American Buffalo
WORKS BY DAVID MAMET
Published by Grove Press
PLAYS
American Buffalo
Glengarry Glen Ross
Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
A Life in the Theatre
Reunion and Dark Pony
Sexual Perversity in Chicago and The Duck Variations
Speed-the-Plow
The Shawl and Prairie du Chien
Three Children’s Plays:
The Poet and the Rent
The Frog Prince
The Revenge of the Space Pandas or Binky Rudich and the Two-Speed Clock
The Woods, Lakeboat, Edmond
SCREENPLAYS
Five Television Plays:
A Waitress in Yellowstone
Brandford
The Museum of Science and Industry Story
A Wasted Weekend
We Will Take You There
Homicide
House of Games
Things Change
We’re No Angels
ADAPTATIONS BY DAVID MAMET
The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov
The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov
Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov
American Buffalo
a play by David Mamet
with an introduction by Gregory Mosher
GROVE PRESS
NEW YORK
Copyright © 1976 by David Mamet
Introduction copyright © 1996 by Gregory Mosher
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-78079
eISBN: 978-0-8021-9180-9
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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13 14 15 16 30 29 28 27 26
This play is dedicated to Mr. J. J. Johnston of Chicago, Illinois.
American Buffalo was first produced by the Goodman Theatre Stage Two, Chicago, Illinois, and opened on November 23, 1975, with the following cast:
BOBBY
William H. Macy
TEACH
Bernard Erhard
DONNY
J. J. Johnston
This production was directed by Gregory Mosher; set by Michael Merritt; lighting by Robert Christen.
After a twelve-performance showcase at Stage Two, it reopened at Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theatre Company, with Mike Nussbaum in the role of TEACH.
In February, 1976, it was showcased at St. Clement’s, New York, with the following cast:
BOBBY
J. T. Walsh
TEACH
Mike Kellin
DONNY
This production was directed by Gregory Mosher; set by Akira Yoshimura; lighting by Gary Porto.
The New York Broadway production at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre opened on February 16, 1977, with the following cast:
BOBBY
John Savage
TEACH
Robert Duvall
DONNY
Kenneth McMillan
This production was directed by Ulu Grosbard; set by Santo Loquasto; lighting by Jules Fisher.
American Buffalo was released by the Samuel Goldwyn Company in association with Capitol Films, produced in association with Punch Productions.
TEACH
Dustin Hoffman
DONNY
Dennis Franz
BOBBY
Sean Nelson
Director
Michael Corrente
Producer
Gregory Mosher
Screenplay (based on his play)
David Mamet
Executive Producer
John Sloss
Co-Producer
Sarah Green
Director of Photography
Richard Crudo
Production Designer
Daniel Talpers
Costume Designer
Deborah Newhall
Editor
Kate Sanford
Music
Thomas Newman
Production Sound
Ronald Judkins
Robert Jackson
Casting
Billy Hopkins
Suzanne Smith
Kerry Barden
Introduction
by Gregory Mosher
In 1975, I was just out of school, working at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago as assistant to everybody and as the director of Stage 2, when a guy about my age walked in with a play under his arm. “Something for your next season.” I told him I’d read it over the weekend. “You don’t need to read it. Just do it.”
Mamet’s eyes sparkled and his upper lip twitched, but otherwise he held a straight face. There was a pause. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll put five grand in escrow, and if the play doesn’t win the Pulitzer, keep the money.” I mustered enough solemnity to reply that I would read the script that night, and we parted. I was fifteen pages in before he left the building.
Auditions began. We quickly signed J. J. Johnston (to whom the play would be dedicated) and W. H. Macy, but we couldn’t find someone for Teach. At a 10:20 A.M. audition a fellow came in, covered in blood. I asked if he was all right. “I fell out of the car, okay? Let’s just do the fucking audition.” We cast him.
At the first rehearsal, where Mamet heard the play for the first time, he kept tearing whole pages out of the script and throwing them away. After the actors left, I asked why. “Cuts.” I pointed out that some good stuff was on the floor. He examined a few of the discarded pages. “That’s true. Doesn’t belong in the play though.”
