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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's terrifying discovery that the grownups are speaking in code and that that code may never be breakable.
Acclaim for The Cryptogram:
"Heart stopping.... Where other dramatists are writing melodrama about the dysfunctional family, Mamet has written high tragedy." - Iris Fanger, The Boston Herald
"Powerful.... His most personal work.... A whodunit with the it waiting to happen.... Spooky and exciting." - Jack Kroll, Newsweek
"Daring, dark, complex, brilliant.... I suggest that in time it will take its place among Mamet's major works." - John Lahr, The New Yorker