THE DAY ROOM
Don DeLillo
Woolly Mammoth
Theatre, Washington, D.C.
John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts
9 & 12 Jan. 2003
I was in Washington, D.C., over the year-end holidays and my
mother and I went to see Don DeLillo’s The Day Room by the Woolly
Mammoth Theatre at the Kennedy Center [December 2002]. It’s one of only
two professional plays that DeLillo wrote, I believe, because he’s a
novelist. (I think his bio lists a couple of attempts when he was a
student.) The Day Room was his
first major play, and may be the only one staged, and I’d count it a success,
but he went on to write only one other, I believe.
[DeLillo has, in fact, written five major plays as of 2020.
The Day Room was written in 1986, and two other plays were composed
by the time I wrote this report in 2003: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979)
and Valparaiso (1999).
Since then, the writer has completed two more plays: Love Lies
Bleeding (2006) and The Word For Snow (2007). Except
for The Day Room, none has been
produced in New York City.]
I had read The Day Room back in ’87 when I was
helping screen nominees for a Rockefeller Fellowship. [I’ve appended the script evaluation following
this play report.] I was very taken with
the script—in fact, I wrote in my eval report that I wanted to direct it—but
have never had a chance to see the play staged.
Woolly Mammoth has done it before—back in ’89—and it has
been done in New York [28 December 1987-17 January 1988, Manhattan Theatre Club]
at least once as well, but I’ve never caught it. It’s an absurdist play,
reminiscent (but not obviously derivative) of Pirandello and Beckett, with some
Stoppardian word-play mixed in.
The Day Room’s set
in a hospital and the first act is in a regular semi-private room where two
patients are awaiting procedures and trying to get along, until they begin to
get visitors, none of whom turn out to be who they seem—including one patient’s
doctor, whom he has known for years, but who turns out to be a patient from the
Arno Klein wing—the psych ward. The second act is in the titular day
room, which is being set up as a motel room for a performance by the mysterious
Arno Klein Theater—which no one has ever really seen, though they are well
known.
Once again, no one is who they appear to be—which is the
basic theme of the play: What’s real, what’s performance—are the actors
patients, or are the patients actors? Or are they actors playing patients
playing actors . . .? What’s truth and what’s dementia?
It’s a wonderful little puzzle, and the production was
delightful. (I might have tried playing it at a less “presentational”
level—less theatrical on the parts of the actors—and see if playing it “straight”
didn’t add another level of confusion. But this director’s choice worked
fine.)
One wonderful aspect: In act two, in the motel room, one of
the patients from act one plays a TV set. He gets turned on and off and
switches channels when someone points a remote at him! The director,
who is also the company’s founder and artistic director, is Howard
Shalwitz—with whom I worked on the Richard the Third at Soho Rep way
back in 1978. Howard was an actor then, and he started his company while
we were doing the show and then moved to D.C.
---------
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIPS FOR AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS
PROGRAM
1987 COMPETITION
PRE-SCREENING READER:
K*****
SCRIPT EVALUATION DATE:
10/8/86
AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Don DeLillo
TITLE/DATE: The Day Room, 1986
GENRE/STYLE: absurdist comedy
STRUCTURE: 2 acts, several scenes
SETTING: a hospital room; the day room, which becomes a
cheap motel room; style is open to interpretation
LANGUAGE: minimalist, absurdist dialogue, reminiscent of
Stoppard and Beckett; complex and multileveled
MUSIC/LYRICS: none
NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 6 men, 3 women
CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: first and second act have
different characters played by same ensemble; characters are chameleon-like,
difficult to pin down; they seem to be symbolic exponents of various ideas and
concepts
CONCEPTION: an exploration of the meaning of reality and
sanity
CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: the Beckettian style; the absurd
characters and situation; the wonderful language
BRIEF SYNOPSIS:
___________________________________________________________
This will be inadequate, just as synopsizing Waiting for
Godot is inadequate. In the first
act, two patients try to develop a meaningful conversation, but are interrupted
first by a wandering patient, who reportedly belongs in “the day room” in the
Arno Klein Wing, the hospital’s looney bin.
Next, their room is invaded by a nurse and a doctor, who turn out to be
day-room patients, too. It seems the day
room folk love to play-act, and are excellent chameleons. Finally, the doctor of one patient arrives,
but also turns out to be an imposter, despite the fact that he and the patient
had been friends for a long time.
