The making of Mamet's America is founded upon a verbal busyness, glib, deft, quick; the parenthetical asides that lace his dialogue (destined, undoubtedly, to become as celebrated as Pinter's pauses) suggest minds that abhor verbal vacuums, that operate, at all levels, on the energy of language itself…. Because so much of the activity of his characters is prescribed by their speech, it is often fruitless to analyze their "psychology": like the victors of Dos Passos' U.S.A., like Jay Gatsby, like the unenlightened of a Hemingway novel, they behave as their language directs them to behave, with unquestioning faith in its values. (pp. 2-3)

The similarities are striking … between Mamet and the early Pinter. Both are what we might call magic realists. Both are drawn to situations of uneasy, sometimes claustrophobic intimacy between two or three characters, among whom there is an unacknowledged sparring for power. In both, speech has an air of phonographic accuracy, with all its repetitions, ellipses, and illogicalities intact, acquiring both on the page and in performance an often comically surreal intensity. But the drama enacted by the characters of, say, The Caretaker, is enacted behind the refuge of speech: they venture out nakedly before each other at the cost, as they realize, of their safety and freedom. Mamet's characters, on the other hand, are their language; they exist insofar as—and to the extent that—their language allows them to exist. Their speech is not a smokescreen but a modus vivendi…. [For example, in The Duck Variations], language does not conceal but rather fabricates emotion, drawing upon the basest of materials. A "very simple" play in which two old men, George and Emil, sit and talk in the park, The Duck Variations dramatizes the comic aspiration of attitudes from the melting-pot of speech. Reader's Digest turgidity ("The Land that Time Forgot"), B-grade adventure-story cliché ("It's you and him. You and the duck on the marsh"), Wild Kingdom platitude ("The never-ending struggle between heredity and environment"), travel-brochure wit ("Nature's playground"), hobbled Biblical eloquence ("… to find a mate and cleave into her until death does him part")—all of this is mixed in with hazy yet reverentially "scientific" exposition, half-remembered newspaper reportage, stupefyingly inapropos catch-phrases, slangy obscenities, and sentimental pieties to concoct attitudes that founder magnificently in the froth of their own self-exclusions. (p. 3)

Much of the humor—and this is a wonderfully funny play—is [based on] the balance of power between the two characters shifting with their shifts in verbal perspective, each of those perspectives entertained with the solemnity of a naïvely incompetent rhetorician…. For the reader, and to an extent for the viewer, who can intuit the shape of each scene, there is also humor of a different sort. Those titles that announce the "variations" on the conversational theme suggest a Mamet in ironic complicity with his characters, an arranger of aesthetic effects unconcerned with the substance of his materials. Reminding us of the equivocal line between rhetoric and art, between (in Stanislavskian terms) sentiment skillfully rehearsed and truth known and felt, they are a device to keep us, and the playwright, honest.

This same mocking complicity emerges through the opening notes of Mamet's second play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago….

A play about the perversion of instincts among all its characters, Sexual Perversity records the progress of Dan's affair with Debbie Soloman, both Bernie and Debbie's roommate, Joan, working to keep them apart. A plot for a TV soap; but, like The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity exploits its dramatic situation in few of the obvious ways. We may be tempted to attribute Bernie's "education" and manipulation of Dan, for example, to conventional psychological motives…. But it is not so much Bernie as it is his language that forbids all real intimacy with women. (p. 4)

[American Buffalo is] arguably Mamet's best play to date. Perhaps because he is working within a continuous two-act structure, perhaps also because he is not insisting self-consciously upon the comedy in his material …, he makes his characters here behave with a consistency and economy of function that the looser episodic form did not exact of his others.

The play explores loyalties and their corruption; it is also an analysis, à la Brecht, of Business. (p. 5)

Almost all of the humor of the play finds its source in a peculiarly American simplicity—in, for example, Teach's application, both conscientious and mindless, to the problem of distinguishing valuable coins from "junk" ("… fuck the [coin] book. What am I going to do, leaf through the book for hours on end? The important thing is to have the idea …"); or in his triumphant proof that the combination to the mark's safe will be effortlessly easy to find ("Look, Don: You want to remember something (you write it down). Where do you put it?" "In my wallet." "Exactly!"); or in his attempts to assure himself that Don is not "mad" at him after he has attacked Bobby and wrecked the shop. Such a mind invites language to fill its great shallows of ignorance with the rhythms of omniscience and authority: and so language is functioning here. It offers, moreover, neat categories of thought for the marks of this world and their girlfriends ("Fuckin' fruits") and prescribes its own bizarrely compelling lines of behavior in response to a casual insult ("The only way to teach these people is to kill them"). It asserts with the ethic it propagates that "You don't have friends this life," yet offers an elaborate system of bland courtesy to hide the viciousness it constantly encourages. Of two faces, it harks back to two American Enlightenments, one conferred by Reason, the other by the frontier….

[These] characters clearly have instincts that transcend both the values and imperatives of their language…. Only Teach, running out into the rain in a paper hat, a vain naïf, seems unable to enter their inarticulate world of emotion, to share the loyalty between Bobby and Don that is all but unmediated by speech. But even he is not impervious to the demands of such a world, as his irrational devotion to the little society of the play suggests. It may be only that his instincts have been buried deeper, have been more radically betrayed, than those of Bobby or Don. In any case, the instincts are there; and in several of the characters in Mamet's later plays, they will surface with greater frequency and insistence….

[The Water Engine, Mr. Happiness, and A Life in the Theatre are all] concerned with the ways by which life is given shape by public media—the radio, the stage—they transpose Mamet's preoccupations with language into a higher, symbolic key. (p. 7)

[It] would be wrong to call The Water Engine merely an exercise in parody. Mamet is not only exposing the inadequacies and evasions of his form: he is suggesting why it found—and still finds—its hold. The representatives of the business interests in the play act and talk as Business acts and talks ("Quite simply, Mr. Lang, my people want the engine. Will you entertain an offer for the right to patent the machine?"). The Forces for Evil are, in short, real. Real, too, is the source of their strength: a rhetoric that shamelessly legitimizes chicanery. Such legitimization breeds, as in American Buffalo, corruption at the heart of things, both verbal and political; it spawns a system in which business is mere thievery methodized…. The corruption meets genuine ideological resistance in the play neither from Bernie nor from Lang—their technological-utopian idealism is itself the bad fruit of rhetoric—but from the reporter Dave Murray, contemptuous of the official pieties he deploys in filling up his daily column. Of course, as resistance, contempt is feeble. And we leave the play less impressed with the attitude than with the pervasiveness of the opposition.

Such a frame of mind prepares us for … Mr. Happiness. For here the opposition is unrelieved. The curtain rises on a serene and sincere "Mr. Happiness," beaming over his microphone and dispensing advice to the helpless and abject. Their problems are hopelessly terrible…. The solutions supplied with comic assurance and efficiency are platitudinous in the extreme. But notwithstanding their triteness and predictability, they seem, somehow, disquietingly apt. For within the cliché-ridden world of Mr. Happiness' listeners, where people are "no stranger[s] to the ways of Love" and declare with conviction that they "can't live a lie," the truth in all its intractable ambiguity really has little place. What those listeners want, and are given, are certainty, guiltlessness, grace: and these the truth can never provide. The mean power of the play resides in its ability to evoke the unnerving self-sufficiency of this world, circumscribed and sustained by the stable values of homily. (pp. 8-9)