Ozersky is a critic, essayist, and cultural historian. In this essay, Ozersky describes some of the ways in which Mamet's play is truly "Mametesque," even though it doesn't appear so at first glance.

David Mamet is one of the most famous of American writers: he has won a Pulitzer Prize, has an international reputation, and is equally at home on the Broadway stage, in independent theater, and in Hollywood, where his screenplays have been nominated for Academy Awards on two occasions. But Mamet has also suffered from being so identified with a particular genre, which he more or less invented: that of all-male workplaces bursting with an inventive and poetic dialect of American profanity. In his best-known plays, such as Glengarry Glen Ross and American buffalo, this language takes the place of plot in advancing an understanding of the world the characters inhabit. But it is a...