The second act shifts to the day room, which is being
transformed into a cheap motel room, apparently for a play. Several wandering people come in, looking for
the peripatetic and elusive Arno Klein Theater company. During this act, a man in a straitjacket
behaves like a TV set, switching “channels” when a remote control device is
activated. No performance is given, but
the spectators depart.
DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: You can’t figure this one out without
at least reading it. I think you really
have to see it, and I wish I had. This
is a wonderful, whacky, inventive and provocative play. DeLillo, a novelist (this is his first play),
creates language that is spare but meaningful, airy but controlled, witty but
unselfconscious. There is the poetry and
symbolism of Beckett with the humor and charm of Stoppard. I don’t just want to see this play, I want to
direct it!
Unquestionably, DeLillo is a budding theater artists much
needed on the American stage. Even for a
successful novelist, a first play of this caliber—not to mention daring—is rare
and encouraging. He should by no means
be discouraged or ignored. However—and I
don’t really know how to get around this—he’s hardly a mid-career playwright,
this being his first script. If the
grant is for a mid-career writer, regardless of the medium, then my
recommendation would be clearly “yes.”
If the award is for mid-career playwrights, DeLillo, despite his obvious
potential, isn’t really eligible. I find
myself on the horns of the proverbial dilemma.
RECOMMENDATION: Second
reading
* *
* *
HOMEBODY/KABUL
Tony Kushner
Victory Gardens
Theatre, Chicago
and
Center Theatre Group,
Los Angeles
Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn Academy of
Music
Harvey Theater
28 May 2004
I had looked forward to seeing Tony Kushner’s last-but-one
play (I haven’t seen Caroline, or Change) earlier this month [May 2004] because
I recalled that when it premiered here Off-Broadway a few years ago [New York
Theatre Workshop, 19 December 2001-3 March 2002], it was received well. I
particularly remember that, because it was written long before 9/11, it
was seen as prescient. I had no expectation that, after the
disappointments of the rest of the season so far, this would be one of the
greatest. And it started right at the beginning.
[Set in 1998, just before and just after the U.S. bombed
terrorist camps in Afghanistan in response to the 7 August 1998 bombings of embassies
in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a
group associated with al-Qaeda. Kushner
started writing Homebody/Kabul
in 1997.]
The production of Homebody/Kabul at the Harvey
Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival was a
collaboration between Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre and L.A.’s Center
Theatre Group. I didn’t check back, but I believe the performances in
those cities had been well reviewed.
Also, the two theaters have pretty good reputations in
general: Victory Gardens is up there with Steppenwolf in one of the premiere
theater towns in the country and the Center Theatre Group is the Arena
Stage/Goodman Theatre of L.A. (Center Theatre Group’s home, the Los
Angeles Music Center, is half Kennedy Center and half Lincoln Center: it houses
a rep company like the Lincoln Center Theatre Company but at the same time
serves as L.A.’s main commercial venue and hosts events at the Ahmanson like
Kennedy Center’s Tennessee Williams Explored in the spring and summer of 2004.)
Anyway, with that imprimatur, along with my recollection of Homebody/Kabul
Off-Broadway here in ’02, I figured it would be a good show—provocative,
interesting, and quirky, all the things that the rest of the season had not been.
I couldn’t have been more wrong!
Right from the start there was a problem. The play’s
first hour (of nearly four, by the way) is devoted to a monologue by the title
character (Linda Emond), a British housewife who has become obsessed with the
history and culture of Kabul. The play is set after the Taliban have
taken over Afghanistan and after President Clinton’s bombing raid, but before
9/11 and our invasion that followed.
However, the Homebody (she has a name, but this is how she’s
listed in the program—and I presume the script.) has become absorbed with the
legends, history, and “contemporary” sights of the city as laid out in an
out-of-date guide book from which she reads and to which she refers.
She sits in a chair center stage—the scene is set in her
London living room, but all we see, isolated on the stage by a square pool of
light, are two wooden chairs on either side of a small table—essentially
lecturing us about Kabul as it has invaded her imagination.
Try as I might, I just couldn’t keep focus on what she was
saying. I also had no idea what she (or Kushner) was up to, either.
My mind kept wandering to all kinds of irrelevant stuff, no matter how hard I
tried to pay attention. For all intents and purposes, this was the end of
the play for me—I got lost and never got back into it.
The rest of the play (until the last scene)—in which the
Homebody never again appears, although she is the focus of the plot—is set
in Kabul and ranges from a semi-realistic hotel room to various streets in
bombed-out Kabul to other locations in the city which are suggested by a few
set pieces and props. The Homebody’s husband and daughter (Reed Birney
and Maggie Gyllenhaal) have rushed off to Afghanistan because they have gotten
a report through the British embassy in Pakistan that Homebody has been killed
in the streets of Kabul when she appeared insufficiently covered by the
burka. A mob of enraged Muslim men literally tore her apart.
