It is easy to recognise a David Mamet play. The dialogue is stilted, terse and bare, like the syncopated sparks of sharpening knives. The characters are familiar, yet distorted. And the hero-woe be the hero-tends to be a white man fluent enough in the rules of the game (academia, business, Hollywood) to believe he is winning, but who soon discovers the rules are not what they seem. A savvy Willy Loman in a sharp suit, this man will assume his cynicism is armour enough against the un-known. But his dominance often curdles into desperation.
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