STAGE REVIEW : ‘The Day Room’ Raises Questions About Nature of Reality

Who is crazy and who is sane? Who is acting and who is real? And to what extent does the world nurse our delusions, granting the person in the hospital uniform such an absolute power over our bodies that we become susceptible to the clever con artists playing those parts?

Those who enjoy such philosophical questions should feel right at home in Don DeLillo’s “The Day Room,” a mind trip in a psychiatric ward, playing at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre through July 1.

DeLillo the novelist has a penchant for playing with reality in novels like the best-selling “Libra,” in which he creates a fictional scenario around the facts of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

“The Day Room,” his only play to date, is also a mystery, but this time he replaces the question of who did what with the basic who is who in the hospital.

Are the doctors and nurses who visit patients Wyatt and Budge really doctors and nurses? Are the patients who visit them really patients? Are Wyatt and Budge themselves really patients? Are the travelers looking for the Arno Klein theater troupe really part of the Arno Klein theater troupe? Or does such a troupe even exist?

Similarly, one may ask, is there really such a play as “The Day Room,” or am I just writing this review to make you think there’s something going on at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre? Or did the Gaslamp just create a hoax of an opening night, complete with press packet and audience to fool me so I could fool you with this review into thinking there really is such a show?

Of course, one may well ask why would anyone go to all that trouble to fool anybody? This show is no “Volpone.” Nobody rakes in gold at the expense of anyone else’s credulity.

The answer, such as it is, may lie in the character of Budge (Kevin O’Neill), who seems desperately hungry for conversation of any kind with anybody. If the only way to get troubled people to talk with each other is to give them roles, then so be it, he will give them roles.

That is the fine point that intersects our so-called “real” world. Who is to say that part of our motivation for the roles we play is not just to make a living or get by, but to have something to talk to other people about? What if God created people, like Budge creates roles, just so there would be conversation in the world? What if all human endeavor--including philosophical exercises such as this one--can be reduced to the various and sometimes extreme ways we have of fending off the loneliness that may well be the human condition in its most pure form?

Once again, director Will Simpson and set designer Robert Earl do their usual clever trick with the Gaslamp space and transform the postage-stamp-size stage into roominess for nine actors without crowding the audience.

The cast, which largely has to play the parts of people playing parts, works smoothly together like well-oiled parts in a complicated machine.

As Budge/Arno Klein, O’Neill propels the action with sheer charisma, as compelling with silence as he is with speech.

Marc Raia is completely convincing, whether he is playing a patient, Wyatt, in the first act or a television that the others turn on and off in the second.

Elizabeth A. Soukup undulates with an earthy sensuality that tantalizes fellow patient Mark Robertson to distraction. And Todd Neal is chilling as a man dangerously on the edge of exploding everyone else’s fantasies.

Soukup’s reaction when Neal accuses one of the visitors to the day room of being a nurse rather than a fellow patient playing a part, is piercing in its expression of genuine horror. If the real collides with the unreal in this environment, the fear in her eyes seems to say, the unreal may fall apart and then where will she be?

“The play’s the thing,” as Hamlet says. Except in the day room, where the play is everything.

“THE DAY ROOM”

By Don DeLillo. Director is Will Simpson. Sets by Robert Earl. Lighting by Matthew Cubitto. Costumes by Katherine Rundquist. Sound by Michael Shapiro. Stage manager is Mary Kim Williamson. With Susan Gelman, Steve Gubin, Todd Neal, Kevin O’Neill, Marc Raia, Mark Robertson, John Rosen, Elizabeth A. Soukup and Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson. At 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays with Sunday matinees at 2 through July 1. At 547 4th Ave., San Diego.