The husband is completely distraught and is unable to comprehend
any of what he’s hearing, despite the assistance of a British ex-pat (Bill
Camp) whom the embassy in Pakistan has put them on to in Kabul (where there is
no official Western representation). But the daughter is confused, too, though
her impulse is not to believe anything—her mother’s body is missing from the
hospital where it was taken after the attack—and she rushes out to wander the
streets of the city in search of either her mother, her mother’s body, or some
clue to what really happened and why/how.
She meets a street guy (Firdous Bamji) who becomes her
guide—and her “uncle,” since a woman is not supposed to walk about the city
unaccompanied by a male relative. (She wears a burka, but often removes
it or lifts it up or drops the veil. Occasionally this enrages some man
on the street, once or twice an armed religious cop.)
Little by little, she learns that the
Homebody came to Kabul to see what it was all about, met a Muslim man and
married him. Not only did she not divorce her husband back home—hence her
“death”—but her new husband is also still married to his Afghan wife.
(This part gets nearly impossibly complicated, and I’m not sure I can do it
justice.)
The guide has met someone who knows her mother and brings
word that if the daughter and her father get the Afghan not-quite-ex-wife (Rita
Wolf) papers to go to Pakistan and on to London, she will grant her husband a
divorce without further trouble (she has been haranguing him in the street
and at his house) and her husband and the Homebody can live on in
peace.
Of course, the wife is a strange woman who herself is
suspect for having contacts with anti-Taliban activists and having been an
educated woman—she was a librarian—who speaks several foreign languages
(including Dewey Decimal!). In fact, her dialogue is a mix of Pashto,
English, French, and what I gather is Arabic (and maybe Russian, too—I forget
what-all she threw in; there weren’t any supertitles).
I can’t relate the rest of the plot—it was extremely
attenuated, with many long—and, to my mind, irrelevant—scenes of incidents like
the husband back at the hotel (he never goes out) smoking hashish with the
strange ex-pat, and later even shooting heroin, or the daughter finding the
site (in a mine field) that is said to be the grave of Cain. I’ll just
say that the “story” went on interminably without seeming, at least to me, to
go anywhere or say anything.
By this time, of course, I had long since lost control of my
concentration, and maybe I just missed all the pertinent bits—but if so, it was
Kushner’s fault, not mine! (I was actually quite angry when I left the
theater—that I had sat for nearly four hours and got nothing to show for
it. Especially after looking forward to the performance so much.
Moreover, the seats at the Harvey are less than plush!)
To catch you up quickly (would that Kushner had), the
daughter never finds her mother or learns conclusively what happened or why,
but she comes to some kind of understanding that I didn’t get. She and
her father do get the first wife papers to cross into Pakistan (where there’s a
scene involving border guards—Taliban, I presume—who suspect them of being
anti-Islamic activists because the daughter has some Pashto “poems” she’s
supposed to transport back to London that are really political tracts and
threaten to kill them all.
The last scene is back in the London living room where the
Afghan wife is now living with the Homebody’s husband. I can’t explain a
bit of what any of this was about or what Kushner was trying to tell us.
He’s too smart not to have had something in his head, but he put it into such a
convoluted vehicle that I can’t suss it out even though I assume it’s there
somewhere.
The Times review [“Afghanistan Still Stirs A
Housewife,” 13 May 2004] did agree with some of my complaints, but Ben Brantley
found that endless monologue a brilliant coup de théâtre. He also
praised Gyllenhaal’s performance and, especially, her voice. I found her
flat and artificial, and her raspy voice was a constant annoyance every time
she spoke. (I kept wanting to shout out, “Stop smoking!” for
that’s what it sounded like had made her voice so gratingly rough.)
I’d have to say that Frank Galati’s production was good—even
excellent. The sets by James Schuette were appropriate and well-designed
(though in the Kabul scenes, there was a revolving wall across the back that
facilitated the set changes—and after the intermission a chunk of it seemed to
have disappeared inexplicably) and Mara Blumenfeld’s costumes were, too.
The acting was all quite fine—except for Gyllenhaal, film
actress sister of Jake, currently in the Roland Emmerich film The Day After
Tomorrow), who’s rather
central in the revised script used in this production—particularly Bill Camp as
the ex-pat (who’s called Quango Twistleton, apparently a funny evocation of a
P. G. Wodehouse character), the Rita Wolf’s Afghan wife, and the actors who
played the street people, guards, and other incidental Afghans—they really
seemed to catch the cultural nuances. (Many of these last are actors from
that part of the world originally—Iran, Pakistan, India, and so on; they
probably were authentic in their behavior.)
