STAGE REVIEW : ‘DAY ROOM’ KEEPS ‘EM GUESSING

During intermission at “The Day Room” Wednesday night, two people were noticing the signs that denote the restrooms at the Doolittle Theatre. Each sign also bears the emblem of a telephone.

“Very strange” the first person said. “Maybe there are telephones for men and telephones for women.”

This is the state of mind induced by Don DeLillo’s play, as performed by the American Repertory Theatre. It leads you to see given things in a new way, to realize that the world (as we have decided to call it) is indeed very strange.

“The Day Room” is either a two-act play or two one-acts lashed together. (I incline to the latter view.) The first and more effective play is set in a hospital room. The second is set in a more vaguely defined space, perhaps the hospital day room, perhaps a motel, possibly both at once.

Each half has a different set of characters, and asks a different question. The second part asks: Are these people living out a situation, or are they putting on a play? The first part asks: Are these people really doctors and nurses, or are they insane?

Those are both interesting questions and DeLillo has as much philosophical fun with the second as with the first. But the audience--identifying with Thomas Derrah as an increasingly dismayed patient--gets more wrapped up in the first.

Derrah has checked into the hospital for a series of tests. He does this every year, to get a rest and to be reassured that all his systems are A-1. This time, though, he finds himself with a talkative roommate (Jeremy Geidt) and an unsettling series of official visitors.

They say they’re official. And each of them starts out in a businesslike way to take his pulse, or his history or whatever. But little by little the masks slip and the talk gets weird. What kind of nurse rhapsodizes about washing corpses and about “the gleam of hospital corridors in the dead of night”?’ What kind of doctor wants to know if you feel “intimately connected with your stool?”

And yet Derrah, wanting to be a good patient, submits to each of them. (Geidt affects tranquillity.) He goes from embarrassment to dread as each visitor is revealed as an imposter from the hospital’s psychiatric wing, only to be replaced by an even more plausible visitor--equally deranged.

In the end, sensible Nurse Baker (Isabell Monk) speaks the moral of the tale: “In the muddle of the world, it’s the uniform that matters.” And then They carry her off.

Who are They? What is going on here? “A warp of some kind,” is Geidt’s explanation. It’s the kind of warp that both Kafka and Joe Orton would recognize. “The Day Room” is a cunning and brainy play, and obviously a metaphor for larger societal issues. Poor Derrah, for example, could stand for the American body politic, subject to a new wave of quack politicians every four years.

But it’s also about what it seems to be about--how vulnerable a man is once they take his clothes away and put him in one of those dinky hospital bathrobes--and that’s one reason the laughter at the Doolittle was so helpless on Wednesday night. Who doesn’t have horror stories about some screw-up that the hospital not only failed to apologize for, but sent you a bill for? The lunatics often do seem to be running the institution.

Act II doesn’t have that recognition factor, unless you’re in that other crazy institution, the theater. What is at issue here is whether the characters are, as they say, trying to track down a secret performance of a certain fugitive avant-garde theater troupe; or whether what we are seeing is the performance.

Well, fine. One sees the debt to Pirandello and the attempt to loop the action back to the first play. And again the writing is very clever--the device of having the strait-jacketed Derrah serve as a TV set, for instance. (Receiving a rather more pretentious line of programs than usual--perhaps he’s on cable.)

But it’s a bit academic after the first play, where metaphysical interest intertwines with human interest. Director Michael Bloom has seen to fine acting in both, with Harry S. Murphy and Diane D’Aquila particularly convincing as out-of control medicos. “Can’t we stop being doctor and nurse for a few minutes?” pleads D’Aquila. “Can’t we give you a glimpse of the people behind our uniforms?” Heaven forbid.

“The Day Room” has no more performances at the Doolittle, where ART’s fairy tale “The King Stag” will play through Sunday. But DeLillo’s play can be seen next Wednesday night at UC San Diego, (619) 534-4559. ‘THE DAY ROOM’ Don DeLillo’s play performed by the American repertory Theatre at the James Doolittle Theatre presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts. Director Michael Bloom. Setting Loy Arcenas. Costumes Karen Eister. Lighting Richard Riddell. Stage manager John Grant-Phillips. With Jeremy Geidt, Thomas Derrah, John Bottoms, Diane D’Aquila, Rodney Hudson, Isabell Monk Harry. Murphy Pamela Gien and Richard Grusin.