Talk and Dramatic Action in American Buffalo

Talk and Dramatic Action in American Buffalo THOMAS L. KING An ancient anomaly haunts conversation about the theatre. The commonplace assumption is that action and words are irreconcilable. One either talks or acts, and generally action is thought to be superior 10 lalk whelher in the Iheatre or elsewhere. From the very beginning, however, the theatre has been a place where irreconcilable opposites reach an accommodation in a paradox thaI is fundamental; that is, in the theatre lalk is action and action is lalk. Aristotle stands near the beginning of the cenluries-old discussion of the theatre, and in the sixth chapter of the Poetics he wriles: €t7'TLlJ ovv 'J"pa:ycpSia P.iILT]CTtf) 1T'paeewr; (T1TOVSaiar; ... ;'6vap_BvqJ .\6yCfJ ... SPWJI1"WV Kai oli St' a1TayyeAiar; . .. ,I Tragedy is an imitation of an action(7TpagBw~) through actions (BpOWTWV) and not narration (a7T(>YYBAia~), but the imitation is in pleasant language (iJBVOp.6VqJ AOYqJ)· Tragedy, then is not speech (a7TayyeAia), but action (7Tpag,~ and fjpwVTe~). Nevertheless, it is action which is in speech (AoYqJ)·By ignoring Aristotle's use of two different words for "action" (7Tpag,~ and fjPWVTB~) and IWO for "language" (A6yO~ and a7TayyeAia), the passage can be paraphrased as saying thaI theatre is action rather than talk which, nevertheless , is talk. Pul thus, the paradox is clearly delinealed and is probably at work in all plays, but it is certainly central 10 one play, David Mamel's American Buffalo. At the very beginning of the play, Don, the shop's proprietor, says 10 his "gopher," Bobby: Just one thing Bob. Action counts. Pause. Action talks and bul1shit walks.1 (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 538 Talk and Action in American Buffalo 539 Don seems to be telling Bob that action is better than talk. Action counts and talk does not. The way that he says it, however, is to characterize action as talk and talk as action. "Action talks and bullshit walks" might be rephrased as "action talks and talk acts," for "bullshit" is a kind oftalk and walking is a kind of action. A junk shop owner in Chicago has begun to elaborate the same paradox that Aristotle raised more than two thousand years ago. Ofcourse Don is simply repeating a version of the old folk saying that "actions speak louder than words," which contains the same paradox. The adage states its case by saying that action is talk - "actions speak." Many ofthe New York critics, when they fIrst saw American Buffalo, complained that it was all talk and no action.' They seemed blithely unaware that Aristotle, folk wisdom, and Don himself suggest that talk is action. Mamet himself has said that he understands language, talk, as action. He makes his point in the first essay in a collection titled Writillg in Restaurants called "Capture-the-Flag, Monotheism, and the Techniques of Arbitration." In it, he explains how as ten- and twelve-year-olds, he and his friends recognized a "statement as an action." They reported speech with the verb "to go" rather than the verb "to say." Mamet cites as an example, "He goes, 'Get over to your side of the line, or you're out. ... ' "4 Mamet says that at an early age he and his friends knew what Aristotle knew, what Don Dubrow knows - that talk is action and that it has power to affect the world in which they live. Talk as action is not passive reportage (a7TayyeAia) but an active agent in shaping the world and the terms of human relationships. Indeed, dramatic characters defIne the world of the play with their words: the conflict of many a play and many a scene is a conflict over which words will prevail. Conflict may be the heart of dramatic action, but the heart of conflict is talk. The sword fIghts and the fIsticuffs are only the denouement. The matter at issue is between two points of view, embodied in words, which create the terms of the engagement between the characters. This is manifestly true in American Buffalo, for much of the talk in the play is a conflict between two ways of understanding the world, and the ground of the conflict is talk as...