Further thoughts on "American Buffalo'

In their review of American Buffalo— which is partly a response to my own review— Pamela and Gresham Riley contend that the unseen core of David Mamet's play is friendship and community. "This is a play about people," they write, "in particular these people, and their social dependence, however fractious, on each other."

The family therapist SaraKay Smullens, responding to the Rileys in a letter, agrees that American Buffalo depicts "the universal longing for trusted and trusting family and community; and the desperate need to be taken care of when we are on the verge of losing everything, usually because our frailties, frustrations, longings and resulting rage are no match for a heartless and corrupt world."

These are surely valid perceptions, and surely any true work of art will be susceptible to many interpretations. But I would point out that Donnie, Teach, Bob and their three unseen friends constitute a community only in the very narrowest definition of the term— that is, they look after each other without regard for the larger community beyond their tiny circle.

The absence of a woman

The plot involves a criminal enterprise on the part of Donnie and Teach— specifically, their plan to burglarize the home of a customer who has visited Donnie's store in good faith and, in the process, has inadvertently dropped certain hints as to the contents of his home as well as his travel schedule. Teach in particular is preoccupied with the wrongs done to him by others, which he uses to justify his own offenses against others.

To me it's significant that the two female members of Mamet's "community" in American Buffalo are never seen onstage. This is not to suggest that women are inherently more gentle, social or moral than men (although they well may be). It's sufficient, I think, simply to point out that men and women are different, and insulation from those who differ from oneself inevitably reinforces a shortsighted view of one's place in the cosmos and one's responsibility to a larger community.

In its insularity, the community in American Buffalo reminds me of the Greenwich Village rooftop community portrayed admiringly by Terrence McNally in Unusual Acts of Devotion. McNally's characters aren't burglars, to be sure. But they resent the "stupid rules" imposed by the larger society and assert their right to break such rules with impunity. They also (like Donnie and Teach) resent the police, whom they see as oppressive, even though the only evidence of such oppression in Unusual Acts is a police manhunt for a serial killer on the loose in the neighborhood. The thought that they may owe something to the larger community beyond their roof doesn't occur to them.

A Harvard-Yale analogy

If the late Penn sociologist E. Digby Baltzell were here today, I think I know how he'd classify American Buffalo's community. Baltzell, perhaps the leading observer of America's Protestant upper classes, was that rare fellow who perceived the subtle theological gradations between, say, the Puritans who founded Harvard and the Congregationalists who founded Yale. The difference between a Harvard man and a Yale man, Baltzell liked to joke, is that "the Harvard man washes his hands before he takes a leak; the Yale man, after he takes a leak."

That is, the Harvard man is concerned about what the world does to him; the Yale man, by what he does to the world. Viewed through that prism, Mamet's characters in American Buffalo are obviously Harvard men. ïµ




To read the Rileys' response, click here.