Reviews

In American Buffalo, the characters express themselves in the debris of our language: words and sentences have become eroded.... If the play finally achieves eloquence it is through the inarticulate. No ideas or statements are ever completed, conversation is chiefly carried on in a series of muddled or explosive ejaculations. One often doubts whether the characters themselves know what they want to say. Hardly anything is fulfilled. There is something about the characters and their values as effaced as the American buffalo in the old coins. We perceive only their lineaments.

HAROLD CLURMAN, introduction, Nine Plays of the Modern Theater

David Mamet brings you to the edge of your seat with language. Not just the force of it, but the cunning deployment of everyday American speech patterns that cut corners and pure grammar to distill hard meaning and veiled threats from the frenzied banter of a trio of articulate burglars in a downtown junk shop. Hearing Pinter for the first time must have been something like this.

MICHAEL COVENEY, Financial Times, Jun. 29, 1978

The obscenities as well as the more homely exchanges compose a litany of the underworld, and Mamet has caught the tone precisely, knowing full well that the trio's words and actions are a form of prayer of the dispossessed.

DOUGLAS WATT, New York Daily News, Jun. 5, 1981

Like some bastard offspring of Oswald Spengler and Elaine May, American Buffalopopped out, full grown, as the American drama's funniest, most vicious attack on the ethos of Big Business and the price that it exacts upon the human soul.

GREGORY MOSHER, introduction, American Buffalo

American Buffalo is a play that is essentially concerned with language rather than deed, and Mamet advances the action almost entirely through that medium. Because of this concentration on the power of language rather than upon overt stage action, some critics have denounced the play as tedious and static.... Many of Mamet's plays have been criticized for their stasis or lack of plot, but they nonetheless remain powerfully dramatic.

ANNE DEAN, David Mamet: Language as Dramatic Action

The play's ostensible simplicity ... expands into a parodic version of the American dream, a social drama, and a metaphysical work of surprising complexity and genuine originality. With its echoes of another America, uncontaminated by entreprenurial greed, a product of utopian rhetoric rather than psychotic fear and aggression, American Buffalooffers a portrait of the Republic in terminal decay, its communal endeavor and individual resilience all but disappeared. The trust and unity invoked on its coinage have now devolved into paranoia, the security and hope it once offered into a frightening violence.

MATTHEW ROUDANÉ, The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet

These three failed crooks are the waste products of the American belief in free enterprise. But while Mamet shows them as victims, it is without patronage and with respect and even love for these little people who, as he somehow makes one feel, resemble the little person in all of us.

VICTORIA RADIN, London Observer, Aug. 5, 1984

In American Buffalo the quarrelsome solidarity of petty criminals is acted out in the mode of a most convincing psychological realism, thanks not least to a masterful deployment of authentically fragmented dialogue; but the author has proclaimed that he had in mind nothing less than a general indictment of American business ethics, and when read or seen in this light the play, right from its title, does give evidence of this.

HERBERT GRABES, New Essays on American Drama

By the time American Buffalo is over, it ... has pounded away at the American dream of success until it is left in soiled, hideous tatters.

FRANK RICH, New York Times, Jun. 5, 1981

American Buffalo is about an essential part of American consciousness, which is the ability to suspend an ethical sense and adopt in its stead a popular accepted mythology and use that to assuage your conscience like everyone else is doing.