David Mamet strikes me as one of the more curious figures in the American theater. Two works by the young playwright, Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Duck Variations, I thought very promising. But everything else of his—and he has been sedulously turning out new stuff as well as ransacking old drawers—I found slightly or vastly disappointing. Now, The Woods hits the nadir. Two youthful lovers have set up housekeeping in the young man's family's summer house at the onset of a symbolic autumn; they are babes in the woods all right, but less lost than the playwright himself in the underbrush of literary trendiness….

Mamet's writing is so sketchy and aimless that one cannot be quite sure how [his two characters] were intended….

As usual, Mamet seems to mean his play to be about language—language that under its banalities or eccentricities conceals desperate urgencies. This...