CRYPTIC GAME

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The setting is a homey, if spare, living room; but nothing much else about David Mamet's play The Cryptogram, which opened in Boston last week in a production by the American Repertory Theatre, is very reassuring. A young boy waits eagerly for his father to come home; he never does. The boy's mother is first heard offstage, breaking a teapot. A gay friend of the family's dissolves in guilt over a betrayal. No one seems capable of finishing a sentence or answering a question directly. There is vaguely unsettling talk about a combat knife. The boy can't sleep.

After an uncharacteristic side trip into social drama with 1992's Oleanna, Mamet is back in territory he walks confidently. His new work is an elliptical, fragmented 75-minute conversation among three characters who use words, words, words to disguise (and maybe salve) their spiritual isolation. The boy's father, this very night, has left with another woman, and his wife is shocked to learn that the gay friend helped hide the affair. Mamet is venturing into family drama here, but so indirectly that you would hardly know it.

The play is an assured, carefully crafted work, but also something of a disappointment. The ricocheting dialogue verges on self-parody, and it doesn't have the realistic underpinnings (or the humor) of American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross. No one can blame the fine cast-Ed Begley Jr., Felicity Huffman and young Shelton Dane-whom Mamet has directed. They help locate the fierce humanity inside this cryptic game.