SOURCE: "The Devil and David Mamet: 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago' as Homiletic Tragedy," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, December, 1993, pp. 512-18.

In the following essay, Skeele describes David Mamet's drama Sexual Perversity in Chicago as a homiletic trag-edy—a late, darker form of the medieval morality play--with the "degrading or dehumanizing use of sex" as its subject.

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...