The Day Room is a play written by Don DeLillo and first produced at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April, 1986. It is DeLillo's first play. Since its premiere, the play has been produced in New York in 1987, and in Chicago in 1989 and 1993, among others. The first international production was in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1995. A portion of the play was published in Harper's in September, 1986 as "A Visit from Dr. Bazelon".
The play concerns characters in a psychiatric hospital in which the distinctions between patients and staff gradually blur. The play is written in an absurdist style reminiscent of Beckett and Ionesco, and eschews linear plot in favor of a non-traditional exploration of such themes as empathy, personal identity, fear of death, and the seeming impossibility of meaningful communication. In line with the transformation of identities, the eponymous room of the first act becomes a vaguely defined motel room in the second. As a single memorable example of the absurdist tone of the piece, one of the asylum patients of the first act appears in the second act as Figure in Straitjacket, performing as a television set for the bulk of the remaining action.
DeLillo stated in a New York Times interview about the play that
I began to sense a connection, almost a metaphysical connection, between the craft of acting and the fear we all have of dying. It seemed to me that actors are a kind of model for the ways in which we hide from the knowledge we inevitably possess of our final extinction. There's a sense in which actors teach us how to hide. [1]
The Day Room was praised by critics for its intellectualism and black comedy, as well as for being a new direction for DeLillo. The noted critic Frank Rich, however, criticized it for being "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as it might be rewritten by a pretentious undergraduate who has just completed the midterm, if not all the required reading, for a survey course in the works of Pirandello, Beckett and Stoppard." [2] Upon its Chicago premiere, critic Richard Christianson gave the play similarly mixed reviews, writing that, while he enjoyed it, the play is "a little too 'literary,' a mite too obviously crafted and pretentious." [3]
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, film director, screenwriter and author. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for his plays Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). He first gained critical acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway 1970s plays: The Duck Variations,Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. His plays Race and The Penitent, respectively, opened on Broadway in 2009 and previewed off-Broadway in 2017.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts". The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. The premiere, directed by Roger Blin, was on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the "most significant English language play of the 20th century".
The Theatre of the Absurd is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence.
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism.
Absurdist Fiction is a genre of literature that arose in the 1950s and 1960s predominantly in France and Germany, prompted by post-war disillusionment.
Philadelphia is a 1993 American legal drama film written by Ron Nyswaner, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. It was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to acknowledge HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, and homophobia.
Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters. It was originally written in French ; Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, opening on 3 April 1957. The follow-up to Waiting for Godot, it is commonly considered to be among Beckett's best works. The literary critic Harold Bloom called it the greatest prose drama of the 20th century, and Samuel Beckett considered it his masterpiece. Briefly, it is about a blind, paralyzed man and his servant who await an unspecified “end” which seems to be the end of their relationship, death, and the end of the actual play itself.
White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.
Lee Knowlton Blessing is an American playwright best known for his 1988 work, A Walk in the Woods. A lifelong Midwesterner, Blessing continued to work in regional theaters in and around his hometown of Minneapolis through his 40s before relocating to New York City.
Valparaiso is Don DeLillo's second play, in which a man suddenly becomes famous following a mistake in the itinerary of an ordinary business trip which takes him to Valparaíso, Chile, instead of Valparaiso, Indiana.
Stuart Alan Gordon was an American filmmaker, theatre director, screenwriter, and playwright. Initially recognized for his provocative and frequently controversial work in experimental theatre, Gordon is perhaps more widely known for work in film. Most of Gordon's cinematic output was in the horror genre, though he also ventured into science fiction and film noir.
Infernal Bridegroom Productions (IBP) was a theater company located in Houston, Texas, formed in 1993 and dissolved in 2007. IBP garnered national attention when it was featured on the cover of American Theatre in September, 2002, for its original play, We Have Some Planes, by Brian Jucha, about the events of September 11. The theater's name is taken from a line in one of its first productions, In the Jungle of Cities by Bertolt Brecht. The line reads, "In my dreams I call him my infernal bridegroom." IBP produced over 60 plays, many of them world premieres.
Falling Man is a novel by Don DeLillo, published May 15, 2007. An excerpt from the novel appeared in short story form as "Still Life" in the April 9, 2007, issue of The New Yorker magazine.
Love-Lies-Bleeding is the title of a three-act play by Don DeLillo. It is his third play and had a world-premiere reading May 2, 2005, at Boise Contemporary Theater in Boise, Idaho, directed by DeLillo himself. Subsequently the play has been produced at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and again in Boise at Boise Contemporary Theater. The international premiere was July 7, 2007 in Sydney, Australia with Lee Lewis directing acclaimed Australian actress Robyn Nevin in the Sydney Theatre Company production.
New Age Vaudeville was an American professional theater troupe that was part of the Chicago comedy boom of the 1980s.
Marvin's Room is a play by the American writer Scott McPherson. It tells the story of Bessie and her estranged sister, Lee, who confront a family crisis.
David Findley Wheeler was an American theatrical director. He was the founder and artistic director of the Theater Company of Boston (TCB) from 1963 to 1975. He served as its artistic director until its closure in 1975. Actors including Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight, Stockard Channing, James Woods, Blythe Danner, Larry Bryggman, John Cazale, Hector Elizondo, Spalding Gray, Paul Guilfoyle, Ralph Waite and Paul Benedict were part of the company.
The Practical Theatre Company was a Chicago-based theatre company founded by Northwestern University students and active throughout the 1980s. Its productions included new plays, satiric agitprop, rock and roll events, and a series of successful improvisational comedy revues. The PTC, whose motto was "Art is Good", is notable for the fact that the entire cast of its 1982 improvisational comedy revue, The Golden 50th Anniversary Jubilee was hired by Saturday Night Live.
Disgraced is a 2012 play by novelist and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar. It premiered in Chicago and has had Off-Broadway and Off West End engagements. The play, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater October 23, 2014. Disgraced has also been recognized with a 2012 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work – Play or Musical and a 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting. It is Akhtar's first stage play. The 2014 Broadway transfer earned a Tony Award for Best Play nomination in 2015.