[An American educator and critic who frequently writes on drama, Kalb has served as managing editor of Theater and is the author of the 1989 Beckett in Performance. In the following, he offers a negative review of The Cryptogram, arguing that in the play, particularly as staged by Mamet, Mamet focuses more on mood and atmosphere than on plot development and character motivation.]

David Mamet has always had his detractors, but until this misbegotten premiere I have never known him to offer them succor himself. In directing this desiccated production of The Cryptogram, he seems at loggerheads with actors who either cannot or have been told not to animate his mannered language, invest it with their own creativity. And the result is that his style comes off forced, overdetermined, a sort of overwriting camouflaged as austerity—just as the skeptical critics used to say in the 1970s, before performers such as Al Pacino and Joe Mantegna gave them reasons to look closer.

The Cryptogram is what its title implies—an encrypted dramatic puzzle in the tradition of Pinter, designed to entice us into an obsessive search for solutions. Set in a cheaply furnished, nondescript living room in 1959 (when Mamet was 10 years old), the play deals with the effect of a father's leaving on 10-year-old John, his mother Donny, and a gay family friend named Del. It is not my favorite Mamet play—the spareness and studious avoidance of social context feel a bit derivative (of Beckett, Pinter, and Mamet himself), the self-conscious chilliness a bit trite (by Mamet's own standards)—but it is as dense and tightly constructed as any of his other texts, which I learned only by reading it on the train home.

As usual, Mamet's focus is less on organizing events than on creating atmosphere, faithfully reproducing that world of missed signals, incomplete connections, and irredeemable coldness he seems perpetually to see in his mind's eye. The coldness has a different flavor this time because it envelops a child, as do his familiar cloaking devices—those odd modes of speech and behavior he uses to obscure surface action and redirect our attention beneath—since they keep our interest in the mystery fueled.

What mystery? Take your pick of a hundred questions about situation and motivation that have no definite answers yet beg to be asked. What went wrong between Donny and her husband Robert (who never appears), and when? Were Del and Robert lovers, and if so, what is Del's place in the house now? Why is he there all the time? And why are the adults oblivious to the obvious mental nosedive of the child? The key to deciphering the cryptic action—it would give away the finale to say more—is realizing that no questions of this sort are of the essence.

One must look behind and between the sparse and fragmentary facts. The three characters talk over and through one another, for instance, continuing what they were saying two lines or two pages before, regardless of what the other person just said, so that even the basic plot is hard to follow in performance. It's as if everyone, including callow John, were infected with a sort of contagious pigheadedness, insisting on finishing their thoughts as a shield against really being heard or achieving closeness—ordinary conversation as a potential door to chaos.

Mamet also leans heavily, as he has before, on the dramatic value of simple frustration, peppering each of the three scenes with exasperating repeated questions ("What?" "When is my father coming home?") and interruptions that recall the infuriating phone rings in Oleanna. Every time someone is on the verge of a personal revelation, or a spiritual connection, someone else enters, usually the boy—who cannot sleep and whom no one ever tucks in. In another production, John's numerous reappearances (his thoughts increasingly ominous) might bring a dark chuckle or two—here they are utterly humorless, barely evoking weak pathos.

Which brings me back to the subject of acting. For reasons that can only be guessed at, Mamet apparently instructed his performers to maintain neutrally expressionless faces and venerate his pauses like holy writ—with the result that the play is deprived not only of suspense but of every other hook that might have held the audience's interest in the mystery. Felicity Huffman and Ed Begley Jr. as Donny and Del are so preoccupied with inserting requisite silences after every half-line ("Oh. Oh …" "To, um … to, um, what is the word …?" "Look what I found") that their characters don't even make sense as ciphers for emotional stinginess. Worse still, Shelton Dane as John starts out with an affectless monotone and works himself up to near catatonia, as if Mamet were so afraid of the child actor's cuteness that he decided not to let him act.

Heaven knows what conceit about highlighting the indeterminacy of his characters' emotional bonds caused Mamet to eliminate all emotional continuity this way. In any case, there is such a failure of energy among this cast—really a palpable sense of defeat and demoralization—that the whole affair cries out to be started over from scratch.