THE DAY ROOM
A succession of characters arrive on the scene, each claiming to be sane while declaring that all who went before them were mad. By the end of act one DeLillo has undermined our expectations to the point where we can’t be sure if anything is true. Who’s mad and who isn’t? Are we in the hospital room where we thought we were or in the “day room,” where the insane spend their days bouncing their “lonely monologues” off the white walls?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This may be a worthy aim, and The Day Room certainly does have its pithy moments. But DeLillo isn’t exactly exploring new territory here. His play is a rather hackneyed pastiche of Pirandello, Beckett, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and that old Monty Python skit about psychiatric patients posing as physicians (“There’s a proper doctor to see you now, sir”). DeLillo also has a tendency to restate and overstate the obvious, as when one of the nurses muses on “the narrow scope of the roles we play” or when an actress from the Arno Klein troupe observes, “We only do one play. We do it over and over. It’s the only thing we know.”
