Squirrels is a one-act play by David Mamet

David Mamet

David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...

.

The 1974 comedy

Comedy

Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

 is about Arthur, a middle-aged, egotistical

Egotism

Egotism is "characterized by an exaggerated estimate of one's intellect, ability, importance, appearance, wit, or other valued personal characteristics" – the drive to maintain and enhance favorable views of oneself....

 hack writer

Hack writer

Hack writer is a colloquial and usually pejorative term used to refer to a writer who is paid to write low-quality, rushed articles or books "to order", often with a short deadline. In a fiction-writing context, the term is used to describe writers who are paid to churn out sensational,...

 who has been working on the opening line of a story involving a man's encounter with a squirrel

Squirrel

Squirrels belong to a large family of small or medium-sized rodents called the Sciuridae. The family includes tree squirrels, ground squirrels, chipmunks, marmots , flying squirrels, and prairie dogs. Squirrels are indigenous to the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa and have been introduced to Australia...

 for fifteen years, and Edmond, the young fledgling writer he has hired as a secretary/collaborator. They soon discover that Arthur's flamboyant redundancy clashes with Edmond's mediocre melodrama

Melodrama

The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...

tic style as they each develop increasingly ridiculous scenario

Scenario

A scenario is a synoptical collage of an event or series of actions and events. In the Commedia dell'arte it was an outline of entrances, exits, and action describing the plot of a play that was literally pinned to the back of the scenery...

s for the story. They are joined by Arthur's cleaning lady, also an aspiring writer, whose suggestions seem to be the most promising, but they too eventually bog down in banality.

Mamet directed the first production of the play at the St. Nicholas Theater Company in Chicago, Illinois
The British premiere was presented by The Mandrake Theatre Company at the Kings Head Theatre, London in 1993. Directed by Aaron Mullen.

http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap8/mamet.html#works. In more recent years it has been staged by the Philadelphia Fringe Festival http://www.livearts-fringe.org/F2000/byov/squirrels.htm, Upstairs at the Gatehouse in North London

North London

North London is the northern part of London, England. It is an imprecise description and the area it covers is defined differently for a range of purposes. Common to these definitions is that it includes districts located north of the River Thames and is used in comparison with South...

 http://10thplanet.thegreenwoods.net/production/production.asp?page=mamet.xml, and the Blue House Theatre Company and Criterion Theatre in Santa Monica

Santa Mônica

Santa Mônica is a town and municipality in the state of Paraná in the Southern Region of Brazil.-References:...

 http://www.squirrelsbymamet.com/.

The play was published in a paperback

Paperback

Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...

 edition by Samuel French

Samuel French

Samuel French was a U.S. entrepreneur who, together with British actor, playwright and theatrical manager Thomas Hailes Lacy, pioneered in the field of theatrical publishing and the licensing of plays....

in 1982 (ISBN 0-573-62517-4) http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/david-mamet/squirrels.htm.