[In the following review, King provides a negative assessment of The Cryptogram.]

In London's West End, David Mamet's Cryptogram had its world premiere. Set in Chicago in 1959, the piece centers around the anxieties of John, a ten-year-old boy. The clues in character, time and place all point to a personal allusion in the coded title—Mamet must be revealing something about himself. His director of twenty years standing, Gregory Mosher, claims not to have raised the question; after all, he says, "The pleasure of the play lies not, of course, in whether the young boy's journey was Mamet's, but in whether it is ours." The Cryptogram runs for under seventy minutes, a brief journey at best; two of the three characters deliver set speeches at a high emotional level, enough to measure acting but not enough to equal a play.

In each of the three scenes, the boy, John, can't sleep. At first, he is excited in anticipation of the next day's outing with his father; the curtain lines to the end of scene one, however, tip us off to expect a less pleasant revelation. His mother reads a note and says, "Robert's leaving me," and her friend Del replies, "Why would he want to do that?" At the opening of scene two, the young boy is speculating on the nature of reality and the meaning of meaning, Del having helped him earlier with "Words can mean what you want them to." With John upstairs, Del comes to realize that a knife given to him by Robert was bought on the street after the war and was a payoff to him, a self-styled "sad queen," for letting Robert use his room for an affair. Robert has deceived all of them. At the very end of the play, John stops half way up the long flight of stairs that rises right to left against the stage's back wall; he opens the knife by letting the blade drop. His last words reveal some dark anxiety about the voices he hears as he would sleep: "They're calling my name." Some darkly creative power must be waiting to shape his future; armed with a parachutist's escape knife, he will presumably confront his destiny.

"Each of us is alone," Donny tells her son in the third and last scene. The Cryptogram is too slight to raise such generalities above bumper-sticker level and too single-minded to question their validity in the language of the stage. The actors are given little more than try-out monologues, preludes to a real part. Unless Mamet expands this piece into a play, be warned. With his reputation, the enthusiasm of some reviewers, the part for a young boy, only two other characters and a single set, The Cryptogram could pop up in regional theaters for several years.