Destination: Valparaiso

Don DeLillo moves from page to stage

by William Corbett

Eight years ago Don DeLillo had an idea for a play: an ordinary businessman sets out for a particular city only to wind up in a different one that has the same name. DeLillo remembers writing the first act "so tentatively and quickly" that he became dissatisfied with it. He put the pages away and gave the next five years to writing Underworld, the novel whose appearance in the fall of 1996 placed him in the front rank of American novelists. A year or so ago he returned to the businessman who made a mistake but now the city had a name: Valparaiso as in Valparaiso, Indiana, Florida, and Chile.

When DeLillo finished the play Valparaiso, he had but one thought: to send it to Robert Brustein at Cambridge's American Repertory Theatre. In 1987 the ART premiered DeLillo's first produced play, The Day Room, and made a success of it. Brustein leapt at the chance to mount a second DeLillo play, and after four days of previews, Valparaiso will open this coming Wednesday.

In early January DeLillo came to Cambridge to participate in rehearsals, eight hours or more a day for five or six days a week. On a recent weekday morning in the midst of this exhausting schedule the novelist-turned-playwright sat down for a conversation.

Valparaiso "is an attempt," DeLillo explains, "to understand what is happening in the culture now that the Cold War is over." Since Underworld spans more than 40 years of the Cold War and marks its end, that makes Valparaiso DeLillo's first venture into a world where, as the Interviewer in the new play says, "It is all footage waiting to be shot." According to DeLillo, "The Cold War had to end for the barrier between substantial news and insubstantial news to fall. I don't believe there is any difference between the two anymore." We have, in other words, fully entered the world of mass culture. Or, as Delfina, a talk-show host and Valparaiso's Prospero, says, "The world is sucked up inside a little Sony."

DeLillo, born in 1936 and thus a teenager when television began to penetrate every American home, remembers watching Westerns on TV with his older cousins in the early 1950s and liking the company but feeling indifferent about what he saw on the screen. He also remembers Milton Berle and wonders whether perhaps "Uncle Miltie" was not the beginning of mass culture. He did, DeLillo notes, "unify the nation."

On second thought, DeLillo guesses that our present mass culture may have begun with the Kennedy assassination, a subject he dealt with in his novel Libra (1988). Kennedy was killed, he points out, on film, and Oswald, his alleged assassin and Libra's protagonist, was shot to death on TV. But these are only guesses. Valparaiso is based not on a close study of television or of recent history but on what DeLillo sees and feels with what he calls his "electric tentacles."

In the writer's presence one easily imagines such tentacles and thinks of Ezra Pound's notion that writers are the "antennae of the race." DeLillo is a trim man who, in his early 60s, could wrestle in the 145-pound class without having to sweat the weight. He is taut like a greyhound or a tuning fork. His concentration is intense, and his spoken sentences are shapely, clipped, and urgent in tone. His quick intelligence vibrates in every word. DeLillo is one of those writers whose novels and plays sound like him speaking.

If Valparaiso began with the vision of a traveler's mistake and moved forward on the writer's intuition, DeLillo wrote the play much differently from the way he wrote Underworld. Before he completed the 825 pages of the novel, he filled a small room with typewritten manuscript pages. He says that Valparaiso "did not acquire the enormous bulk that a novel usually produces." It did not have to because DeLillo's brief time in the theater has taught him that "after I'm finished writing, the true work is only beginning." For instance, the typescript Valparaiso that went to the actors had few stage directions. These would be added in rehearsal, where the playwright is collaborating with ART resident director David Wheeler, who also directed The Day Room, and a cast fronted by Obie winner Will Patton.

This is where the "true work" takes place, and as DeLillo looks on in Cambridge he makes changes, cutting mostly but adding lines as well -- and this will happen up through the final preview. Whereas he, a passionate moviegoer, dismisses the screenplay as "not a writer's form," he regards the theater as a place where he can exercise his powers. In writing Valparaiso he sometimes added "irrelevant detail to a piece of dialogue," riffs he would not allow in his novels, and he constructed dialogue as narrative, every word moving the play forward. When he points out cuts he has made, he speaks of the abandoned words as having "slowed the action down." He hopes the audience "will find pleasure in the language" but he knows that the language of Valparaiso is not, as it can be to stunning effect in his novels, "naturalistic." Instead it is language attuned "to locate the metaphysics of a form," the form being television.

In Valparaiso the hero, Michael Majeski, is in search of his missing identity. DeLillo explains, "He does it through the instruments of broadcast technology, microphone, cameras, videotape, and film -- he does it publicly." Majeski, the Interviewer's subject because he flew to the wrong city with the right name, becomes a late-20th-century Everyman for whom, once his self has been created and shaped by the media, "everything has to be," in DeLillo's words, "revealed, disclosed, and absorbed." For DeLillo there is "something in the soul of technology that requires this to happen. Once it is feasible, it can't be resisted." He points to the current impeachment process as an example of this. It grinds on, unable to distinguish the trivial from what is important. As Valparaiso's Interviewer says, "Everything that leads up to and flows out of the film is the film. Including the film. A film that consumes itself even as the audience watches." Majeski cannot stop this from happening, but he can use the process to, as DeLillo says, "try to come into selfhood."

At a glance this sounds like the subject for a satire aimed at television, the loop within which Majeski is caught, but satire has no interest for DeLillo. He has written a play in which the audience encounters a man "inside the Sony," who is part of what DeLillo identifies as "the contemporary process of white-hot consumption and instantaneous waste." Majeski begins a journey through the medium until he becomes, to DeLillo, "a hero of self-disclosure."

What is striking for this reader of the play -- who has yet to see it -- is that DeLillo stages what we are used to seeing on our living-room TVs. He holds a mirror up to nature but aslant, as Louis Malle did in My Dinner with Andre. In that film we watch Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat their dinner and talk about the theater. It is talk, it dawns on us, that we no longer go to the theater to hear. The camera moves but never takes our eyes off Shawn and Gregory until we see that they are a two-character play about the theater but on film, and the loop between what we see and what we are thinking about takes several twists.

In Valparaiso Delfina, who comes on stage in act two when the play moves from "television to theater," speaks like a seer or enchantress of "someone spun of lightwaves and repetitious sounds." It is as if we, contemporary men and women, had, in DeLillo's vision, entered an enchanted world. We can now be more than two places at once, more than 50 million places at once, at a finger's command. It is a world in which the word "live" carries the same quotation marks Vladimir Nabokov advised us to place around the word "truth." Majeski is one of those "lightwaves" whose travel error makes him footage that, at the ART, we watch unroll. It seems right for theater to follow this process, an act that television cannot commit because, DeLillo tells us, the nature of film is to consume itself.

Delfina suggests that this enchanted world has been created by magic. Who are we to doubt her? We cannot see what she calls "these grids of information," but we know that image and sound fly through the air. To what end? If that is the question, DeLillo's answer might be something like his musing, "Is cyberspace part of the world or is the world part of cyberspace? I don't know the answer, and I don't know if the question is worth asking." But Valparaiso has another question, an ancient one, at its core: who are we?

To answer this for himself, Michael Majeski enters "deep mean massive structures." There he feels "the enormous sense of power all around -- heaving and breathing." "How could I," he asks, "impose myself against this force?" When asked whether this particular force existed in the past, if the words, for instance, in which a life might be written down could be compared to footage, DeLillo laughs. This is our science fiction, his laugh says, no one else's. n

Valparaiso opens in preview this Friday, January 29, and officially this coming Wednesday, February 3, at the American Repertory Theatre, where it will play in repertory through March 17. Tickets are $23 to $55. Call 547-8300.