The actors were relieved, I suspect, because they had more than enough dialogue to learn in just nineteen rehearsals. Halfway in, we had a walk-through. Mamet was seated just behind me, and everybody was nervous. The actors, valiant to a fault, tried to get through the play without their scripts and
so, of course, kept having to ask the stage manager for help. After a while, they were hopelessly lost. We started to hear everything twice.
“Line, please.”
“’Lemme see the fucking nickel.’”
“Lemme see the fucking nickel.” (Long pause.) “Is it still me?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. Line, please.”
I think I may have suggested, in the heat of the moment, that they resembled amateurs. This went over particularly badly with the fellow who had fallen out of the car, and he advanced on me with a questioning mien. My assistant whispered that he was definitely about to hit me. I knew there was an appropriate response, but I couldn’t think what it was at just that moment, and I turned to see if Dave had an idea. The door was closing behind him.
After the rehearsal I found him up the street at the China Doll. There was a little paper parasol in his drink. There were two more little paper parasols on the table next to the notebook in which he was writing. He suggested we cancel.
Opening night went splendidly. Even before the reviews, we knew that the American theater was now a little bit different. After a few weeks we moved the production to the new St. Nicholas Theatre space, with a brilliant new Teach, Mike Nussbaum, who played him like Nathan Leopold in cowboy boots. Dave and I watched from the back of the house, happy beyond all bounds and already nostalgic, because we knew this was the end of the best part.
Nineteen years later, I wandered into a film festival screening of Michael Corrente’s Federal Hill. In the lobby after the movie, I passed by Corrente, whom I’d never met, and threw him a quick thumbs-up.
Later that day, the director came up and said, “This won’t mean anything to Mamet, but could you tell him that Federal Hill never would have happened if I hadn’t seen Buffalo onstage when I was a kid?”
My response was to suggest that he direct the movie. Michael thought I was joshing him and went back to his wife and friends. I called Mamet to apprise him of the situation, and he was kind enough to suggest that if I thought Corrente was the guy for the job, then it was fine with him.
As Estragon says in Waiting for Godot, “Off we go again.”
The very first thing we did was to anchor the film with Dennis Franz, an old Chicago buddy, as Donny. Mamet suggested we get a really young guy to play the Macy part, and we found the fourteen-year-old Sean Nelson on our first day of auditions.
On the first day of rehearsals, Dustin Hoffman had already been working on Teach’s lines for weeks, and I think it would be fair to say that he was positively dazzled at their complexity. My fondest location memory is of Hoffman, poleaxed with exhaustion, checking his work at the video replay station.
“Wait, stop the tape a second. I had this. Christine, is it ‘Fuck you. Pause. Fuck. Pause. Fuck you’? or ‘Fuck you. Fuck. Pause. Fuck . . .’ Aaagh fuck me, what’s the line?”
Same as it ever was.
Mamet worked iambic pentameter out of the vernacular of the underclass, he made it sound like people talking, and he made it funny. The language was an immediate sensation, and over the years it’s made a lot of audiences very happy and a lot of actors very crazy. There’s more to the play than the words, of course, because there was more on Mamets mind than a linguistic parlor trick. Like some bastard offspring of Oswald Spengler and Elaine May, American Buffalo popped 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.
As Dave might say, “Hey, somebody had to do it.
Folk Tune.
American Buffalo
THE CHARACTERS
DON DUBROW
A man in his late forties, the owner of Don’s Resale Shop
WALTER COLE, called TEACH
A friend and associate of Don
BOB
Don’s gopher
THE SCENE
Don’s Resale Shop. A junkshop.
THE TIME
One Friday. Act One takes place in the morning; Act Two starts around 11:00 that night.
ACT I
Don’s Resale Shop. Morning, DON and BOB are sitting.
DON: So?
Pause.
So what, Bob?
Pause.
BOB: I’m sorry, Donny.
Pause.
DON: All right.
BOB: I’m sorry, Donny.
Pause.
DON: Yeah.
BOB: Maybe he’s still in there.
DON: If you think that, Bob, how come you’re here?
BOB: I came in.
Pause.
DON: You don’t come in, Bob. You don’t come in until you do a thing.
BOB: He didn’t come out.
