The making of Mamet's America is founded upon a verbal busyness, glib, deft, quick; the parenthetical asides that lace his dialogue (destined, undoubtedly, to become as celebrated as Pinter's pauses) suggest minds that abhor verbal vacuums, that operate, at all levels, on the energy of language itself…. Because so much of the activity of his characters is prescribed by their speech, it is often fruitless to analyze their "psychology": like the victors of Dos Passos' U.S.A., like Jay Gatsby, like the unenlightened of a Hemingway novel, they behave as their language directs them to behave, with unquestioning faith in its values. (pp. 2-3)
The similarities are striking … between Mamet and the early Pinter. Both are what we might call magic realists. Both are drawn to situations of uneasy, sometimes claustrophobic intimacy between two or three characters, among whom there is an unacknowledged sparring for power. In both, speech has an air of phonographic accuracy, with all its repetitions, ellipses, and illogicalities intact, acquiring both on the page and in performance an often comically surreal intensity. But the drama enacted by the characters of, say, The Caretaker, is enacted behind the refuge of speech: they venture out nakedly before each other at the cost, as they realize, of their safety and freedom. Mamet's characters, on the other hand, are their language; they exist insofar as—and to the extent that—their language allows them to exist. Their speech is not a smokescreen but a modus vivendi…. [For example, in The Duck Variations], language does not conceal but rather fabricates emotion, drawing upon the basest of materials. A "very simple" play in which two old men, George and Emil, sit and talk in the park, The Duck Variations dramatizes the comic aspiration of attitudes from the melting-pot of speech. Reader's Digest turgidity ("The Land that Time Forgot"), B-grade adventure-story cliché ("It's you and him. You and the duck on the marsh"), Wild Kingdom platitude ("The never-ending struggle between heredity and environment"), travel-brochure wit ("Nature's playground"), hobbled Biblical eloquence ("… to find a mate and cleave into her until death does him part")—all of this is mixed in with hazy yet reverentially "scientific" exposition, half-remembered newspaper reportage, stupefyingly inapropos catch-phrases, slangy obscenities, and sentimental pieties to concoct attitudes that founder magnificently in the froth of their own self-exclusions. (p. 3)
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