The Day Room (Plays, Penguin)

The play opens in a hospital; the characters are patients, doctors and nurses. It is a recognizable, predictable world. And yet, as the scenes unfold -- in dialogue crackling with intelligence and insight, with incandescent bite and humour -- our sense of normalcy is rocked from under us. Are these doctors and nurses really just patients from the Arno Klein Psychiatric Wing? Or are they something else entirely: people who are playing psychiatric patients playing doctors and nurses? And who, exactly, is Arno Klein? Described by the Boston Globe on its first performance as 'an unselfconscious, fizzing, inventive black comedy that is enormously funny', The Day Room displays Don DeLillo's extraordinary talents in the brightest of lights.