrayal. And at the end of the day, it's quite heartbreaking, actually.

There's a whole lot going on here. If you're a playwright, read it just to get a sense of how supple and modern the classical tragedy can be. It may well be Mamet's best. It is definitely an aesthetic and dramatic highpoint in American theater.

I have always enjoyed this play. I saw it in NYC in its first run on Broadway, then saw a production at the Berkeley Rep some years later. I watched the filmed version recently. This is (as are many of DM's works) a character study. The plot is just a vehicle to give the characters something to talk about. There are no great truths revealed but there are tremendous depths to the characters. This is an actor's play, full of great dialog exchanges. For the non-theatrical person it plays better than it reads.

Mamet is one of America's finest playwrights while "American Buffalo" might not stand up to universal appeal as much as "Glengarry" or "Speed the Plow" I consider it one of his best works. The language and characters are not idealistic but harsh and real as the Chicago neighborhood it takes place in. Mamet writes of broken characters and the broken American dream, read the play then rent and watch the production starring Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz or go watch a local theatrical production when it's done right and done by good actors it is truly an American classic.

"American Buffalo" was recommended to me by a fellow thespian because he thought this was raw and fantastic. It is indeed raw, but not at all fantastic. The dialogue is very choppy and I felt out of the loop with it - as if I missed some great detail. Perhaps this is a play that needs to be enjoyed when seen performed, rather than just read. I do not recommend.

In this play about three low life thugs, Mamet was trying to take a shot at America and its business ethics. The Indian associations of the title was a loose attempt to suggest the fundamental chicanery of a society whose founding act was the dispossession of the former owners of the land. But the problem with this play is that BOB, DON, and TEACH are so 'dumbed down' and their dialogue so impoverished that all Mamet can do is create a moral fog.

America may well be founded on the crime of dispossession and the genocide of the Indians, but a buffalo's head on a coin in a play hardly suggests any of this and is certainly incapable of presenting the rights and wrongs of the case. The logical extension of capitalist drives may indeed be a criminal society, but a few petty criminals mouthing off phrases of capitalist jargon, obviously detached from the comprehensive arguments of capitalist ideology, hardly proves this inherent criminality or reveals the complex processes by which capitalism encourages crime.

In the play TEACH defines 'free enterprise' as: "The freedom of the individual to embark on any course that he sees fit." In dialogue like this Mamet is apparently hoping to link the amoral self-interest of his characters to the principles of the American Revolution.

But the characters' relevance is limited by a number of factors. First, their ignorance and inability to express themselves severely limits any exposition and critique of society. Also, because Mamet is attempting a particularly bleak and stark form of realist drama. There is no opportunity, as with, say, the early plays of Eugene O'Neill, to present us with archetypal characters embodying whole race or class positions. Who does TEACH stand for besides himself?

Because of the 'literalness' of his form, if we want to find a critique of society, we must look for it more directly in the evident relations of the characters to the broader society. Such an avenue, however, remains firmly blocked as the characters are isolated from society. Indeed, they seem to belong to an almost self-contained little universe, centering around "Don's Resale Shop."

If Mamet is attempting in this play to present us with a 'reductio ad absurdum' showing the inherent criminality of American business ethics, then, he has painted himself into a corner. His characters lack consciousness, social relevance, and symbolism, all factors that allow a playwright to tackle social and moral problems. "American Buffalo" is extremely limited in the extent to which it can refer outwards to the greater society. All he can give us, in effect, is the 'absurdum' without the 'reductio', the criminality detached from the social forces that create it.

This play is a failure, but Mamet was able to return more successfully to these themes in "Glengarry Glen Ross." where the greater eloquence of his characters, dishonest land salesmen, allowed him to express more coherently the amorality of American business imperatives.

The play was a very smooth and quick read, containing a unique language, but it was much more than what was on the surface. The text drew me into the play and provided a very realistic view of American society and the of the ideal American business in a very raw sense. Great!