It’s probably odd—and telling—that I picked up on this,
given how diffuse the rest of the play was. In any case, even with good work
from the company, it all seemed to have gone for naught—at least as far as I’m
concerned.
* *
* *
ORSON'S SHADOW
Austin Pendleton
Steppenwolf Theatre
Company, Chicago
Barrow Street Theatre
5 April 2005
I went up to the Theatre Development Fund’s TKTS booth in
Duffy Square to try for some tickets on Friday, 1 April [2005], with Diana, my frequent
theater companion. We had only one show
to consider—Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow. Charles Isherwood’s
New
York Times review back on 14 March [“Two Titans of Drama Assemble
For a Battle of Wills and Wits”] was very strong.
(The promotional card quoted a review by Ben Brantley, which
was also pretty positive, but that turns out to be from an omnibus column in
the Times he did back in January
2000 about Chicago theater, including the Steppenwolf production of Shadow
that was the origin of the current Off-Broadway show in New York [“Critic's
Notebook: Extracting the Essence of Real Lives Onstage,” 27 January 2000].)
Anyway, we picked up tickets—not much of a discount, by the
way: only 25% off, so it cost us almost $90 [the equivalent of $119.21 in 2020]
for two seats to a show in a Greenwich Village community house
auditorium! (The Barrow Street Theatre is a space I remember going to
when I was reviewing for The New York Native; Soho Rep was in there and
it was still just an auditorium then—folding chairs on a flat floor—but now
they’ve built risers to rake the seats, which are no longer metal folding
chairs, though not actual theater seats, either. Still, $55 [worth $72.85
in 2020] for a ticket there—that’s full fare—seems outrageous.) To get to
the end first, Diana liked the show, but I found it pointless and
self-indulgent.
As last month’s Times review
reported, the play’s about the relationship among Orson Welles (Jeff Still),
Laurence Olivier (John Judd), Kenneth Tynan (Tracy Letts), Joan Plowright (Susan
Bennett), and Vivien Leigh (Lee Roy Rogers). (The characters within the play, by the way, are
called “Orson,” “Larry,” “Ken,” Joan,” and “Vivien”; aren’t we chummy!)
Welles is doing a stage version of Chimes at Midnight before empty
houses in Dublin, trying to raise money to make the film.
[Chimes,
best known as 1965 film, centers on William Shakespeare’s character Sir
John Falstaff and contains text from five of Shakespearean plays: Henry
IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Richard
II; Henry V; and The Merry Wives of Windsor.]
It’s 1960, and Tynan proposes that Welles direct Olivier and
Plowright (Olivier’s wife from 1961 until her death in 1989) in the London production
of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Tynan also wants Olivier to hire
him for a post at the new National Theatre, to which Olivier has just been
appointed director. (A theater critic, Tynan was appointed the National
Theatre’s literary manager in 1963.)
Olivier’s marriage to Leigh (1940-60) is falling apart, and
he’s already started an affair with Plowright.
The bulk of the play is a rehearsal of Rhinoceros somewhere in
the Royal Court—seems like a room under the stage or something. (I think
it was supposed to be the empty stage, but it looked more like a basement
space.)
As for the script, there’s a lot of talking, much of which
is name-and-title-dropping. It occurred to me that if you weren’t old
enough to remember the characters (only Plowright’s still alive [she still is,
at 90]; the rest were all dead by the ’80s) or aren’t a film buff, you wouldn’t
have any idea what any of these people was talking about, and maybe not even
who they are anymore.
Olivier and Welles might be names you’d recognize, but I
wonder if you’d have any sense of who they were in theater and film.
Forget Tynan! (Oddly, Leigh might be the most well-known figure for
younger people because of Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire, but she
has the smallest part in Orson’s Shadow.)
Maybe people know Citizen Kane, but Chimes?
Or That Hamilton Woman, which Olivier drops a few times because it was
the movie he and Leigh made together when they met. I doubt too many will
know The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, or The
Entertainer too well, and the stage work these people mention endlessly, if
they are known at all, are just names in theater history.
