THE DAY ROOM -- Don DeLillo

Alfred A. Knopf -- hc
New York -- ©1986 -- 113pp 
a play 


A black comedy that explores the chaos caused when the onlooker is unsure of the status of a team of medics in a psychiatric unit. Are they really bona fide staff or patients just pretending to be?


*****


I enjoy absurdist theatre a great deal and while the name Don DeLillo may have brought people in to watch a theatrical production who might otherwise never have gone to a play, I found very little that was original about this. 

First of all, there's going to be an obvious One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nestcomparison. I caught myself making just such a note early as I was reading, but I also found myself thinking about Harold Pinter's The Hothouse, and in both cases the earlier play is a much more engaging piece. Of course the plots are vastly different, with The Day Room asking some rather metaphysical questions, such as "What is real?" "Who can you believe or trust?" It is a deconstruction of reality, whereasCuckoo's Nest is a fight for reality and Hothouse is about abusive power. 

But if you are going to deconstruct reality, you must be compared to another master playwright, Eugene Ionesco, who managed to do it over and over again. 

Back to DeLillo... 

The main problem I had with this script is "why?" Why tell this story? What was in it for me? I didn't finish it and think about my own life and what was real or not. I didn't feel compelled to see this on stage any time too soon. 

I enjoyed the theatricality of this, and the humor, but found it lacking in story or purpose.