SOURCE: Skeele, David. “The Devil and David Mamet: Sexual Perversity in Chicago as Homiletic Tragedy.” Modern Drama 36, no. 4 (December 1993): 512-18.

In the following essay, Skeele discusses how Mamet's early works mimic medieval morality plays, especially Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

It has frequently been noted that David Mamet is a moralist, a keen social critic who uses the groping inarticulations and dizzying verbal constructions of his characters to form a chorus of complaint against the spiritual emptiness at the core of America. What has less frequently been noted is that Mamet is sometimes very nearly a medieval moralist, using themes, structures, and characterizations that recall actual morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The influence of medieval drama is perhaps most overt in his Bobby Gould in Hell, a play which features the Devil as a character and a plot lifted directly from the medieval morality formula. Some...