THE DAY ROOM
But absurdist literature is diabolically difficult to create. It’s supposed to spring from the unconscious–the true source of human motivation–and the only way to tap into the unconscious is through unfettered free association. The unconscious, however, delivers its nuggets in a geyser of dreck. You can’t spread that dreck over a page and create a play any more than you can splatter paint on a canvas and produce art–without method, you wind up with a mess.
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The best playwrights recognize the fine line dividing the absurd from the idiotic. Don DeLillo apparently doesn’t. His play, The Day Room, aspires to absurdity, but settles for platitudes and obscurity. While trying to say something perceptive about the insanity of modern life, DeLillo resorts to the sophomoric assertion that it’s hard to distinguish the insane from supposedly normal people–a notion that went out with bell-bottoms. Mercifully, DeLillo has an impressive facility with language, so some passages are verbally interesting. But overall, his play is stupefying. At least three people in the audience on opening night fell asleep.
Well, Mr. Grass is actually a patient in the Arno Klein psychiatric wing who has slipped out of the unit, hooked himself up to some IV bags, and is now wandering about visiting. But which other characters are actually mental patients in disguise? That’s the mystery that unfolds in the first act.
In a way, the irony of this speech backfires on the playwright–DeLillo seems to have donned the “uniform” of a playwright, assuming that it bestowed some sort of authority on what he said. But as his play suggests, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the competent from those merely pretending to be.
