John (Shelton Dane) is waiting for his father, Robert, to take him on a camping trip. His mother, Donny (Felicity Huffman), and a family friend, Del (Ed Begley Jr.), try to calm the excited boy as he keeps coming downstairs from his bedroom, unable to sleep. The three engage in a classic Mamet cross-fire of missed communication; the house bristles with cryptic tensions and undercurrents. It’s a whodunit with the it waiting to happen. Suddenly it does: John finds a letter from Robert announcing that he’s leaving Donny. Blackout. The rest of the 80-minute play is a crescendo of disclosures and closures, confessions and accusations. Everyone has betrayed everyone. John is the ultimate victim and the mini-oracle who sees into the darkness that surrounds this ordinary family committing their lethally ordinary treacheries.
Mamet was about John’s age when his own parents broke up, and in his 1992 ““The Cabin,’’ a memoir in essay form, Mamet described the tensions, including psychological and physical brutality, involving himself, his sister, his mother and stepfather. John is a reimagining of Mamet’s young self: Dane’s hair has even been cut in Mamet’s close-clipped style. ““The Cryptogram’’ is Mamet’s coming to terms with a troubled past just as ““Three Tall Women’’ was for Edward Albee.
To see little John uttering his perfectly timed Mametgrams is spooky and exciting. As the play moves toward an implicitly shocking climax, we’re witnessing both a tragedy for the character and the genesis of a sensibility for the playwright. John, who hears voices and sees phantom candles in the dark, has already been severed from certainty. ““Who knows we are here?’’ he says. ““We are a dream . . . We don’t know what’s real . . . or that there’s hell. And maybe we are there.’’ The actors, especially young Dane, perfectly project Mamet’s fiercely unsentimental triptych of a self-cannibalizing family. Staging his own play must have been a victory and an exorcism.
