The Cryptogram
It reportedly took Mamet 15 years to finish the semiautobiographical script, which depicts the relentless, irreversible abandonment of a ten-year-old boy, John, by his errant father and traumatized mother. A tense, manicured howl of a play, The Cryptogram is set in a suburban Chicago living room in 1959, the year Mamet was 11. As it opens John can’t sleep–a problem he faces in all three of the play’s extended scenes, the second of them a night later and the last a month after that–perhaps because he’s so excited about the camping trip he’s supposed to be going on with his father, Robert, the next day. His mother, Donny, is making tea in the offstage kitchen, hoping it will settle the boy’s nerves, though she talks through the door with her friend Del, an effete man halfheartedly attempting to connect with the talkative John. After a few minutes the teapot suddenly shatters offstage, the first of several indications–the late hour, the absence of John’s father, John’s precocious ruminations on impermanence and uncertainty–that something is seriously wrong.
