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The Cryptogram

In this gripping short play, David Mamet combines mercurial intelligence with genuinely Hitchcockian menace. The Cryptogram is a journey back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing — the moment when the sheltering world is suddenly revealed as a place full of dangers.

            On a night in 1959 a boy is waiting to go on a camping trip with his father. His mother wants him to go to sleep. A family friend is trying to entertain them — or perhaps distract them. Because in the dark corners of this domestic scene, there are rustlings that none of the players want to hear. And out of things as innocuous as a shattered teapot and a ripped blanket, Mamet re-creates a child terrifying discovery that the grownups are speaking in code, and that that code may never be breakable.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 112
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780679746539
  • Genres
  • plays, drama, theatre
  • Release date
  • 1995