American Buffalo (1976)

American Buffalo, which won its author the Drama Critics Circle Award for the best American play of the 1977 season, has been hailed as the most exciting Broadway debut of a new American playwright since Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Newsweek acclaimed Mamet the "hot young American playwright" who is "someone to watch." Clive Barnes in The New York Times exclaimed in admiration: "The man can write!" Martin Gottfried in The New York Post called American Buffalo "a gripping and exciting play which provides the richest and best qualities of the theater experience." Other critics called it "a sizzler", "superb", and "dynamite."

American Buffalo has three crooks in a junk shop plotting to rip off a coin collection. They are brutes who need each other, but their words are like punches that almost casually build to real violence. Mamet has been compared to Harold Pinter, except, says Newsweek, that "Mamet's ear is tuned to an American frequency."

American Buffalo won the 1976 Obie Award when it played off-Broadway that season, an honor also awarded to Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago which had a highly successful run. David Mamet is also the author of A Life in the Theatre, The Water Engine, and The Woods.

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