Traveling man

DeLillo marches into the maw of the media

by Carolyn Clay

VALPARAISO; By Don DeLillo. Directed by David Wheeler. Set design by Karl Eigsti. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by Christopher Walker. With Will Patton, Caroline Hall, Stephen Rowe, Karen MacDonald, Randy Danson, Thomas Derrah, Remo Airaldi, Dina Comolli, Sophia Fox-Long, and Jonathan Hova. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre, in association with AT&T: OnStage, at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through March 17.

Like the man in its middle, who becomes a celebrity after traveling to Chile when he meant to go to Indiana, Valparaiso goes in quite a different direction from what is expected. But anyone who believes that Don DeLillo's new play will turn out to be just the surreal send-up of tawdry, all-invasive media that's announced on the ticket doesn't know DeLillo. The acclaimed author of edgy novels rife with the menace of modern life, he's no Chris Durang. And Valparaiso, a cumulatively chilling black comedy, is less a reprise of Media Amok than a 1990s all-TV-all-the-time sibling of Tiny Alice.

DeLillo's protagonist is Michael Majeski, an apparently ordinary businessman who sets out on a routine trip to Valparaiso, Indiana, but allows himself to be rerouted to Valparaiso, Florida, and then to Valparaiso, Chile. These are the first of many submissive acts leading to what turns out to be a dual journey for Michael -- into the ravenous maw of the media and into the belly of self-discovery.

As with DeLillo's first play, The Day Room (which premiered at ART in 1986), Valparaiso's first act serves as a set-up for the second. It takes the form of a series of media interviews of the play's sudden, flavor-of-the-week celebrity, in which Michael's "humorous story about a long, wrong journey" morphs into an exploration of his existential angst. Of course, it's decorated with the sort of trivial or salacious detail, much of it involving sex or underwear, upon which the media love to dine. This play's first half is, of necessity, repetitious, the point being that the interviews are an endless loop in which Majeski's story is not so much extracted as shaped -- not by the teller but by the media interrogators with their endless mantra of "We need to know." Coached, tweaked, and manipulated, Michael is turned into a sort of Stepford star in search of a self.

Act two takes the form of a television talk show on which, once again, Michael and wife Livia tell their story. This act moves the piece, in DeLillo's words, from "television to theater," making us, in the role of the studio audience, complicit in what comes close to a ritual sacrifice. "I am here to separate you from the grim business of your non-audience lives," the show's Mephistophelean Ed McMahon figure, Teddy Hodell, purrs before introducing host Delfina Treadwell, a totalitarian Oprah who admits to sucking her very life from her audience. In the hypnotic atmosphere of the TV studio, Michael and Livia -- an anxious woman given to herbal cigarettes and "demon repetitions" on her exercise bike -- reveal things they never would in life.

But DeLillo is up to more than just exposing TV as our great electronic confessional. In Valparaiso, TV is both more real and more ruthless than life -- which is nothing more than "footage waiting to be filmed." Michael, in particular, seems to give himself up to the medium -- and to what it asks of him -- completely. "Don't fight the camera, melt into it," Delfina instructs. And seeking some sort of authentication, some "nuance of human sharing," he does.

A seductive yet dictatorial persona, Delfina, abetted by the sinister Teddy, represents some overarching, media-generated design for the world: "grids of information" that must be filled -- with product buzz, sleazy revelation, human drama, all of seemingly equal import. "Do you lie awake sometimes and feel the genius and terror of the night?", Delfina demands to know. "What kind of dentifrice do you use?" But, ultimately, she wills Michael toward the "grueling truth" of his unlikely journey -- which, as it happens, is on video and therefore "verifiable," as "off-camera lives" are not.

DeLillo's script is jumpy, poetic, and surreal. It's also surprisingly funny. And David Wheeler's ART production picks up on those qualities, just as Karl Eigsti's set echoes both the phantom "grids of information" and the plasticity of modern décor. The play's first act, which can seem tedious, gets by on the production's mood, which is, from the get-go, unreal. Similarly, Will Patton, an Obie winner who has appeared in a number of films, infuses Michael, from the outset, with a mix of bemusement, acquiescence, ache, and oddness that tips us Valparaiso is no glib media satire. Given to precise, almost insouciant movements, he seems to say his lines -- some of them repeated in interview after interview -- as if knowing he's an actor in his own drama.

The supporting cast, too, skillfully negotiates the play's abrupt interspersing of soul baring and superficial Q&A. Stephen Rowe and Karen MacDonald portray the various interviewers, he capturing the strange mix of politeness and belittlement characteristic of the breed, she the mix of bullying and feared insignificance. Randy Danson brings to Delfina not a soupçon of Oprah-esque folksiness; her queen of daytime is an imperious creature, crazed and all-powerful. And mustachio'd Thomas Derrah is like some devil Charlie McCarthy as Teddy. Caroline Hall does well by the arbitrary twists and turns of the cheerily unsatisfied Livia, but DeLillo hasn't really made her a character, he's made her a wife.

Valparaiso isn't perfect. You have to experience the second act to appreciate the first. And the play, which sets out to echo the empty, surfacy allure of television, can be alienating. Only two hours and change, it's so dense that it's hard to absorb in one viewing. But then, Michael Majeski goes to Valparaiso more than once. So, I suppose, can we.