The Day Room

The Day Room is a play written by Don DeLillo and first produced at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April, 1986.

The play concerns characters in a psychiatric hospital in which the distinctions between patients and staff gradually blur.

The play is written in an absurdist style reminiscent of Beckett and Ionesco, and eschews linear plot in favor of a non-traditional exploration of such themes as empathy, personal identity, fear of death, and the seeming impossibility of meaningful communication.

It seemed to me that actors are a kind of model for the ways in which we hide from the knowledge we inevitably possess of our final extinction.

[1]The Day Room was praised by critics for its intellectualism and black comedy, as well as for being a new direction for DeLillo.