The Day Room

By: Don Delillo

 

According to Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

"The play opens in a hospital room occupied by two men. One, the good-natured Budge, does Tai Chi exercises while trying, without much success, to strike up a conversation with his roommate, Wyatt. Then, slowly but inevitably, their world begins to spin away from reality as they are visited by a series of fellow patients and hospital staffers, all of whom, it turns out, may now be what they seem. Oddly normal, but also oddly frightening, it is soon apparent that they have strayed in from the psychatric ward of the adjacent Arno Klein Wing, and are all quite mad.

In the second act, which is set in the day room of the psychiatric ward, the same performers reappear, but with different identities. Some of them, claiming to be actors, transform the room into a motel suite in which a play-within-the-play is to take place and one man, strait-jacketed and "becomes" a television set. At last Arno Klein himself appears, and proves to be the man (Budge) who started the play. So, in the end, we have come full circle, with appearance and reality, madness and normality still tantalizingly undefined, and with the growing conviction that all the world may indeed be no more than a stage--and all its inhabitants merely players."