STAGE REVIEWS : Absurdist ‘Room’ Serves Up Zany, Satirical Froth

Unless he has another one in the works, “The Day Room” is novelist Don DeLillo’s only play, an Ortonesque farce set in a mental institution in which such questions as who’s the doctor, who’s the patient and who’s the nurse remain impossible to answer.

Hardly a new idea, but nicely handled by DeLillo, whose vigorous writing goes on an outrageous bender with this play. It is exquisite lunacy that finds a happy, rocking home at Hollywood’s youthful Fountainhead Theater.

Youth suits this fearless theatrical style. In fact, the Fountainhead production’s minor drawback is an older Arno Klein (a.k.a. Budge), a patient in this booby-hatch through whose mind we experience its tenuous reality. He is played in short, explosive bursts by Angus Duncan, an actor not entirely at ease with the role’s sharp left turns, but who does manage to infuse it with a disjointed weirdness, however inorganic.

Otherwise, this “Day Room,” directed with no-holds-barred abandon by Andy Fickman, zings along, slightly overwrought, but deliberately making a royal hash of what’s real and what isn’t.

It displays a cast of eagerly talented exhibitionists who seem to love it when they can poke fun at themselves (DeLillo’s script offers that chance).

Production values at the Fountainhead may be perfunctory, but these actors are adept at unambiguous cartooning, most notably Jackie Earl Haley’s as the wild-eyed sicko, Grass; Mark Robinson as mincing Dr. Bazelon; and Kate Fuglei’s Nurse Baker, as prim and stern as she is sexually repressed.

Kathe Mazur and Collin Bernsen go in for much broader strokes as two different sex-crazed couples, and, in what amount to cameos, Joe Hannibal and Suzanne Krull prove to be skilled miniaturists, delivering colorful personas as a pair of slow-moving orderlies, a maid and a desk clerk. A particularly winsome performance is given by Andrew Shaifer as the nebbishy Wyatt, the man who shares the room with Budge and who is summarily chopped to bits as “The Day Room” relentlessly whips up reality and unreality into zany satirical froth.

Froth is ultimately what this play is. DeLillo’s broadsides are a bit faded, coming as they do on the heels of such divinely inspired absurdists as Ionesco and Pirandello, and such dark satirists as Joe Orton, Alfred Jarry, Jean Genet and even, when the right occasion beckons, Arthur Kopit.

Come to think of it, it would make an interesting companion piece for Kopit’s “The Road to Nirvana” currently whooping it up at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. Both soak their satire in frenzied, sometimes stomach-churning excess, raising hell and our temperatures to fever pitch.

A play could do a lot worse.