Across the street I can see the Statue of Liberty next to a pyramid, while outside Treasure Island a life-size British frigate is sunk in a sea battle three times a day.

These actors are not just friends and colleagues, they are apostles, acolytes, disciples.

It's funny already: An academic conference in Las Vegas. Scholars journey from all over the world to discuss playwright David Mamet, the wizard of obscenity, the hanging judge of all that Vegas—the Capital of Crass—represents. If Mamet is hot (new play, new books, new films), Vegas is hotter (eight of the world's nine largest hotels, all within walking distance of one another).

My whole Mamet/Vegas experience begins before I even get there, on the plane. Assigned to the seat in front of me is a guy—maybe 40, kind of a slob, sweats and unwashed hair, radiating impish charm, dimples at the ready. Somebody jostles him, and his retort is quick, sharp and funny. Aside to me, the handiest stranger: "Satire is my strength."

He calls to his buddies sitting a few rows behind me, saying something about next year's "open." He smiles at me. Dimples. So I say, "Are you going to Las Vegas for golf?" He laughs, says no, not that kind of "open," an "open opportunities meeting." And so Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet's play about real estate salesmen who can "sell ice to the Eskimos," comes to life in front of me.

The guy spends the next two hours selling (something—who knows what?) to the 30-ish couple sitting next to him, complete with persuasive charts diagrammed with a ballpoint pen. The couple, meanwhile, are on their way to get married at the wedding chapel at the Mirage (all the casinos have wedding chapels—this is Nevada, remember, where marriage and divorce laws are notorious). Our Guy says, "They all look like funeral parlors," and the prospective groom explains that his bride-to-be wants to get married on Halloween so she can walk around all day in her wedding gown and gamble. Whatever.

And so I arrive at the ersatz city full of theme parks, where the conference venue is a casino/hotel (the Tropicana) with pools featuring "over-18 only" hot tubs and a flock of pink flamingos.

Where, looking across the street, I can see the Statue of Liberty (in front of New York New York) next to a pyramid (at the Luxor), while inside the Mirage there are white tigers and outside Treasure Island a life-size British frigate is sunk in a battle with a life-size pirate ship three times a day.

Where the ceiling of the mall in Caesar's Palace looks like the sky and completes the cycle from sunshine to darkness every two hours.

Where the chingchingching of slot machines is the ambient noise, the Vegas equivalent of wind rustling in trees, where the hotel rooms all have mirrored ceilings but you have to request a clock radio, where the cabbies are gearing up for a convention of 400,000 people the following week, where Halloween trick-or-treaters are given gambling chips instead of candy, where you can do your banking at 4 a.m. on a Sunday, but nobody knows where a grocery store is, where now that they've built New York-as-casino they're building Venice (canals and all) and Paris (complete with Eiffel Tower).

David Mamet, the powerful, controversial American playwright (American Buffalo, Oleanna), is having a spectacularly prolific 50th year: a new show just opened on Broadway (The Old Neighborhood), a second novel just out (The Old Religion), three new films (he wrote the screenplay for The Edge and the soon-to-be-released Wag the Dog with DeNiro and Hoffman, and he wrote and directed The Spanish Prisoner, a Hitchcockian thriller just screened at the Toronto Film Festival). His brand new book on acting, True and False, is stirring much ill will in the theater community—an excerpt appears as the lead article in the November issue of American Theatre magazine, and a forthcoming book on the structure of drama, Three Uses of the Knife , is likely to cause more gnashing of collective teeth.

As Bobby Gould, Mamet's reappearing character, says in Speed-the-Plow, "You want a thrill in your life? ...Money, art, a chance to Play at the Big Table...," and Academe replies, "Fuckin' right we do: let's have a conference in Vegas."

Making this conference juicier than other academic conferences is the Mamet Mafia, as they are called, the actors who have worked with Mamet for years: William Macy (the car-selling husband in Fargo), Felicity Huffman (she and Macy just got married), Natalya Nogoluch (who played the Israeli terrorist in Mamet's film Homicide—she's there in full Hollywood glam, along with her new husband, a very hunky, very devoted elementary school teacher), Lionel Smith, and, filling in for an absent Gregory Mosher (Mamet's longtime director), Robert Brustein, the man who recently took on August Wilson in a year-long debate about race and American theater.

Watching and listening to the actors talk about him is like watching a meeting of a fan club or a minor sect: these people are not just friends and colleagues, they are apostles, acolytes, disciples.

They provide many Mamet anecdotes and much gossip as well as serious, passionate advocacy of his kind of drama and the kind of acting he requires. There are funny stories about Mamet's penchant for jokes (Macy remembers when Mamet faxed the cast rehearsing Bobby Gould in Hell new dialogue to be included in the play's debate about the nature of good and evil: "Nothing's black and white." "Oh, no? what about a panda?"). Macy, who says Mamet thinks of him as "Hebraically challenged," speaks in Mametian rhythms and italics; he explained "practical aesthetics," Mamet's anti-Method theory of acting in which the basic tenets are these: 1) It doesn't matter what the actor feels, it only matters what the actor does. 2) If you, as an actor, believe you're the character, you're not acting, you're psychotic. 3) Action, not talk, defines character.

Macy remembers back when the little St. Nicholas theater company they started right after they graduated from Goddard was going through seriously hard times. Mamet disappeared for a month. He came back with the script of American Buffalo, which turned out to be one of the most-performed and most-celebrated plays of contemporary American drama. They tell stories of Mamet's generosity on his movie sets, where he will greet 20 extras by name, and 12 hours later shake their hands and say, "Thanks for being in my movie." In theater rehearsals, he will walk onto stage and say, "How about this set," or "How about these lights," and everyone will applaud the set designer or the lighting designer. But he has no interest in collaboration with actors: he wants what he wants and, as a director, gets it out of them. We learn that Mamet writes 20 pages a day—whether that takes one hour or 20 hours.

A thrilling inscription on a commemorative statue at the Hoover Dam dedicating the memorial to those men who were "inspired by a vision of lonely lands made fruitful."

Me (looking for tourist info) to croupier (the only hotel person anybody ever finds): "Can you tell me where the concierge desk is?" Croupier to me: "Lady, this is the Tropicana."

When the airport shuttle drives me back toward Center City Philadelphia, I realize with relief that the skyline in front of me is real buildings with real offices in them with people doing real jobs in them. The autumn sun is shining on trees where the leaves fall off and grow again. I am back in the real world of clocks and windows, where the only gamble is whether the shuttle will get me to work on time.

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