SOURCE: "David Mamet's Child's Play," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXXI, No. 7, April 10, 1995, pp. 33-4.

[In the essay below, the critic relates Mamet's thoughts on his childhood and family life, language, and unhappiness, particularly as revealed in The Cryptogram.]

At the far end of the pine table in the basement kitchen of David Mamet's town house, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his six-month-old daughter, Clara, bobs in her baby bouncer; at the near end, the playwright himself is also bobbing, but with his mouth open to snare the mushrooms being lobbed at him from the other side of the stove by his actress wife, Rebecca Pidgeon (Becs to him), who is whipping up a pasta primavera. In the mushroom-catching department, Mamet is all chin and playfulness, but in the playwriting department he is all heart and ferocity. At home, Mamet seems to have found his bliss, and in his latest...