I’m told—though not by a reliable source—of a form of psychotherapy where they tie you to a table, tickle you, and shout, “Who’s the boss? Who’s the boss?” Whether such a cure really exists (and how effective it is) I’m not in a position to say, but the question “Who’s the boss” is one that, in one form or another, has dogged intellectual man for centuries. It has baffled philosophers and moralists and absorbed theologians. At the moment, it is puzzling audiences at the Manhattan Theater Club, where “The Day Room” opened last week to mixed reviews. A first play by the novelist Don DeLillo, “The Day Room” is a metaphysical speculation on the themes of madness and theater.
The spiritual setting of “The Day Room” is neither the hospital room where the first act takes place nor the motel room where we find ourselves in Act II but another place entirely—a mental ward that may or may not exist somewhere offstage—and its spiritual hub is Arno Klein, a character we may or may not ever see. The hospital room—occupied by Budge and Wyatt (Mason Adams and John Christopher Jones)—is said to be adjacent to the Arno Klein Psychiatric Wing. As characters in Act I prove not to be the patients, doctors, and nurses they seem to be but lunatics who have wandered in from the Klein wing, it becomes less and less clear to the audience who the real doctor is. In Act II, “the Arno Klein wing” has become a touring theatrical company—“the Arno Klein group”—that Gary and Lynette (Timothy Carhart and Mary Beth Hurt) have come in search of. But the Klein group turns out to be as difficult to locate as the Klein wing was. And as characters in the second half wander into the motel room babbling about the elusive theatrical troupe it becomes less and less clear who the real audience is. Are these actors or madmen, we wonder. Are they performing for us? For each other? For themselves?
If all this sounds a little irritating and pretentious, that’s probably because “The Day Room” is a slightly pretentious and, at times, irritating play. Long stretches of it seem as though they could have been written by a precocious high-school student fresh from a first reading of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”—which “The Day Room” in some part resembles. Of course, Stoppard’s play took stock of its own literary tradition (Molnár, Pirandello, and Beckett as well as Shakespeare); DeLillo’s doesn’t: it seems unaware of the whole history of absurdist drama. But American playwrights, as a rule, aren’t terribly conscious of their literary roots: it’s part of their charm. They burst on the scene wide-eyed and breathless, making familiar observations about important things, as though no one had ever thought of them before.
Actually, if you can get past the preciousness of some of DeLillo’s dialogue, “The Day Room” is full of delights and surprises. Its charms are largely due to the comic flair of Michael Blakemore, its director, and a first-rate cast led by Miss Hurt, Mr. Jones, and J.T. Walsh. Mr. Blakemore is a dab hand at staging farce. (He directed Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” both in London and New York.) In his hands, DeLillo’s play becomes an intellectual farce in which mistaken existence takes the place of mistaken identity.
“The Day Room” is about the degree to which we make epistemological judgments on the basis of what we think is plausible behavior. Its wit resides in the extreme plausibility of the performances: Miss Hurt’s as Nurse Walker, Mr. Walsh’s as the loopy Dr. Bazelon, Eric Swanson’s as two vastly different prissy young men. Mr. Blakemore has also collected around him a design team of great ingenuity. The production is full of arresting aural and visual evocations of madness: footsteps in a corridor, a snatch of classical music, an indeterminate buzzing noise, a child’s painting scrawled on a wall. In the second half of the play, Mr. Jones gives a tour-de-force performance as the motel-room television set. Even the scenic and lighting design (by Hayden Griffin and Natasha Katz, respectively) contrive to echo the themes of the play. Visually, the production is full of frames, like the frames of reference that the play is about: the frame of stage flats out of which two actors build the motel-room set around Mr. Jones; the tasteless painting that hangs on one of its walls; the frame of darkness into which we see his face receding at the end of the play, and the window-like apertures in the flats which the two hospital beds slide back through when we go back to the beginning again.
“The Day Room” may not make any discoveries about the nature of existence; but it does produce a kind of comic therapy. And it comes up with some lingering images: the television as lunatic; the elusive theatrical company as an expression of that transforming aesthetic experience we’re all looking for. Best of all, perhaps, is an image of Theatrical Man himself: a shadowy figure who walks swiftly and silently across the stage at the end of the evening, dressed in a cape and fedora that we saw hanging on a coat tree in the first scene, signaling to us in a language we did not yet know how to read.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, January 11, 1988