The Cryptogram

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Mamet’s rarely produced masterpiece, The Cryptogram, combines mercurial intelligence with genuinely Hitchcockian menace as this gripping play journeys back into childhood and the moment of its vanishing – when the sheltering world suddenly reveals itself as a place full of dangers. One late evening in 1959, a young boy sits waiting up for his father in anticipation of their camping trip. While his mother urges him to go to sleep, a family friend tries to entertain them or perhaps distract them. Mamet re-creates a child’s terrifying discovery that the grownups speak in code – a code that may never be breakable.