[An American essayist and critic, Simon has served as a drama critic for New York Magazine as well as a film critic for Esquire and the New Leader. In the excerpt below, he faults The Cryptogram for its lack of content and Mamet's use of language and dialogue.]

"A playwright who imprisons his characters within crippling verbal debris" is how Jeanette Malkin of Jerusalem's Hebrew University describes David Mamet in a book. I agree with this completely—except that she intends it as praise. It's one thing to imprison Mamet's characters—in Sing Sing, an underground oubliette, or crippling verbal debris—but another to so incarcerate the audience. Mamet's characters, after all, are guilty of having become involved with one of our most pretentiously vacuous playwrights; the audience, however, save for having been suckered into a shell game, is relatively innocent.

The Cryptogram starts out with what appears to be a typical middle-class family on the eve of a stay in their cottage in the woods. The seeming paterfamilias, Del, is reading on a sofa in their living room in 1959. The date, given by the program, is meaningless except perhaps to Mamet, but let's not quibble about a minor meaninglessness here. Offstage upstairs, John, circa 10, should be asleep. Offstage downstairs, mother Donny is making tea. But John is kept awake by excitement about the trip and comes down the exposed stairs to start pestering. And Donny, as she announces four times offstage and at least once on, has broken the teapot.

Further, Del is not Donny's husband and John's dad despite being patriarchally ensconced on that 1959 sofa. The real daddy is Robert, who is working overtime at the office—at least that's what Donny keeps telling John; actually, he'll never return. Del is a family friend, vague father surrogate, and something else I can't tell you without giving away the crypto and leaving you with only a couple of grams of gram.

Mamet is up—or down—to his usual verbal games. It begins with why John isn't wearing his slippers: They're already packed. This piece of information is chewed and rechewed. So is the fact that John couldn't sleep: "What does it mean, you couldn't sleep? It means nothing other than the meaning you choose to assign to it." Later, the kid says, "I'm perfectly alone; that is what I was saying to myself—because I didn't have a pen to write it down." This is stated three times; it all sounds writ by a nitwit who read Wittgenstein. Or just heard about him.

The form is dramatic fetishism: Object after object is verbally idolized. The slippers, the teapot, the blanket John wraps himself in against the cold. This blanket has a hole in it: freshly made, as John claims, or an old tear, as Donny maintains? This problem is good for many lines, though not quite so many as which coat John should take, an agon meriting at least twelve speeches. But even the coat cannot hold a candle to the knife: the German army knife Robert may have captured in the war (or may not have); the knife he may have given Del when they went camping together (or may not have—as, indeed, they may not have gone camping); the knife that may be in two different locations and may in fact be two knives. And should this knife be entrusted to John, to cut the twine around the package that contains …

But who cares what it contains: Contents is not what Mamet is about. About language, then? Yes, if you like rambling monologues that, merely because they occasionally connect, pretend to be dialogue—and don't even connect so much as encroach on one another. Mamet is the man who mistook the hat he was talking through for his muse.

Felicity Huffman moved me: Here is a capable actress who clearly believes in what she is doing to the point of imagining a role where there is none. She does not even mind mouthing Mamet's solecisms: "The older I get, the less that I know" and "If you do not sleep, lay there." Ed Begley Jr. also grapples touchingly with such lines as "Who am I? Some poor queen who lives in a hotel." Granted, Mamet dialogue should be inflicted on a kid only as punishment; but Shelton Dane betrays no charm or talent whatever and suggests that John must be Childe Mamet.