TALKING DIRTY

Regarding Dan Sullivan’s put-down of the playgoer who objected to David Mamet’s language in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” and that she “literally had not heard the play for the words” (“Words That Anger and Injure,” Dec. 15).

It would seem to me that it is a playwright’s obligation to form his play in such a way that the words he writes bring the playgoer into the play, not away from it.

Sullivan implies that Mamet’s work (and others who write as he does) is sophisticated. If, as he recalls, Eliza Doolittle in 1914 caused a stir in 1914 using the word bloody , and that “vulgarity is a sliding scale,” what can we expect to come sliding after Mamet?

After ugliness . . . what?

JOHN H. ABBEY

Bverly Hills