American Buffalo Book

"The whole entire world.
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"--Teach, in American Buffalo

I seem to be in a phase here of running/walking and listening to great American plays in a particular vein--Sam Shephard, David Mamet, Kenneth Lonergan, Edward Albee--plays featuring working class language: Muscular, visceral, sometimes profane. The men--and it is most often men in these plays--get showcased as they talk, and they often talk a lot, and "roughly," so a soliloquy here ain't no Hamlet. It's a different kind of poetry, some may call it profane poetry, street poetry, that emerged in theater in the 1950's and 1960's and remains in some playwrights today. Poetry Whitman might have celebrated as "democratic." I think in some ways the talk comes out of a noir tradition, too, dark and occasionally melodramatic.

So these are language plays, and seen that way can be exhilarating, if you pay attention to the rhythms, the cadences of the talk, though as the often low ratings of these plays here indicate, these plays don't always feature the most admirable people. "Lowlifes," the noir writers might have called them. Morally compromised, shall we say, though we do find things to admire about them in their allegiances to each other sometimes.

This one features three small time crooks: Don, who owns a pawn shop; Bobby, an ex-junkie whom Don takes under his wing, and Teach, Don's friend. The play opens after Don has been given ninety bucks for a "Buffalo-head" American nickel; none of the guys know anything about coins, but they decide to steal it back (and any other valuable coins the guy has) so they can resell them for greater profit.

In the process, Teach elbows Bobby out of the job. And later, at the time of the robbery, when Bobby comes in to try to sell Don a very similar nickel, where did that nickel come from?!

But whatever else happens, the play is not about the nickel! (as in, "it's not about the bike," yeah). It's not about the plot, it's about talk and the relationship these guys forge along the way. It's about Mamet's ear for American talk, for Chicago, north-side, working-class talk. Someone called Mamet the American Pinter (a Brit known for language, for talk, for violence) and this works for me (read The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, or Betrayal by Pinter) The other great play from Mamet is also Chicagoan, Glengarry Glen Ross, a play about struggling big-talker, real-estate guys during the eighties recession. Words like punches to the gut.

And some great American actors have fought to get into these plays: Robert Duvall or Al Pacino as Teach; John Goodman and Cedric the Entertainer as Donny? William Macy or John Savage as Bobby? Watch a film adaptation, as just reading it, you miss the rhythm, the punctuation.

And how odd to put his language in relief by my listening as well to Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips--lyrical, feminine, graceful, beautiful in another way.