DON: What do I care, Bob, if he came out or not? You’re s’posed to watch the guy, you watch him. Am I wrong?
BOB: I just went to the back.
DON: Why?
Pause.
Why did you do that?
BOB: ‘Cause he wasn’t coming out the front.
DON: Well, Bob, I’m sorry, but this isn’t good enough. If you want to do business . . . if we got a business deal, it isn’t good enough. I want you to remember this.
BOB: I do.
DON: Yeah, now . . . but later, what?
Pause.
Just one thing, Bob. Action counts.
Pause.
Action talks and bullshit walks.
BOB: I only went around to see he’s coming out the back.
DON: No, don’t go fuck yourself around with these excuses.
Pause.
BOB: I’m sorry.
DON: Don’t tell me that you’re sorry. I’m not mad at you.
BOB: You’re not?
DON (Pause): Let’s clean up here.
BOB starts to clean up the debris around the poker table.
The only thing I’m trying to teach you something here.
BOB: Okay.
DON: Now lookit Fletcher.
BOB: Fletch?
DON: Now, Fletcher is a standup guy.
BOB: Yeah.
DON: I don’t give a shit. He is a fellow stands for something—
BOB: Yeah.
DON: You take him and you put him down in some strange town with just a nickel in his pocket, and by nightfall he’ll have that town by the balls. This is not talk, Bob, this is action.
Pause.
BOB: He’s a real good card player.
DON: You’re fucking A he is, Bob, and this is what I’m getting at Skill. Skill and talent and the balls to arrive at your own conclusions.
The fucker won four hundred bucks last night.
BOB: Yeah?
DON: Oh yeah.
BOB: And who was playing?
DON: Me . . .
BOB: Uh-huh . . .
DON: And Teach . . .
BOB: (How’d Teach do?)*
DON: (Not too good.)
BOB: (No, huh?)
DON: (No.) . . . and Earl was here . . .
BOB: Uh-huh . . .
DON: And Fletcher.
BOB: How’d he do?
DON: He won four hundred bucks.
BOB: And who else won?
DON: Ruthie, she won.
BOB: She won, huh?
DON: Yeah.
BOB: She does okay.
DON: Oh yeah . . .
BOB: She’s an okay card player.
DON: Yes, she is.
BOB: I like her.
DON: Fuck, I like her, too. (There’s nothing wrong in that.)
BOB: (No.)
DON: I mean, she treats you right.
BOB: Uh-huh. How’d she do?
DON: She did okay.
Pause.
BOB: You win?
DON: I did all right.
BOB: Yeah?
DON: Yeah. I did okay. Not like Fletch . . .
BOB: No, huh?
DON: I mean, Fletcher, he plays cards.
BOB: He’s real sharp.
DON: You’re goddamn right he is.
BOB: I know it.
DON: Was he born that way?
BOB: Huh?
DON: I’m saying was he born that way or do you think he had to learn it?
BOB: Learn it.
DON: Goddamn right he did, and don’t forget it.
Everything, Bobby: it’s going to happen to you, it’s not going to happen to you, the important thing is can you deal with it, and can you learn from it.
Pause.
And this is why I’m telling you to stand up. It’s no different with you than with anyone else. Everything that I or Fletcher know we picked up on the street. That’s all business is . . . common sense, experience, and talent.
BOB: Like when he jewed Ruthie out that pig iron.
DON: What pig iron?
BOB: That he got off her that time.
DON: When was this?
BOB: On the back of her truck.
DON: That wasn’t, I don’t think, her pig iron.
BOB: No?
DON: That was his pig iron, Bob.
BOB: Yeah?
DON: Yeah. He bought it off her.
Pause.
BOB: Well, she was real mad at him.
DON: She was.
BOB: Yup.
DON: She was mad at him?
BOB: Yeah. That he stole her pig iron.
DON: He didn’t steal it, Bob.
BOB: No?
DON: No.
BOB: She was mad at him . . .
DON: Well, that very well may be, Bob, but the fact remains that it was business. That’s what business is.
BOB: What?
DON: People taking care of themselves. Huh?
BOB: No.
DON: ‘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. Or else the rest is garbage, Bob, because I want to tell you something.