ABSTRACT
Speaking of American Buffalo and of his later Pulitzer-Prize-winning work, Glengarry, Glen Ross, Mamet has said that both plays are 'set deeply in the milieu of capitalism, obviously an idea whose time has come and gone'. As he explained, in America we're still suffering from loving a frontier ethic –that is to say, take the land from the Indians and give it to the railroad. David Mamet wrote Glengarry, Glen Ross a decade after American Buffalo, but it is very close to it in spirit. Like the earlier play it has its roots in Mamet's own experience. In 1969 he worked for a year in what he has called 'a fly-by-night operation which sold tracts of undeveloped land in Arizona and Florida to gullible Chicagoans'. Mamet's characters are forced to treat as real the fictions they promulgate. They live on their wits and are, indeed, brilliant performers.
