[A Life in the Theatre is Mamet's] least characteristic play. Ordinarily he works from an oblique angle of vision, in flat tones. Life is all surface flamboyance, sight gags and gimmickry, lush language and posturing—in short, closer to a Feydeau farce than to the Beckett-like minimalism to which Mamet more typically aspires…. At its best, Life is a mildly amusing diversion; at its more frequent worst, it is a tedious, offensively banal caricature of what daily life in the theater is actually like.

The sheer awkwardness of the play surprised me, since Mamet is the most technically proficient of the new writers. In The Water Engine he manages skillfully to juxtapose a 1930s radio play about an idealistic young inventor pursued by the evil forces of corporate greed with the inane chatter of a "Century of Progress" tour guide—and, in addition, intercuts ominous injunctions from a chain letter, which the actors take turns in reading out. Where the transitions in Life are amateurishly abrupt or nonexistent, in The Water Engine Mamet … interweaves his triangulated tale with such dexterity that we're absorbed into the intricate shifts of time, place, and mood. Initially, that is. Once we catch on to the alternations in rhythm, the play's fascination rapidly evaporates…. Eventually anger takes over instead—that so much is being put at the service of so little. Mamet has subtitled the play An American Fable. Well, yes—if you believe our culture (like our theater) is best seen as an allegory of emptiness.

Something more is going on in American Buffalo. Something to do with people…. Mamet is attracted to the lumpen underside of contemporary life…. [He] finds no lyrical profundities in it…. [He also] finds no resources for humor in it, grotesque or otherwise. He finds robots. And invents for them a suitable robot language. (pp. 86-7)

[His characters] also, now and then, languorously collide. We're never sure about what. And we soon cease to care. Perhaps Mamet had yet another fabulistic moral in mind. I refuse to guess at it. Two can play at his game.

It should be noted, however, that the game is a highly mannered one, full of falsity. If Mamet believes that by flattening his tone to a deadbeat monotony he has captured the authentic lowlife rhythm, he should be encouraged to spend more time on the streets. If, as seems more likely, he believes that by emptying language of content and flair he will automatically uncover deeper subtexts, he ought to reread—it is clear he has read them once—the true masters of unspoken resonance, Beckett and Pinter. Silence can be eloquent speech, banal words can transmute into subtle metaphor—but only when the surrounding context has been properly prepared. When it has not been, we have self-consciousness and boredom. In both, American Buffalo abounds. (p. 87)