(Olivier talks about directing Leigh in the London
production of Streetcar, before she did the film with Kazan. Even
I barely recall that, and I’ve done a little research on that play for an
academic in Mississippi. Olivier also did the film of The Entertainer,
but it was his stage performance—with Plowright—that boosted his career, and
that’s what he talks about in Shadow, not the film version. Fro the record, I saw Olivier on stage only
once: in a special performance of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death—with Geraldine McEwan, I believe—in London in the summer of
1969.)
There are two clues that tell me this is just a backstage
bio-play. First, a big deal is made of referring to Macbeth as “The
Scottish Play.” Both Welles and Olivier do this, and when Leigh doesn’t,
Olivier makes a thing of it. (She’s on the phone from home—that is, not
in a theater—but he’s at the Royal Court.)
Then Sean, the young stagehand (Ian Westerfer), asks about
the reference—that’s how Pendleton gets to explain this bit of theater
arcana—and then says Macbeth and is instructed to run around the theater
to remove the curse. (That stagehand is something of a walking joke—he’s
too young to know any of the people the other characters mention, and
he likes movies but doesn’t know anything about theater even though he works in
one.)
The second clue is that at the end, Plowright—the only one
left alive (even the stagehand apparently died)—runs down a list of what
happens to everyone (except Sean, the stagehand—she doesn’t know what happens
to him) after the play ends. Not only is this an undramatic device, but
she does it by answering questions from the characters. (“Joan, what
happened to me?” Riiight.) Those two bits tell me that
Pendleton had nothing really in mind but to do a backstage theater play.
Ho-hum! (As Diana pointed out, actors like to talk about theater.
Pendleton, an actor, just put his ruminations on stage.)
Aside from all the name-dropping (they mention lots of
people from that era, too—the ’30s through the ’50s), I didn’t see that
Pendleton was trying to say anything beyond putting some interesting
theater/film people on stage together. The dialogue wasn’t
bad—literate—but no one really presented any ideas that went beyond the
imagined confrontations. (There’s not much record of the production of Rhinoceros;
it apparently figures as a footnote in all the memoirs of the people
involved!) There just wasn’t any point to this.
I also had serious objections to the production—Tyler
Micoleau’s lighting, Takeshi Kata’s set, and David Cromer’s directing.
(The acting was fine. No one tried to impersonate the famous people they
portrayed, but they got the idea across well enough.) As I said, the
space looked like a room beneath the stage (the same set was used for all the scenes—Tynan meets Welles
at the Dublin theater after a performance, then he meets with Olivier and
Plowright at the Royal Court, then the Rhinoceros rehearsals; all
were backstage scenes).
There’s a staircase going up at the rear left, an entrance
up right, and a line of ropes and pulleys along the stage left wall. For
some reason, the actors had to go through those stage-left ropes a lot, and
Olivier especially had to stay back there for long periods. (Leigh had
two appearances, one of which was via telephone. As she sits upstage
right in a chair placed in a corner, Olivier is down left, behind the ropes, on
the backstage phone which was situated in the down left corner. He looked
like he was doing Hello, Out ThereI
Then on top of this, the director, David Cromer, put a lot
of the actors below the stage, on the house floor. (Several entrances
were also made from the rear of the house.) I suppose there’s nothing
wrong with this in principle, but a good part of the audience can’t see anyone
walking around down there. We saw a lot of tops of heads moving
about!
And Micoleau’s lighting didn’t help. It was basically
dark—I suppose to approximate a theater without stage lights. But many
scenes were lit with spots on the actors, so there were these isolated pools of
light—mostly focused on the actor’s head only—while the rest of the space was
dark. I’m not sure what the point of this was dramatically, but it was
annoying. I didn’t read Micoleau’s bio, but maybe he was a dance designer
before this. (I think the whole production, techies included, were from
the Steppenwolf version. Maybe all this worked better in Chicago.)
Remember: all this cost me $45 [$59.60]! You can put
up with a lot for $20, but at $45 (and that was a discount), I expect
more for my money.
It’s not that Shadow was totally uninteresting.
As a nostalgia piece, a peek backstage at some big names, it was even kind of
fun. My suggestion—do it on HBO or Showtime as a TV film. You might
have to get actors who can pass for the famous faces—or do make up (there was a
recent Welles bio-flick on the tube, wasn’t there?), but it would work better
on TV (not in a movie theater, I don’t think) than on the stage. [I don’t know if this is what I was thinking
of, but HBO aired RKO 281 in 1999 in
which Liev Schreiber played a young Welles.]
I can’t guess why both Isherwood and Brantley liked this
play so much. I remember saying recently that Isherwood’s reviews were so
much in line with my own opinions that I was beginning to feel spooked. I
don’t agree with him at all this time.
