A Tale of the Cryptic
[An English-born editor and critic, Barnes is the author and editor of several books about the performing arts. In the following excerpt, he praises Mamet's emphasis on childhood and the pain associated with the dissolution of a family in The Cryptogram.]
A Cryptogram—a message in code or cipher. Code, mystery, solution. What we are is what we were, and our present is largely a secret message from our past.
Things happen to a child. A father leaves. A family friend disappoints. A mother goes shrewish into the bad night. We need to understand, to grapple with the frozen moments of the past, the moments that stopped us in our tracks and made us what we are.
Psychobabble? Of course! If you go to David Mamet's new play The Cryptogram expecting anything more than conventional enlightenment you may well be disappointed.
Mamet is no original thinker, but he is an original playwright. Using time-stained materials, he has invented an original and vastly interesting play that opened at the Westside Theater/Upstairs last night (pushing out Charles Busch's You Should Be So Lucky and igniting a controversy in the process).
It has been suggested that this very brief play, set in 1959, is partly autobiographical, because some of its facts—primarily a father leaving home—apparently coincide with those of Mamet's own Chicago childhood.
True or false, it's irrelevant, an irrelevance perhaps pointed up by the author, who after the London production, removed program-mention of Chicago from the play, leaving it placelessly anonymous.
The important thing here is not memoir, but how powerfully Mamet has evoked the pain and process of childhood—the way we learn "the meaning of things that have occurred."
The language is intentionally portentous—the three actors talk around one another with oddly artificial locutions, as if they were conversing in a translation from the telegraphese. At times the dialogue sounds like an oddly unsubtle and unfunny parody of Pinter or even Albee.
But it's not—the influences are there sure enough, yet Mamet is providing a stilted validity to his own very personal concept of lost innocence and bruised experience. As the play puts it: "Everyone has a story … And finally you are going to have to learn how you will deal with it … At some point we have to face ourselves."
The Cryptogram is the story of 10-year-old John's story. The story he must live with. And die with. And absorb.
To the play text, Mamet has appended a verse from a camping song: "Late last night when you were all in bed / Mrs. O'Leary left a lantern in her shed." John is the transfixed victim of yet another "Chicago fire," a calamity of which he has no part and less understanding.
The outer story surrounding John's confrontational inner story, is simple—a man (we don't meet him) leaves a letter for his wife telling her he is never returning home.
At first, she finds some solace in the couple's homosexual friend, but feels betrayed when she learns that the friend instead of going off earlier on a hunting trip with the husband had actually during that time loaned his hotel room for the husband's assignation with his girlfriend.
The play's original production was staged by Gregory Mosher in London last year, where it had a critical rather than popular success. The text has since been slightly revised—for one thing I think the friend is now more overtly homosexual than before, and the boy has lost the model airplane he once had in his room.
This time round, the play has been directed by Mamet himself—possibly a mistake, because the play seemed somewhat stronger in London. The action moved at a less formal gait, and the playing was altogether more naturalistic, which added to the story's poignancy, and the sense of a child looking back mostly into his life and finding, if only vaguely, that defining point of character….
So finally, what is the cryptogram of the title? It's surely the Sphinx's riddle we all, like Oedipus, have to answer. And it is the mystery of what really happened at our own personal crossroads.
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