[Feingold is an American critic and educator. In the following, he offers a favorable review of The Cryptogram.]

"Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein," runs Wolf's bestloved song, "Even little things can be precious to us." David Mamet's The Cryptogram is made up of little things—memories, household objects, verbal slips—that are precious as clues to the explanation of a childhood trauma. Magnified by it, they become objects of both veneration and horror, things that are not so much cherished as burned into the awareness.

The central figure is a child, but the action is conducted in rigidly adult terms, a puzzle that a child can only decipher in retrospect. It feels like a deep-buried memory of the playwright's own, striking with a force at once more personal and more profound than his other works: Under the cold, terse phrases, the spare structure, the formalized tableaux, its vulnerability is tangible, almost unbearable.

The adult's secret code that the child will have to crack in the future is paralleled by a puzzle to be solved in the play's present: Why isn't Daddy home? Del, the only man on the scene, is neither father nor husband, one of those spinsterish, sexually wavering "friends of the family" who is supportive to the absent man's wife, affectionate to the son, but, as it turns out, not really a friend to either. His love has led him into duplicity; under cover of his evasions, the husband has escaped forever from the marriage, betraying his friend as both have betrayed the wife.

The son, barely grasping any of this, feels betrayed by all three. No wonder he can't sleep, and hears voices in his dark bedroom. He thinks the dead are calling to him—but, of course, he doesn't know what "dead" is: When his mother, Donny, throws deceitful Del out the door and breaks down crying, the boy asks her, "Are you dead?" In a sense, he's not wrong. The house is full of dead things: love, marriage, friendship, affection between mother and son.

Mamet echoes their absence, visually, by staging the play in a creepily grave, arid style—naturalism with pieces inexplicably missing: The living room has a sofa and chair, but no tables. The staircase on John Lee Beatty's Hopperish set seems to stretch up to a dark infinity; the son's last slow ascent of it—on his way to the attic, with his father's hunting knife—makes the audience gasp as intensely as Cherry Jones's final-curtain climb in The Heiress.

Like other objects in the play, the knife too turns out to be a deceit, its obvious meaning false, the ones it will carry in retrospect more complex and numerous: a parting gift, a death wish, a symbol of the father's phallic betrayal, a memento that's also a manufactured lie. This is man's inheritance: Every memory is bittersweet, every object from the past as false as it is precious. The present is a cryptogram which we only solve years later, when its message is no longer any use. "Ye must become as a little child again," said the fellow who allegedly rose last Sunday. But when you do so, you find, not salvation, but the hell your parents unintentionally wished on you, to be passed on as unintentionally to your children. "Myself am Hell," as somebody else once remarked.

Once or twice, Mamet's austere language stiffens up into the stilted; a few of the terser exchanges slip down into ordinary Mametese. Beyond that, both his script and staging seem dauntingly, chillingly perfect, even in such weird details as Del's ornate struggle to handle a bottle and two glasses with no surface to rest them on. Begley, making his stage debut, is convincing, if occasionally a shade tentative. The play's emotional weight rests on Huffman, whose fierce, precise assurance on every elliptical line makes you marvel even while she's wrenching your heart out. And Shelton Dane's eerie, grave concentration as the child is so attuned to the Mamet style, you might almost believe he understands the play, which I sincerely hope for his own peace of mind he doesn't. Some future director will probably have this taxing role played by an adult actor in child's clothes—looking, I expect, a great deal like David Mamet.