Word: mamet
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Nick's sporadic violence is the only action in the play; all else is dialogue that often appears pointless and incoherent. Mamet's critics often consider this ultimate realism--the diminishing of action into perpetual, unconstructive, oververbalization...
...Mamet, like Philip Roth, justifies his oververbalization within the script. Ruth declares to Nick in the third act of the play: "You're so fucking corny." Writing off Nick and Ruth as corny characters may redeem many corny lines that are obviously unnatural. "We put on clothes, we can not make out what we look like...It's very lonely and we all get desperate to be warm. We have to find our lovers when it's warm...
However, the realist label is a simplistic description of Mamet--and too unfair. Mamet does not write realistic dialogue unrealistically because he lacks the ability to transfer literal modern speech onto the page, nor does he do it solely to make his characters seem sentimentally corny. Mamet himself decried the critics who called him a magnificent realist, only to turn around and say that he seemed to forget himself at times and wax poetic...
...Like Mamet's poetic dialogue, his characters are allegorical, pointedly representative. Nick and Ruth, a "Man" and a "Woman", divulge no specific information about their families, their jobs, or the earlier history of their relationship. Their stories do not contextualize their existence, instead they echo an earlier, mythically romantic, generation when people did love generously...
...Ruth talks of people escaping and hiding them under petticoats and taking them to safety through the forest. These stories have a figurative purpose: Ruth and Nick are the babes in the wood, yet simultaneously mother and child and also the ones who have lost their way. Mamet deftly weaves these layers of imagery into the dialogue...