‘Room’ Talks Its Way Into Confinement

There’s a lot of talk in “The Day Room,” Don DeLillo’s play at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills. As one character puts it, “The talk eddies and swirls.”

And sometimes it pools and congeals. There’s so much talk in this hospital allegory that one wishes at least a few of the patients suffered from laryngitis.

DeLillo is best known as a novelist (“Libra,” “Mao II”), and prose may indeed be his metier. Onstage, his marriage of logorrhea and ironic distance forms a natural antipathy with this thing called drama, even in director Flora Plumb’s admirably crisp production. At intermission, one understandably perplexed viewer was heard to wonder: “I guess this is theater of the absurd?”

The first act is set in the hospital room shared by Wyatt (Michael Gough) and Budge (Jay Bell). The two make perfect foils, Wyatt as retiring as Budge is expansive. But language quickly becomes a prism for reality and identity, as the two are visited by a succession of doctors, nurses and orderlies who may or may not be role-playing patients from the psychiatric ward.

The action shifts in the second act to the day room, the common area where mental patients are given, in a typical DeLillo trope, white crayons to draw on white paper. Here a straitjacketed Wyatt has metamorphosed into a TV set, or a psychotic man pretending to be a TV set, while the other patients from Act 1 have also assumed new identities and await a performance by a theatrical troupe.

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The clinical metaphor summons memories of “Marat/Sade,” Peter Weiss’ famous lunatic asylum play-within-a-play. “The Day Room” never rises above the level of a moderately interesting intellectual experiment, although its overall inscrutability and lack of emotional involvement could plausibly be mistaken for depth.

Plumb stages the action with uniform pacing and a minimum of fuss. Evan A. Bartoletti’s set consists of suitably drab institutional furniture; Debra Garcia Lockwood’s lighting reasonably approximates the dull overhead glare of hospital illumination.

Because DeLillo’s characters exist more as ideas than human beings, the ensemble makes the best of a tough job. Richard Hoyt Miller enjoys some droll moments as Wyatt’s masquerading physician, and Cheryl Tyre-Smith doubles up nicely as a no-nonsense nurse and a performance diva. But Bell perhaps fares best, striking a rare note of human vulnerability within this most loquacious play.

* “The Day Room,” Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 21. $14-$17. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.