Word: mamet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...setting is a homey, if spare, living room; but nothing much else about David Mamet's play The Cryptogram, which opened in Boston last week in a production by the American Repertory Theatre, is very reassuring. A young boy waits eagerly for his father to come home; he never does. The boy's mother is first heard offstage, breaking a teapot. A gay friend of the family's dissolves in guilt over a betrayal. No one seems capable of finishing a sentence or answering a question directly. There is vaguely unsettling talk about a combat knife...
After an uncharacteristic side trip into social drama with 1992's Oleanna, Mamet is back in territory he walks confidently. His new work is an elliptical, fragmented 75-minute conversation among three characters who use words, words, words to disguise (and maybe salve) their spiritual isolation. The boy's father, this very night, has left with another woman, and his wife is shocked to learn that the gay friend helped hide the affair. Mamet is venturing into family drama here, but so indirectly that you would hardly know...
...play progresses, the actors are able to get a better hold on the rhythms of the dialogue. The words rocket form person to person as the characters desperately struggle to be heard and to fend off silence. Mamet's dialogue is like a spell, when it works right One is hypnotized, and can't help but hear what he wants emphasized. The characters babble on in a Beckett-like fashion about whatever comes to mind--an old photograph, a torn blanket, an impending camping trip with John and his absent father. As they ramble along, certain phrases stick...
...fatalistic inability of the characters to understand or to control the events of their lives is expressed in these words--they pop out of the dialogue and steer one towards understanding, even when the sum of the conversation is obtuse. Through these moments of clarity, Mamet offers us clues to 'the cryptogram...
With "the cryptogram" Mamet is presenting his audience with a new kind of puzzle. While the play lacks the compelling intensity of his earlier works such as "Glengary, Glenross" or the amazing "Oleanna," the intellectual challenge of sifting through the dialogue to try to hear what Mamet has to say is exciting. The actors, after some initial stumbling, carry off the piece with energy and subtlety. Presumably, since Mamet is directing, they are fulfilling whatever vision he had for the piece...