In several of his plays, most notably in American Buffalo, Mamet has demonstrated genuine dramatic gifts. He possesses a tender sensibility and a keen sense of the stage. His plays shift in focus and in aim, as if they were meant not so much to interest or entertain us as to discover who he is: Mamet appears to be seeking his theme, his artistic identity. It is a quest which inspires sympathy. (p. 581)

[The Woods] is all literally "true to life"—which is exactly what troubles me. Innumerable love affairs everywhere may be similarly graphed, even to the point of the nervously inconsequential fragments of speech with which the lovers communicate. The play implies that, especially in the matter of love, we are all in the "woods." The phenomena of nature itself surround and wrap us in an impenetrable dark mystery, unresponsive to reasoned explanation.

This sentiment in itself may be banal, but that does not preclude its serving as material, even the essence, of sound drama. How many vital truths about life are there anyway? But the "realism" here dispels the larger dimension sought for. In language and behavior the characters are too concrete and superficially recognizable to take wing. We fail to learn anything beyond their immediate and unexceptional situation. They are not transfigured by any special insight, psychological or intuitive. The obvious symbolism—the maze of the lonely wooded landscape in which we find them—evokes nothing, and the realism is so commonplace that it makes the symbolism appear terribly "young." (p. 582)