It’s been two days and I think I’m still as struck by American Buffalo as when I left the theater.

David Mamet is one of my favorite playwrights. You’ve probably seen his work, if you have at all, in Glengarry Glen Ross, which features the greatest male actors of a previous generation yelling profanities at each other. Or if you know people that like theatre and profanity, you might have read The Duck Variations or Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Boston Marriage or his collected monologues and short works (which I heartily recommend). I’d neither seen nor read American Buffalo, which I think is how I would have wanted it. Like everything he writes, it’s tense and verbose and profane and brutal. Mamet, according to the director’s notes in the program, claimed that the central act of the play is one of compassion. I’m still completely unable to accept that, but the longer I think about it the more palatable the idea is.

The run is over, so I have no obligation to encourage you to attend, but I feel like I should give credit to one of the most talented productions I’ve seen at Stanford. There’s only a three person cast consisting of Tyler Fitzgerald as Donny, a pawn shop owner, Dante Belletti (whose senior project this is) as “Teach,” his poker buddy and accomplice, and Maggie Medlin as Bobby, Don’s young flunky, directed by Weston Gaylord. Mamet might be one of the hardest modern playwrights to perform from both an acting and directing standpoint. If you haven’t read his work, the dialogue can be seen in his immediate disciples, Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin. It’s full of idioms and jargon, and its cadence strives to recreate the way people actually talk. It’s eloquent in its accuracy. I think one of the few writers who have been able to capture his ear for how conversation works is Louis CK on Louie. It’s nearly impossible to read on the page, but actors and directors who approach the play carefully find nuances in the ellipses and vulgarities that bring more subtext and emotional depth than almost any other modern writer. There were a few hiccups and missteps in this production, but the overall effect was of three performers who knew how special the material they were working with could be. The blocking and physicality felt natural and patient. The play found places to breathe even though the action was at nearly fever pitch for pretty much the last hour.

It’s amazing how a play that’s tense for almost its entirety still manages to create interest in the viewer. It would make sense for it to fail; it’s hard to sit through a play that you have to work to comprehend, where most of the dialogue is yelled, and with absolutely zero reprieve. I felt a knot in my stomach building towards the climax that stuck with me after I left. The lack of resolution is almost appalling. But I feel like the little slave-to-narrative part inside of you starts working to untie the knot immediately. You start to realize that it was stupid to look for a simple solution, or an emotional catharsis. The play is up front with you from the beginning. It’s in a pawn shop filled with refuse and discarded junk. None of its characters are characters. They act rationally and irrationally. None of them represent anything more. By the end of the play you’ve adjusted to its logic or lack thereof and resolve all of the cruelties and betrayals that give it motion. Though there is a plot, all that the play needs to be propelled are the ill-fitting fears of its characters.

Gaylord jokes in his director’s notes about the uneasiness that comes from trying to assign symbolism to the objects of the play. There probably is. But maybe not. Some of the reviews I’ve read about the play when it first came out try, bafflingly, to make it into a play about good and evil. I’m not sure how you can miss the point so badly as a reviewer for The New York Times. The play is about fear and insecurity and miscommunication, like most things. It’s severely capitalist, but its characters aren’t comfortable with that. The buffalo nickel of the show’s title, if one were to assign meaning to it, is a reminder of how the system is built on such small and inconsequential details that are inexplicably ascribed value. In the densely furnished set, objects occupy space; they aren’t used, they just fill void. The only time a character really interacts with the decorations is Bobby idly donning a boxing glove. The feeling is that the objects barely even matter. Though characters are driven by vague perceptions about the value of nickels and yogurt, it seems like nobody really cares about their material surroundings. Just the weird complicated human relationships they try to parse.

I still don’t know anything about this play. This isn’t meant to be a deep analysis or a review of the production or anything. American Buffalo, and the amazing talent of Gaylord and his cast and crew, just made me want to figure out some stuff. I still don’t know if there’s compassion at its heart, or if there’s anything. I don’t know if that little knot will keep untying itself. I don’t know what dialogue to take at face value. I don’t know how to communicate to you how I felt about this, or what it makes me want to do.

I liked it, though.

Alec Arceneaux (‘16, Undeclared, Literature Editor) hails originally from Lafayette, Louisiana. When not gator wrestlin’ or crawfish boilin’, Alec spends his time playing and listening to music, reading, writing, and dominating at fantasy football. He writes for the Stanford Review and is a member of the local jazz ensemble Skeleton Crew.