Mamet’s play explores the warring concepts of friendship and free enterprise.  Teach and Donny discuss friendship often, with each maintaining his own notion of what real friendship entails. Friendship for these characters, Mamet suggests, is incongruous with the self-interest and cunning of free enterprise.

In the play’s opening dialogue, Donny counsels Bobby on the importance of friendship: “‘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 […] There’s lotsa people on this street, Bob, they want this and they want that. Do anything to get it. You don’t have friends this life […] You want some breakfast?” (19).

Donny wants to equip his protégé with an understanding of the business world, as he sees it. Mamet’s dialogue is permeated with irony: Donny offers to buy Bobby breakfast immediately after telling him to be wary of others, as friendship is—according to Donny—nonexistent.

When he comes onstage, Teach is disillusioned after an encounter with two women—Ruthie and Grace—who he claims begrudged him a piece of toast.