26 pages • 52 minutes read
David MametAmerican Buffalo
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Human Cost of Free Enterprise
Mamet’s play explores the warring concepts of friendship and free enterprise. Teach and Donny discuss friendship often, with each maintaining his own notion of what real friendship entails. Friendship for these characters, Mamet suggests, is incongruous with the self-interest and cunning of free enterprise.
In the play’s opening dialogue, Donny counsels Bobby on the importance of friendship: “‘Cause there’s business and there’s friendship, Bobby . . . there are many things, and when you walk around you hear a lot of things, and what you got to do is keep clear who your friends are, and who treated you like what […] There’s lotsa people on this street, Bob, they want this and they want that. Do anything to get it. You don’t have friends this life […] You want some breakfast?” (19).
Donny wants to equip his protégé with an understanding of the business world, as he sees it. Mamet’s dialogue is permeated with irony: Donny offers to buy Bobby breakfast immediately after telling him to be wary of others, as friendship is—according to Donny—nonexistent.
When he comes onstage, Teach is disillusioned after an encounter with two women—Ruthie and Grace—who he claims begrudged him a piece of toast. Teach claims that he has treated his friends to breakfast countless times, without asking for recognition: “I never go and make a big thing out of it” (23). This is an ironic claim in light of Teach’s self-promotion throughout the play.
Teach counsels Donny against the dangers of mixing business with friendship, underscoring the tension at the heart of the play:
“We’re talking about money for chrissake, huh? We’re talking about cards. 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?” (31).
In the play, friendship and business mix with dangerous consequences.
Criminal Activity Breeds Distrust
Both Donny and Teach see themselves as men of business, but not just any business: Act I suggests that the two men routinely participate in robbery schemes. The two discuss robbery in terms that present it as a business—“the guy with the suitcase, he’s the mark” (51). Both Donny and Teach frequently say what they do in the name of business, with each professing to be an expert.
The characters never completely trust each other. Teach is the most consistently distrustful. He sows mistrust when trying to convince Donny that Fletcher and Bobby can’t be trusted.
Even Donny mistrusts Teach and Bobby at different points in the play. When Teach claims that his watch broke, Donny asks him, “when did your watch break?” and then asks to see the watch (99). When Teach can’t furnish the watch, the audience also realizes that Teach is being deceptive.
When Masonic hospital says that Fletcher is not a patient, Donny becomes suspicious of Bobby. Like Teach, Donny is capable of deceiving others. When he agrees to dismiss Bobby from the robbery, he cagily says, “forget the thing” (71).
Both Donny and Teach reinforce the message that criminal activity breeds distrust, and that those most prone to treating others with suspicion are also those most inclined to deceive others.
The Subjectivity of Value
The titular coin is never formally appraised. Donny sells it for $90, but later says: “I bet it’s worth five times that” (48). Only halfway through the play does Donny reveal that he has a coin book. When Teach uses it to quiz Donny on a coin’s value, Donny incorrectly guesses “about thirty-six dollars,” when the coin is actually worth “twenty fucking cents” (49-50). Neither Teach or Donny have an affinity for the value of material items. Donny’s contention that the buffalo-head is worth five times the price for which he sold it is likely an instance of self-deception that Donny contrives to justify the burglary.
In Act II, Bobby tries to sell a buffalo nickel to Donny. Bobby says that “it’s a buffalo, it’s worth something” (94). Donny’s reply is none other than one of the play’s central questions, “the question is but what” (94). Donny proposes looking it up in the book, insisting that the condition is more important than the date. This is problematic, since condition—unlike a date—is subjective.
Teach’s monologue dramatizes the arbitrary nature of laws, such as those that govern material value: “There Is No Law. There Is No Right And Wrong. The World Is Lies. There Is No Friendship. Every Fucking Thing. Every God-forsaken Thing” (160). Though it seems like a desperate rant, Teach’s lines underscore themes explored within the play: Objects do not have intrinsic value; humans are responsible for assessing the worth of items, which, like the worth of people and friendships are a matter of subjective, personal appraisal.
The play suggests that objects do not have objective value. Rather, worth is determined by the price for which an individual person is willing to buy or sell something.
Related Titles
By David Mamet
